The future ain't what it used to be

It's a little bit dreaming. It's a little bit planning. Mostly, it's imagining possibilities and visualizing myself within those possibilities.

I'm feeling good about the Fashion Forecasting course. I'm not quite halfway through, but I'm doing fine. What I'm learning is fascinating! I know I will register for another course in the fall, hopefully Merchandising Fashion (really the first course in the program) or History of Fashion. I've learned through experience that I should not take more than one course while I'm still working full time, so I will continue at a slow pace until I have to "turn pro" (our old term for musicians who lost their day job).

Meanwhile, I am getting a little deeper into social media. I have had this blog for some time, but it's only occasionally a fashion blog. I created long wave on Tumblr for my fashion and style stuff. It's not strictly about fashion and style, but it usually has a relevant angle—style in a rock band (mine), for instance, or comments on marketing. And being Tumblr, it's mostly pictures. I'm learning that inspiration can come from anywhere!

I have been adding style blogs to my RSS feed: StyleSight, Vancouver Fashion, some eco-fashion feeds, and others. I know I will find more. One feed leads to another! And you never know where relevant material will come from. Someone I know is a regular contributor to Hearty Magazine, an online publication. She writes about music, and it's only recently that I found out that Hearty contains style articles too. Music and fashion go together!

I have also started to pay more attention to LinkedIn. I made major changes to my profile. It might seem premature to be aiming the profile toward fashion, but my future lies in that direction, not in software development. So while my current occupation is still important (it certainly allows me to indulge in my wardrobe and pay for band-related expenses), and my computer experience might well be relevant to a new career, it is unlikely that I will be directly involved in either software development or technical writing after I am let go from my current position. So I have shaken up my profile, joined new groups, and changed the kinds of news I'm getting. I'm trying to connect with people in the business but also with artists, writers, and designers. Do I look any more hirable than I was? I doubt it. Probably less at this point. But my profile is certainly a more accurate reflection of who I am, whether it will get me a job or not. And of course it's a work in progress.

I have not yet returned to Twitter, which I left behind several years ago. I suppose I'm going to have to, not necessarily to tweet (although maybe) but mostly to get feeds that I can't get otherwise. So much fashion news goes out on Twitter! Not that I have time to follow yet more stuff, but I'm pretty good at filtering when I have to. I don't feel overloaded with information. If anything, I can't get enough, as long as it's the right kind of information.

Fashion and music don't just go together. They seem to be dovetailing in my life. It is wonderful being back on stage with people I love and love to make music with. We in Lisa's Hotcakes are under no illusions about "making it." There are only a few million bands trying to do that. But we certainly intend to have big fun and to open up as many possibilities as we can while we do it. It won't be long before more people will have seen us either live or on YouTube than ever saw our old bands back in the day. In these days of digital everything, making music available, even for a price, is as easy as opening a Bandcamp account and uploading MP3s. The idea of going into a recording studio again makes me very excited! As well, my treating songwriting like writing and working on it rather than letting it happen (or not) has been paying off. And we're also getting songs from Sweetie, one (so far) from our drummer T, and maybe even one from our singer G soon.

Imagining possibilities is a powerful thing for me. It's creative. It has me feeling very unstuck in lots of ways. I suppose it might only be irrational exuberance (the thing that makes stock markets go crazy), but I'll hang onto it for now.

The future ain't what it used to be. And that's a really good thing.

(It was the anniversary of the birth of Yogi Berra a few days ago. That's where the title comes from. Thanks for all the great quotes, Yogi!)