NP: Guided By Voices, Universal Truths and Cycles (MP3)

I'm such a slave to momentum. After finding out I didn't light a fire under my interviewers last week, I had the best intentions of pounding the pavement once more to unearth some new employment prospects. Except that I mostly didn't.

Until today, when I had an opportunity for some freelance work fall in my lap, and got an unsolicited call from a headhunter for a full-time gig in New York. That gave me a bit of a running start to make some other calls and look for new opportunities.

And, as I think I've said before, that's the hardest part about this whole "working for yourself" model that I find myself in. You've got to constantly be searching for opportunities in order to avoid the natural cycle, the ebbing and flowing of work that happens when you make a bunch of calls during the same down time. Add to that an unhealthy dose of false hope, and you can find yourself behind the 8-ball pretty quickly.

There's also the interesting matter of what things I tend to put off. The whole singing and playing guitar thing has barely any traction whatsoever, as I still have a hard time asking someone to pay me for that without laughing hysterically. The opening at The Reader is another one. I find myself plagued by enough self-doubt that some schlub with a website merits serious consideration by a major metropolitan alternative weekly newspaper that I can't seem to get started. Of course, reading some of my old reviews didn't help. The l.i.t.c. and the other music page stuff is decent, if a bit overly casual, but man, I need to work on my reviews. It would help if I would actually write one.

I'm not trolling for sympathy here. There are still plenty of big things dancing on the horizon. Some days I'm just more impatient about reaching them than others.

And I'm not going to gloat about Wesley Clark crushing the other Dems in the polls this week, along with running neck-and-neck with Dubya. It's too soon for that to be much other than a quasi-protest vote, a sense of dissatisfaction with the available options. Clark has to follow what has turned out to be a well-timed entry into a substantive campaign in order to maintain the initial splash, and it's still a very open question whether or not he'll be able to do it.

Cubs still in first, T minus five games and counting. If the Red Sox win the AL Wild Card, we may have the apocalypse.