Adventures in Radio Garden

I am challenging my boredom by refusing to be bored. I've made it this far by living a pretty untraditional life, and it seems to be working.

As in, things happen from time to time that are interesting. Maybe not significant. 

I texted a friend recently about wanting to know more about music from Brazil. At some point after that I spent an evening listening to whatever Apple Music has in their "essentials." I don't speak Portuguese, but I'm interested in the rhythmic quality of the language. 

At some point in the last week, I remembered the existence of a website called Radio Garden. This link will take you to the station I'm currently listening to, in Aruba.

Click here to listen!

I have no idea what they'll be playing when anyone read this, but at this moment I've escaped to this station, which features at this moment a beat and kind of music I can't quite describe. The announcer keeps breaking in, and then suddenly we're to something more like gospel. 

It gets boring so I decide to change channels. 

English radio from Alta, Norway is as depressing as my real life.

So I move on to Greenland, where their website clearly tells me how i can buy an ad for. I could sponsor the weather for 3,000 DKK a month, and I have no idea how much that is. 

$441.80 it turns out. 

I'll pass for now, but I'm excited to travel the world. I even hooked up a disused stereo system for the sole purpose of standing here writing this gibberish in a way that hopefully conveys how nice it is to remember a good part of an interconnected world.

Even if the song on Nanoq FM bores me so it's time to move on. Where to next? Let's see what the land looks like. 

Reform wishing reform

I hated high school and could not wait to be out. I'm sure others are in the same boat. I ended up teaching myself what I needed to know when I got to college. High School was when I realized that no one except me had my interests at heart.

If I could recreate the perfect experience for me in the past, it would have been to have had a way to get experience in journalism earlier. Sure, the profession was already dying, but I'd argue the world needs idiots like me who don't have anything better to do.

I think it's many people's experience if you weren't born into the system. Being a first generation American born into a family that didn't do much to assimilate means I'll die an outsider, too.

I then went to Virginia Tech, which was a waste of an experience where I learned how truly little I mattered. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Guidance counselors in high school thought I was just weird.

Again, I found my way through journalism, but the competition with the other newspaper was so cutthroat and they destroyed us. My entire life has been filled with people who cut my throat. I want to leave Charlottesville so much because even now I can feel the knives sharpening again.

My main point here is that formal education isn't for everyone. I would have loved a more vocational option for a blue-collar writing profession that doesn't exist anymore. Why has the profession completely die out? What's the future?

High school taught me well for a life that's been spent mostly alone. I was always the weird kid who wasn't quite anyone's friend. Now that my parents don't live nearby, I feel like there's no reason for me to be here in Virginia. Sure, you could argue the work I do, but couldn't I do that somewhere else? Is there still time for me to rescue this life, or am I condemned to continuously write on a landscape where there are so many actors who want the flash and not the substance?

Finding the structure

It's been a week of change in a year of change. Or at the very least, I know I'm in a new era when a new fridge has arrived. I don't feel like I deserve it at the moment, as the mini-fridge got me through for a while. 

My idea of being human has involved a lot of pondering about whether any of this is real. Each day I wake up after a series of dreams in which I live other lives, and much of it seems so real. 

And these days I wake up and I get to work on the next set of stories, and try my best to make sense of the world around me. I get paid to do this, and I'm grateful for all that had to happen for me to able to be here.

Underneath the old fridge I found an artifact from December 2008, something to add to a collection of talismans about a specific time that radiates throughout the rest of my life. I didn't know that this piece of the puzzle was lost, but now it is waiting to be reconnected to the other specimens. 

I somehow seem to get by from day to day by remembering that on other days I had intention to survive and thrive by embracing who I was. That seems a luxury, and I'm programmed to think of any thing luxurious as something I don't deserve. 

I've lived in this house now for 15 years with a small gap whose 15th anniversary begins in about a month from now. I can feel that massive quake in my life even now. 

Yet here I am, having survived enough to get to this point, a time when I can take a brief pause to capture it one of many places I keep the accounts of who I was at any given moment. Does it matter? Future versions of me, if there are any, will appreciate the information even if many dislike the reliance on the anecdotal. 

This is all a roundabout way of saying that at the end of a day where I didn't always feel good about my pathway, I'm at least here and I survived.  

Describing the pause

Every now and then, I hit a series of obstacles that derail my momentum and I end up wondering if I'll ever write again. Both yesterday and today I feel like I've used up all of my interest, and fear I've been getting it all wrong the whole time. 

This can be quite debilitating because I've got a lot I need to write in a given week. Maybe too much, which is what's worrying me on this Friday evening in mid-November. 

I have enough administrative to work to do to make it feel like I'm doing something. One of those is to post articles from Charlottesville Community Engagement over to the Information Charlottesville site. Another is to update cvillepedia, even though that's not at all part of my job anymore. 

I keep dreaming of other places and exploring my own life rather than spending it writing about this one community. I have made a decision to stay here long term and I'm going to honor that because I'm five decades old now, and I've spent more than two of them here. 

I know I'll be okay tomorrow and will get right back into the work. There's a part of me that knows when I can pull back and recharge, but every time I do so I begin to feel tremendous guilt. This guilt needs to be kept in check, but it's a very real feeling that makes every thought suspect. 

And all I can do is just sit with the feeling for a bit and try to shift my mind to something else. That's what the past two days have been. Something is keeping me from focusing on work, and I need to figure that out through just going through what I can. 

I've worked really hard this year. The past three years. It doesn't seem like I've taken any time off, and that's beginning to hit me as the year ends and I find myself wanting to be in other places. 

A small pause

The computer I am typing on in recording a meeting where people are talking about housing issues. That's not the entire reason for the meeting, but it matters at the moment. I write about all of this stuff and on another computer I'm recording a City Council meeting.

Today I went on the radio, published two newsletter, one podcast, and a story for C-Ville Weekly. I also went to Staples to buy a keyboard and mouse for another computer that currently doesn't have one.

I am procrastinating typing this out because tomorrow is Election Day and there are no meetings. Two that would have been on Tuesday are now on Thursday, so I'll write that up in a couple of days. I have to be prepared for the polls to close so I can get to work reporting out what happened. 

I'm so tired, though. At this moment, I'm so tired. The clocks have just been put forward and so everything seems a little off at the moment. In the morning, there will be work to do and right now I still feel like I have to keep going.

I am grateful for the house where I live, and for the ability to keep trying to make it a better place. 

And then I got back to work. There's a lot to do.