...for some semi-random comments.
i've always been concerned, perhaps overly so (i often am), with other people's perceptions of me. for a long time it was regarding crazy things like appearance, personality, hairstyle, voice, etc. i got over that years ago when it turned out that the amount of effort necessary to assuage my concerns was enough that it would have literally been impossible to care about myself that much every day and still be a human being. so i just stopped. it was simple math, the easiest kind of justification.
so now, in a weird one-eighty, i do all kinds of weird stuff. i write rampantly and semi-coherently in a blog about my life that friends, family, co-workers, my bosses, my professors, my ex-students, my current students, my ex-girlfriends, people who i hope might someday be my girlfriend, and tons of people i've never met before in my life have access to. i write poems, i write songs and sing and play them, i occasionally try to draw or paint something (though that never goes well), i make weird shit out of random textiles to hang on my walls, i write books and stories and plays and rants and pretty much whatever else the fuck comes out of my head, and sometimes i even post it all on youtube.
and i don't worry about what people think of any of that. i occasionally worry about crossing this or that particular personal boundary with this or that person; anybody who's the least bit considerate sometimes worries about that. but i don't worry if anybody "likes" what i do. i worry, instead, about what people might think of how i present all of the random things that spill out of my head. oddly, i worry that people won't understand that i'm not worried. i worry that people will see my music, or my writing, or whatever, or just the pretty fucking direct and personal way i usually conduct myself and think i'm doing it to provoke some kind of reaction. like my display of art or life or whatever is meant to attract others' interest. because that's not the case.
there's so much attention-seeking behavior going on out there, though, that it's hard i guess to blame people for assuming by default that that's why anyone would share a song (because they want a record deal, or want more hits on their myspace profile, or want to bask in the miasma of faceless internet comments). i don't really do any of the stuff i do for that reason though. even though a lot of times it's hard to share any kind of art with people (getting up in front of people and playing music? music that actually means something to you when most of the people "listening" aren't even there to hear you in the first place? that's pretty tough stuff), i've found in the last few years that sharing is a self-reinforcing process. it never really gets any easier, but it makes more and sense to me that it's the thing to do.
for me one of the biggest blessings and the biggest curses of the internet age is this ability to pretty much share anything, anywhere, anytime. it brings the attention-seekers out of the woodwork, the people who aren't happy with themselves so they want to impress someone else with something and then draw from that, like a vampire or something, until it's dry. then they move on. at the same time i can throw up any writing or music or video i want on this screen for free and there's no obligation on my part, there's no obligation on the audience's part. they choose to look and the worst they're going to lose for it is a few minutes of their time.
so i can sit here and post weird video after weird video, and post demos of songs that still have a whole verse of just filler words, just to get something out there, just to get it out of my head and into the world. because that's really the reason i do all this stuff when i could just be watching TV or playing nintendo or catching up on my RSS reader. because life is hard, and complicated, and if you're paying attention there's a lot of sorting, and thinking, and airing out of dirty laundry to do. and the best way for me to deal with all that stuff is to make the kinds of things i make. to be able to take things out of my head that might be too dark or too bright for words and put them into something and let them out so they're not rattling around in there so loudly anymore. if anyone ever thinks it's for anything other than that (like the desire to be a famous author or a rock star or something) then they're wrong. my inspiration for the things i write, etc. comes from a much deeper and elemental level than "what will people like?" or "how will i make money off of this?" so trying to turn it into those things would be sort of like disrespecting the source, i think. that's not to say that getting paid to write would be horrible...it would actually be great becuase that would strip away so many of the outside details (like my job and junk) that slow the writing process way, way down. but i can't specifically work towards that or else i might as well not be working at all.
so why not just keep all my shit to myself then, if i don't care what other people think and i'm doing it all for myself anyway? i dunno...sometime way back, listening to records and reading books and stuff, i got this crazy idea that occasionally you read or hear or see something that makes you think, or makes you smile, or makes you cry, or turns your world a little bit on its head for a few minutes. art has the power to make you really think, and i guess i go through the trouble (and possible embarrassment, failure, etc.) that i do in the hopes that maybe there are a few people out there who might take something from a line in a song, or an image in a line of a poem, or a lonely harmonica melody. beyond the money, beyond the interest in literature, beyond the fact that i just plain had to do something, i got into teaching because i remembered those teachers who significantly altered the way i saw things simply by doing what they did everyday of the week and talking about what they knew...and i've always thought to myself that if i could teach a class in a way that made just one student feel the same way i did about my high school calculus teacher or my creative writing professor, then all the trouble would have been worth it. that's how i feel about my writing/singing/etc, only about ten times more strongly. if there's someone out there that gets something out of it, even if it's just a little smile at a turn of a phrase or something, then all the potential awkwardness and embarrassment is totally worth it. and even if nobody gives a shit, i've got a lot of growing to do on my own anyway, so i've always got that to work on.
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