Tangentialist
Oh, hello.
It’s been a few weeks, and I hope you’ve been well. I can’t believe it’s already February…of Two Thousand and Twenty Two! Isn’t that nuts?!
Anyway, I had a couple of not-so-very-good mental health/emotional-wellbeing weeks there, and I spiraled into a very depressed version of myself that I don’t enjoy very much.
Since I know that everyone is having mountains of difficulties right now, I chose to withdraw into myself instead of sharing my anthills with anyone else. It’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad habit and just made me feel very alone because I realized that I may live in the middle of the forest, but I need people and I’m a social creature by nature. I’m still not back to perfect, but who is, really? I’m trying my best and I hope you are, too.
I’ve been sober for almost a year, and that’s helped more than anything else.
I’m still struggling, but every day is a chance to do better.
So here are some personal updates:
I’m actually factually, for serious working on an “officially approved” podcast with the one and only BJ Leiderman!
Oh yeah, he wants you to get one of his Bummerstickers for your automobile or whatever mode of transportation you use to haul your groundscores around the wasteland.
You wanna know where this podcast thing even came from?
Yeah, so… It all started last summer, when I thought I was gonna transfer to Oregon State University’s New Media Communications program…
in September…
…of LAST YEAR!
So I got all of my various credits together, and thought I was ready to go. Then I talked to a cool dude in the department, and he said “All of our students make a podcast as part of our program.”
In the wonderful fantasy world that exists in my mind, my first thought was how fucking rad it would be to have “Our theme music is composed by BJ Leiderman” and then I started working backwards about what, exactly, my little radio show would be about.
So I wrote BJ Leiderman’s social media account, and got an immediate auto-response back with an email address. So I wrote a very long, very personal letter explaining who I was and that I needed to make a podcast for school, but that I had no idea what it was going to be about. He wrote back an hour later, and said (this is a direct quote) he would be interested as long as it “wasn’t shitty.”
I almost had a heart attack, because BJ-goddamn-Leiderman emailed me back, and said he would be interested in writing music for the podcast I was making…and then I almost had a second one because I remembered that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, or what it was about, but I knew it couldn’t be shitty!
The only reason I built this website was so I could have a place for this podcast to be that wasn’t just out in the ether or on Facebook…and because it seemed like what everyone else is doing, and then I realized it had the capabilities of a blog…and also a store which I’m clearly using to its fullest potential.
So now it’s today.
I’ve gone from my first conversation with BJ Leiderman when I was so audibly nervous that he asked if I was okay, to us talking for two hours one day and him suddenly saying “Wait, why aren’t you recording?! THIS should be your podcast!!! Us talking about LIFE is wonderful!” because I was so caught up in us somehow becoming friends that I forgot I’d originally approached him to write theme music…
We’ve talked about depression and joy. We’ve discussed finding ourselves and we’ve talked about losing people close to us. I told him about that one time I accidentally got addicted to heroin and he told me about finding purpose again.
This afternoon, I’m finally going to find out where he gets his ideas for melodies from, and why I’ve had the Weekend Edition theme stuck in my head for 30+ years.
Oh, and I’m still working on my transfer from community college to OSU. It turns out that in my 20+ years of off and on college courses, I never took a math class. I tried taking one last term, but it ended up being this insane sped-up curriculum…and I started having so much anxiety before class that I had to drop it. It was really sad, because now I don’t know when I can get this all done. But one day at a time, right?
Limitlessly Yours,
Me
