Transcript:

Hello everyone, it’s Amelia back with another Sitty Chatty. Today, I just wanted to give a little bit of a life update and talk a little bit about intentionality and how I’m going to be approaching creating content going forward. I’ve been dealing with some sinus issues over the last couple of weeks.

Last week, I actually went to Vermont and New York to gather the rest of my stuff from our two houses, and I did successfully bring everything back to the house in Buffalo. But it was a lot of driving. I did have a nice little scenic detour back to Buffalo. Intentional, because it was actually only about ten minutes longer to go the back way than it was to go the highway, and I much prefer scenic routes.

While I was doing this drive, I was thinking a lot about how I want to create going forward, just in general. One of the things I have mentioned on many occasions is intentionality. That doesn’t necessarily mean always having something brilliant to say or trying to make something perfect.

But you do need to have some sort of idea of what you’re trying to convey. What is it that you’re trying to offer the world , something that you can do well, something that you can do pretty naturally. I’m not saying you don’t have to work hard for it, but you do need to have some sort of lane that you’re staying in.

And as somebody who’s always been the type to throw everything at the wall, that doesn’t really work in our day and age. I’m not saying you can’t be a generalist. I mean, you can be. I’m most certainly a generalist But while I’ve been sick, I have been watching a lot of different YouTube channels, a lot of YouTube channels I haven’t watched before.

They have a pretty decent following, and they all have sort of a niche that they have filled out. For example, there’s someone who does MLB The Show challenges, but the ones that are more niche, more unusual. Like he’ll take one player on each of the 30 MLB teams and make them a 99 because that’s his favorite player on that team.

He had this really cool idea about linking player ratings. So he’d start with a team with just a couple of players and then a bunch of nobodies, and each year he would draft a new player, but based on the rating of the pitcher or the hitter that he last drafted. And then he had this wheel where it had all the different attributes that you could have in either hitting or pitching, and then he would draft a player based on that from the in-game rosters, which also included legendary players.

It was just a really cool idea. I’m sure that none of that made sense to most people. But you get my point, that it’s something very niche that only people that play those games really understand, and yet his videos do very well

If you hear some clinking of forks or some chewing sounds, it’s ’cause I’m trying to eat while I’m making this recording. I don’t have very much energy recently. The seasonal change always affects me, but not nearly as badly as it has this year. I think also it’s partly been moving to a new house and still figuring out this and that.

I have resolved some issues that I had. They’re all pretty minor, relatively speaking, but I’m just the sort of person that I need things to be copacetic or I’m just not, I’m just not able to function creatively. And so that’s why I really haven’t posted much. I did do a couple of short videos of me reading some essays that I had.

They didn’t really do much, and I just really don’t like reading off a screen. It makes me sound really monotone. Going forward, I do wanna have a little bit more of a script, more of an outline for some of my videos, and I do plan to be on camera at some point. I am waiting on an adapter so I can use my mouse and my microphone at the same time and do some screen capture videos where I’ll be in the corner, and I’ll have some things on screen just to keep them more visually interesting.

The reason that my videos have been so bare bones and really most of them just being audio files that I put a picture on with a title is because, as I’ve said, I’ve still been in the process of moving into a different phase of my life and between just not having a lot of energy, dealing with illness, where pretty much three out of seven days of the week I’m bedridden with either fatigue or some sort of sinus issue.

These are seasonal things I deal with pretty often, but they’ve just been extra bad this year, and there’s just other things going on, and nothing serious, just it’s a lot of little things. But I seem to have my internet to into a place where my upload speed is now okay enough that I can do a little bit longer videos.

I need to try to not make the uploads individually too big or it’ll freak out my limited upload capacity on wireless internet. I was thinking as I was making my rice here that to keep the line moving, what I should probably do is, I was doing morning pages for a bit, but I kinda fell out of that habit pretty quickly because naturally I was doing a lot of moving last week and most of my stuff’s still in the side room where I haven’t dealt with it yet.

I don’t have enough shelving or storage solutions yet. I did have to buy a snowblower because there was no way that I was going to pay the crazy amounts that people want for contracts for a season, so it’s a self-propelled electric variety. I also decided that I’m going to be just mowing my own lawn next year.

I had a little bit of an issue with a lawn mowing service. Fortunately, I have that resolved temporarily. But you can get a self-propelled electric mower too, so I decided my property’s not that big. I’ll just deal with it myself. It’ll save me a lot of money. And it’s not even about saving money so much as I need to keep myself active.

I need to give myself things to do so that I’m not just staying in the house all day playing mobile games. That’s something I’ve been doing a lot lately. I have this app where I get cash rewards for playing games. It’s not really paying me much, but it does work and it gives me something to do, keep my hands busy while I’m watching videos because I’ve been feeling so crappy lately that I’ll just fall asleep, and the problem with me is if I fall asleep too early, it just wrecks my entire day.

I fell asleep at 7:30 last night and woke up at 4:00 in the morning, and that wasn’t good. I did actually get up and read some more of that book, Depraved, which is a book that I might actually make a little bit of a miniseries about, talking about various ideas and aspects of the relationship between art and artist.

That book, it’s good. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it. I’m not sure if I would recommend it. It is good, but there’s just some aspects of it that kind of annoy me. There’s a lot of little sections of rage-baiting that I don’t really agree with, although the author, Daisy Dixon, does make a lot of great points.

She is a philosopher of art, so I definitely have a lot of respect for her. But I feel like the way that the book was organized and edited, it just could’ve been done better. I think that there’s a lot of sections that could’ve been trimmed quite a bit. It’s one of those things where word count comes into play, and I think the book would be better if it was probably two-thirds the size if that makes sense.

I think you could cut a third of the book out and have a much stronger, cohesive book. That is to say, it’s starting to drag for me, and I don’t like it when books drag. But I’m reading this for a book club, so I really wanna get through it. I’m enjoying the content. It’s very thought-provoking, but it’s not my favorite book in the world.

There was another book that was up for consideration that I might end up reading on my own that was about language. Now, obviously I’d be interested in that, being a writer. I did have a pretty terrible weekend. Pretty much Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I was bedridden. And this morning, as I said, I woke up at 4:00.

I did do my reading. I showered. But then it got to be 6:00, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m just gonna lay down for about half an hour and go to the store,” ’cause the grocery store actually opens at 6:00 AM here. But I ended up passing out for an hour and a half. So I ended up forcing myself to go out around, I don’t know, 8:30 or so.

I got all my shopping done, but I was just in such a dazed state. I managed to get basically enough food to last me for over a week, but I ended up almost leaving one of my bags behind because I was just… Good thing the front-end manager chased me down. Yeah, I’m actually admitting that just to give you an idea of just my brain and my body are just not– They’re not cohabitating very well right now.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to finally get back into some sort of work rhythm. However, I have not been idle. I have been taking notes on things in my inbox. I’ve actually been going through my inbox even when I’ve been sick, whenever I have any moment of lucidity at all, and I have continued to keep track of the videos I watch.

I’ve kept track of some interesting music, especially indie music that I want to write about. So I still have ideas. I still have things to put out there. It’s just they’re extremely disorganized. I’m way behind on going through my journals for things And because of that, I’ve realized that if I’m that far behind on things, it must mean that they’re not really that important to me.

I think what’s more important to me is I just wanna put something out there where I’m putting something out into the world that, that reflects who I am as a person, my various skill sets, and my various interests. I’ve even considered making another channel where I basically make it about hobbies, about certain games I play, things of that variety.

But I think what I really need to do is focus on a more generalized narrative of my life in general, a more generalized overview of things to ground myself in the moment. That is one of the things I really struggle with, is staying in the present moment. It’s something that a lot of us struggle with.

But it can be scary sometimes to just sit with yourself for long periods of time, and that’s something that living alone in Buffalo has definitely done. I still talk to Emily a fair bit, but I’ve been trying to give her more space, give myself some more space, and I find that choosing the solitude has actually been good for me in a lot of ways.

It’s really made me reflect on what’s really important to me. And what’s important to me is I wanna keep this YouTube channel going, and the best way to do that is when I’m not feeling up to producing long-form videos. Right now, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to put a long-form video together for at least another month.

Emily’s gonna be coming out towards the end of this month and helping me with some various things around the house. Nothing urgent, but things that really should get done before the year is out and the winter comes full storm. Yeah, that’s basically my little update. I just wanted people to know that I’m not disappearing.

I know this is a ramble, but I’m thinking going forward, these may end up becoming daily reflections that I post fairly regularly. There might not be one every single day, but I think until I really start getting into a better rhythm with going to the park and doing the walkie-talkies.

The weather hasn’t been great lately. There’s been a lot of heavy rain and wind, so not really conducive to that. And then the nice days that I have had, most of those days I’ve been sick. I do wanna get back to doing shorts. But I wanna have something worth saying, if that makes sense. It does seem to me that there’s a lot of times where people will just post things online just to remind themselves that they’re human and for other humans to respond to.

And you can’t be discouraged if only two or three people watch your stuff. Outside of my wife, I’ve received exactly one comment that essentially said, “Hey, I had this on in the background.” I don’t know if that was meant to be a diss or what, but I thank them for engaging with the video at all.

So I think that’s it for now. I’m planning on doing a lot more in-depth looks at a lot of topics that I’ve already made some SItty Chatties and Walkie Talkies about, sitting down and really discussing ideas. I do also want to talk about books that I’ve read and videos I’ve been watching.

If I have any music-related things, I’ll put them over on the New Vibrations channel. I also have decided that I’m going to be sharing these daily reflections on my Substack as well. My Substack is substack.com slash at Amelia Phoenix Desertsong. I focus more on music there, but I also reshare a lot of articles I’ve been reading, and I’ll also be sharing the links to these daily reflections.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to be taking excerpts from the transcripts of these or not. Sometimes I don’t even remember to grab the transcript, but that’s something I can always do later. And just so I have another place to engage, so you can follow me on there for free. If you want to subscribe and give me money, that’s great, but I don’t plan on doing paid content for a bit, if ever.

I’m not doing this to make money. I’m doing this as a creative outlet, and it’s been very therapeutic for me to make these. I’m getting a lot of stuff that used to just circle around my head and do me no good and sometimes allow me to get stuck in these really unfortunate thought loops.

I’m going to do this even if literally no one watches or listens because it’s something I need to do for myself. And see, that is what you need to do. If you’re ever wondering what I should create, well, what makes you feel better in the moment? What outlet, what interest do you have that allows you to come back to yourself and be able to live in the present?

I think that is the greatest creative advice that I can give to myself and anyone listening to this right now. So take care, everyone, and I will talk to you soon.