Administration and Music

It's Thursday and all is well. Or not. Today I seem to have forgotten the purpose of life, or at least what I'm doing. Tell me again, tell me a thousand times that this blog is an outlet for my personal problems and gripes, but it is.

In one of the many periods today where I was able to contemplate the meaning of life, I chose to decide what to do in the immediate future, but my brain was so fried after not being able to sleep and then being put to mundane tasks immediately that I wasn't able to think straight. Perhaps that's a good thing? Maybe I needed a day off worrying about what do do with my music after last night's protracted discussion on the state of music in Scotland with a couple of dear friends. I had one problem with what they were saying, although I do see their point. They put forward that the music in Scotland isn't good enough, and that they wanted it to be better. This is fair enough, I believe that the music here is not of a high enough standard, and that people are not aware of _how_ to make it better (excusing myself). They do not possess the skills to be able to _know_ that their music isn't good enough, so we come back to square one: education. Their proposal was not to solve the problem, but to offer something which posed more questions, and stimulated debate and the realisation that the music is not good enough. Excessive ideology and debate without practically applying concepts is not productive, and can only lead to more complaints because people are not /doing/ anything, but surely we have to have some sort of model that we wish to apply ourselves, even if we don't wish to force it on others? What I'm saying is that we need personal goals that we achieve ourselves rather than an all inclusive master plan that we force on others: what we force on others is the desire to better themselves. My problem with their approach was that by putting on a concert we are not educating people. Simply listening to music is not going to force people to want to do it better themselves. Constructive debate, and a platform to discuss it on will force people to think more. This should then be combined with the concert and left open for people to see and enter into at their own will.

Through all of this I tried to decide what my purpose in life is. Am I wanting to educate people, simply present what I have to offer, or haven't I found what I want to do yet? I think it would be a little presumptious to think that I could possibly offer any knowledge to anyone else when I don't really know what I'm doing myself, so it must be that I haven't decided what I want to offer yet. The eternal dilemma of the artist is that they will never really know what it is they want to offer, that their best work will always be behind them and that people will never appreciate them until it is too late and they have offered everything they have. My solution is to stick to my guns, keep doing what I want to do and ignore any comments that are not either constructive or helpful.

Back to pasta for dinner tonight, but today I'm looking forward to it. Mini parcels with stuff in and pesto. So many things have changed recently that I don't know whether I'm coming or going, or even what I feel about it. Sometime soon, in fact now, I have to make some very big decisions and rectify all the things I'm not happy with. Money, Music and Surroundings. Luckily the second is almost finished, but the others make take a little more practical planning. I'll let you know what I come up with.