Hi dee ho and a higgelty piggelty, here we are, like old friends who’ve been vaccinated and can now touch each other again.
Me? I’m waxed, vaxed, and sending a fax, because I’ve had both doses of the Pfizer juice. I got the second dose almost a month ago, and it was intense, I’m not going to lie, but it only killed me for a day and a half of so.
I didn’t realize it would feel so good to be vaccinated. We’re at pretty low risk around here, but for some reason, I felt like getting that second shot was a big deal. Even though it took two weeks to have its full effect.
So here we are, and what? No podcast this year? It must be a horrible oversight, a scheduling snafu. Well, as much as I’d like to blame it on scheduling, the truth is I haven’t written a podcast yet this year.
If THIS IS NOT A TEST was about something, it would be easier to keep up a schedule. But since it’s a show about nothing, when other things in life pile up, it’s easy to think, “Oh, I’ll get around to that, I’ll podcast the hell out of some topic or another,” but then nothing happens and months pass by and the seasons change and you think, where the hell am I anyway?
If you do a podcast or did a podcast, you know how much time they take to produce. That 30 or 40 minutes of talking takes more than ten times as long (sometimes way more) to write, produce, post, and promote. So it isn’t a matter of getting an idea and whipping out a podcast over lunch. There’s no quick and dirty path to a THIS IS NOT A TEST episode.
All of which is to say…what? “I’ll be back,” is the message I guess. Because I will be back. Will I ever maintain a regular monthly schedule again? I think that’s unlikely. That’s all promotion, schedules like those, it’s all schemes and tactics meant to optimize your audience and all that lovely marketing stuff.
But I’m not selling anything, so I feel like this should be approached more like a blog, where I talk to you when I feel like I have something worth talking about, rather than some kind of freaky business requiring a firm schedule that can never be broken.
Did producing an episode on a weekly or monthly schedule, which I did for five years, sometimes force me to come up with ideas I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise? Yes, it did. Was it worth the time and work and stress? No, it wasn’t.
What is life, anyway? Is it standing in front of this computer? Well sure, part of it is. Those are just the times we live in. My job is online, so spending my day with a computer is unavoidable. But I suppose that recently I’ve just come to the conclusion that standing or sitting in front of a computer shouldn’t be as large a part of my life as it has been.
So that’s the name of that tune.