Back to the Drawing Board (aka job search)

Satisfied intellectually and spiritually by my work teaching piano and voice, yet not satisfied with the pay, I find myself once again clicking on the familiar websites - careerbuilder.com, craigslist (in Iowa, North Carolina, Baltimore, Chicago, New York - basically anywhere where I have friends or that I think is cool). If you type in "music", you'll get about a hundred ads declaring the need for "Actors, models, extras, $200 a day!" Actually you probably get that ad if you look for "accounting", too. Who knows.

Honestly, I lied a bit about the intellectual and spiritual fulfillment of teaching. It's great to have a positive impact on young people, but it would be even better to be creating and being involved in music in a more direct way. After years of learning the fine nuances of tone and phrasing, diction and balance, it's hard to go back to the rudiments. (Quarter, Quarter, HALF NOTE....) How does anybody put those two lives together?
Let's start with some goals:

1) I'd like to do something with the songs I've written. I've gotten positive feedback on them, and I'd like to share them outside my closest circle of friends, give them a wider audience, even if it involves a music circle like Chris's in North Carolina, an open mic night, whatever. I'd like to build my skills in songwriting and performing and see what I can do with it. I don't need the whole world to hear what I have to say....just.......someone.......anyone. Otherwise it's like I'm talking to myself.

2) I'd like to find a man to love. A relationship that comes naturally, in a way, not one where one person has to sublimate his or her personality for things to work. To do this, it would probably help if I stopped obsessing over past relationships that didn't work out. Yes, you can learn from the past, but sometimes you just have stop looking in the rearview mirror all the time and move on.

3) I'd like to share my writing, also with others than my friends. I love to make people laugh, and to make them think. I think I'd also improve my writing by sharing it more, as I'd get responses, positive and negative, which would help me see the flaws in my logic. It would allow me to express my spirituality in a different way than debating at Sunday School.

4)Another creative venture, classical music composition, has been neglected of late. I think I need a lot more work to do for my stuff to be really meaningful, but I'd love to be a part of that world again, because it expresses things that almost no other medium can.

5)To contradict myself again, I really do like doing this quarter quarter HALF NOTE nonsense. I like working with people, though I must admit it has not much to do with the rewards of making kids smile, though that's part of it. It's the thinking on your feet, trying to look at a concept from a different angle, trying to see something the way your student is seeing it, and get it to somehow make sense to them. It's just frustrating, because working at home (making lesson plans) distracts me (look! cookies! Look! internet! ooohh, shiny objects!), as does working two jobs. Because there are kids involved, I put aside my more creative work to focus on the more pressing need to make lesson plans and give them my full energy and attention. Unfortunately, I'm not *just* teaching, I always have to have another job. At most jobs, you have the interesting part, and then you have the bullcrap you have to do that goes along with the interesting part you care about. What's annoying about the 2-job situation is that one job is basically complete bullcrap that you put up with for the money, and the other one you care about, but there is still some bullcrap that you have to deal with. That's a lotta crap. Without a good friend base to uh.....shoot the crap with, my hobbies include escapist fiction, drunk dialing ex-boyfriends, and planning my own audio commentaries for my dvds. (Did I just admit that?) It's not really a sustainable life, in the long term. The question is - is it a sustainable life for another year?