Ah, the blog

for some reason, every 3 months or so, usually in the middle of the night, i decide that writing regularly in a blog will be mildly entertaining. then i write one in excusably lame entry and give up forever. and by forever i mean until 3 months later. it's a cycle, you know?

so right now i'm trying to figure out why i can't write songs anymore. the last one i wrote was at the beginning of the summer of 2007, so nearly 2 years ago. that's probably the song i'm most happy with, at least as far as the recorded version goes. in the past, i've been more satisfied with every song that i write (well, usually), and when i write, i'm inspired to write more. so why is it that that momentum stopped all of a sudden? bear with me as i think out loud. or online. or whatever.

one thing is, i got married. now this isn't a bad thing, and i'm very happy i did it. but i think it brought about some things that are getting in the way of writing songs. one thing is that i'm alone much less. and when i am alone, it's usually because i can't sleep, meaning it's the middle of the night and i ought not make much noise. before, whenever i was alone, i'd pick up the guitar and fool around. now i probably play about a tenth of what i used to, maybe even less. i used to play so frequently that any idea i had during the day would be quickly set to music, and i'd pick the guitar up again before it was forgotten. now the guitar playing is so infrequent that that's rarely the case.

but that can't be completely it. i also had trouble sleeping on my mission, so i'd find myself in a comparable situation. i'd be up in the middle of the night with no guitar and someone asleep in the next room. my mission was probably the most prolific of my songwriting days, even if most of the songs sucked. all i had to write on was a crappy 45-ish key keyboard with the volume all the way down, and half the time i didn't even use that. so i really have no excuse there.

there is something else to the marriage thing. that automatically makes any love song about my wife, even if it isn't. not that i'm writing love songs about other people, but rather i'm writing love songs about no one at all, and that's what i've always done. my songs are not autobiographical. but all of a sudden there's this person that's gonna get pinned with all the lyrics of anything i write, whether they're good or bad. i don't know if this bothers me much right now, but it used to. i kind of trust that kari's a smart enough person to figure this kind of thing out, but it's still shaky ground. i mean, song writing is one of the few arts where it's almost always assumed to be autobiographical. i could go on, but i won't.

another thing could be that i'm just not reading and writing as much as i used to. i mean, i switched to a science major, and that's a lot less inspiring than the english classes i used to take. it also means i have a lot less spare time to read. as far as writing goes...i don't know, i guess mostly it was all just communicating with people on the internet. that seems to have slowed down a lot, mostly because nobody uses instant messenger and everybody uses facebook. i think facebook is fine for staying in touch with people, but i don't think it's very good at all as a means of everyday communication. and for that reason, i rarely use it for anything other than just to change my status. and thus the writing declines. so i guess the main point of all this is that i'm distancing myself from constantly processing words. i just don't think about them or play with them as much. thanks to that i don't think or interesting words, or double meanings, or rhymes, or whatever else makes lyrics different from anything else.

it could also be cuz of this dang computer. i've become a pro at wasting time on the internet. seriously wasting time. like, i'll sit down for a couple hours and have nothing to show for it, and half the time i won't even remember what sites i've been to. it's pretty lame. if i dedicated that time to playing music, or even reading and writing, i'd get so much more out of it. i tell myself i have to time because of school work, but, honestly, if i just lost my internet connection, i'd have more time than i could figure out what to do with.

i guess that's enough. is that enough? yeah, i guess it's probably more than anyone even cares about. so maybe i'll figure this all out at some point. watch out, the world, because i'm ready to rock.