I have spent the last several years trying to figure out what to do with myself, having given up on finding a tenure track faculty job somewhere. I found it was really hard to be productive without being part of an active artistic community. I also found it was really hard to be productive without having access to a 24 hour coffee shop with free wireless. Heck, I’d settle for a coffee shop that closes at midnight–the kind I used to go to if I wanted to make sure they’d kick me out at some point so I’d wake up in time to be at a morning appointment.

I tried various approaches to turning into a morning person but none of them took. Albany-time and musician-time don’t really mesh. Most approaches fizzled; I thought committing to something steady would do the trick. So like everyone with too much time on their hands who needs to force their schedule into a particular pattern, I took Chinese.

It turns out, learning Chinese takes more time than you’d expect. I wish I could take Chinese again this year–Shu-Han Yeh is an amazing teacher–but I think I am a bit too busy now. I did get a lot done, but it ate up any time I’d have to spend posting about them. I have a backlog of things I should write about. Now that I have taken some time to recover, I hope to start posting again more regularly.