Who Knew That Playing the Ukulele Would Be So Hard?

 Or anyway, at least blogging about playing the ukulele...

I had a moment today as I was doing the dishes while my lunch warmed up. I remember back in the day when I was blogging about beads, it was like EVERYBODY was blogging. There were blogs everywhere, and people actually read them, subscribed to them, etc. 

The last few years since I started this blog have been a struggle. I'm just gonna come clean and say it: I've been dealing with some pretty debilitating health issues that no one can seem to figure out (they just run more tests and say EVERYTHING CAME BACK NORMAL ISN'T THAT GREAT? and send me on my way), and I've been trying to find a job (which is a whole other blog right there), and otherwise just trying to find a way to make some money in his late unregulated capitalist hellscape we call the U.S. 

But in between, I've been doing things like writing songs and making jewelry and learning new things on the uke, thanks to some help from some amazing online teachers. So it's not all bad. 

I think one of the things that has totally had me screwed up is this capitalist bullshit ideal of monetizing every single fucking thing I, as a human being, do. Whether it's a creative pursuit like uke or jewelry or just living my life, it feels like there's this constant pressure to sell some part of it to make it "worthwhile". 

Maybe that's a whole other blog right there, but damn, it really gets in there and freezes me up. 

Fifteen years ago when my son was still a toddler, I would blog about the thing I loved most - beads - almost every day. Along with the other aspects of my life. Part of the reason why I think I've neglected this blog is because I was trying to make it **just** about ukuleles and music and not about anything else. But the thing is, the ukulele is such a part of my whole life, it feels odd to just focus on that and not focus on everything else. 

Maybe I'm just afraid to box myself in to just one thing?

Because really, lately, I've been doing lots of creative things. For the last few years, I've been learning and perfecting and practicing wire wrapping jewelry. I've been learning new things about reading Tarot. I've been learning and practicing shamanic Reiki. In between all that, I've been taking care of our sick rooster and trying to save his life. I mean, how does that all fit in with a blog about the ukulele?

I actually toyed with the idea of changing the name of this blog to "Jen Plays Ukulele and Makes Jewelry and Reads Tarot and Does Reiki" but that seemed a little long to type into a browser.

Aaaaaaaaaand with Mercury retrograde arriving tomorrow (and in my rising sign of Virgo so EXTRA FUN FOR ME), this is probably a good time to go back and take a look at this blog and see what I can salvage from it. Ask what works, and what doesn't. 

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Does anyone else remember "the good old days" where all you needed was a blog and maybe a website if you were extra fancy? These days, it feels like you need to be on sixteen different social media channels plus making fancy videos and doing a podcast and maintaining a website just to get noticed. I mean, it's totally overwhelming. And it also brings me right back to that whole capitalist bullshit idea of "you gotta monetize everything you do or else it's not worth your time" kinda thing. 

You start out on Facebook, and then you go over to IG or Threads (and not that cesspool formerly known as Twitter) and then there's YouTube and TikTok and who knows where else people are posting on social media. It can get to feel like a lot of pressure on someone who just wants to make music and write songs and wrap pretty stones and do magic with Tarot cards and candles. 

I mean, I just want a nice website where I can blog about all my shit in one place and maybe post some videos of my original songs and my song covers on the uke and tenor guitar and maybe sell some of the jewelry that I make and do some Tarot readings and stuff like that...does that seem like a total hodgepodge mishmash hot mess? 

Life is kind of a hot mess, right? 

I had a couple of websites, but I took them down because they were costing me way too much money and not really giving me much of a return because I couldn't put the energy into them the way I put the energy into my social media sites. 

Even on social media these days, it feels like I'm talking into a vacuum, screaming into the void. And maybe the void is just doing active listening, but whatev. 

At any rate, I guess I'm just gonna go back to the basics and start writing on this blog about all the stuff that's going on in my life and share that on social media until I can figure out what I want to do and where I want to go.