Collapsing Under the Work

I’ve clocked in a lot of good situations in the past couple weeks, minor wins, but still good wins. I have successfully changed my relationship with social media. Everything is off my phone. The posts I do for myself/trivia mafia and theoretically Heiruspecs on Instagram are done on my wife’s phone. I’m not scrolling past your beautiful lives anymore. I use twitter actively when I DJ. When I do other work on twitter I schedule it in advance so I’m not hunting for likes constantly.

In general during the pandemic I’ve been successful in keeping my health up. One of those metrics is my weight. I find being overly sensitive to weight, especially for people who may be close to their goal weight, is super dumb and can only hurt shit. I feel I have a good relationship with the scale and a nutritionist who is really supportive of that healthy relationship. But I know that when I had my first daughter in 2017 I ended gaining a legit 20 lbs across a year and a half. I didn’t go to the gym, my schedule changed, my energy for myself waned. I slept less. I wanted to see something different with my second child. And in that account I succeeded. I peeled off about 12 of those pounds. But I’ve been struggling the last couple weeks. Returning to life, returning to gatherings, entertaining, sitting down at restaurants. These activities bring me into some bad habits. But I don’t even want to call them bad habits. They bring me into some situations in which I enjoy the fuck out of a plate of food. But, I have to relearn limits, listen to where my body is. There was a time where two bottles of champagne and some plates of food was a great situation or so I thought. I eat different now, I drink different now. And, I need to recalibrate in regards to my father. He changed how he ate when he got diagnosed with diabetes, and he changed even more after my mom died. He changed for the better but I felt it was an abandoning of how our family ate. Seeing him split a fish entree and a garden salad with his new wife made me feel like an exchange student with some strange new family. But it’s his business, and I’m sure those fish entree splitting nights are part of why he is in good health now even though he’s getting up there. I can change how I eat and not change who I am, and so can my dad.

I didn’t even come here to write about food. I came here to write about collapsing under the work. I took on more work during the pandemic. Trivia Mafia was and is profoundly broke, so there was little outsourcing. I took on a YouTube trivia night, I took on a short IG video duty on Thursday nights. But there wasn’t much work to go around, we weren’t doing much trivia. You’d be amazed how easy it is to do payroll when you aren’t paying many people and it’s the same folks every two weeks. The Current had more work for me after a while in the pandemic. At first, it was thin times. No interviews, no live shows, no action. But working from home was a learning curve, I took on Wednesdays when Mark Wheat left. I started doing The Warming House on MPR News, I started doing more interviews, I took on the Local Show when Andrea Swensson left. I lost supports and help for Purple Current when other schedules got full. I volunteered to do cool shit cause a radio station should do cool shit and I had some cool ideas. So I get that all together, and where am I. . .I’m collapsing under the work. I work 4 days a week and one night for MPR. I work 1 day a week and one night for Trivia Mafia plus a little IG thing that doesn’t take more than 1 hour total. I am going to back to weekly live trivia starting next Sunday. I have two daughters, they are both in full time daycare but you know it’s still a lot. I am lucky to be in a healthy relationship with my wife, we share a lot of duties, but there are a lot to go around. I want to do this work, but I can’t enjoy any of it, I am doing things I always wanted to do, god I wanted to do the hip-hop show on The Current, now I get to with Sanni. I wanted to be the guy reading underwriting on MPR News, and now I am. I dreamt of getting to do a show on MPR News and I got to do that (and I hope to get to do it again). But, I don’t have the time to do it right, and I don’t have the time to think on it. It’s just keep firing, keep moving. I’m double booked and missing events I heartily endorse that I know I’ll never be able to go to. I work 48 Saturdays out of the year in a normal year. That leaves one date, one vacation, one Heiruspecs show and one wildcard most years. One of my days off is a Monday, so all those holidays on Mondays, I’m already off those days. Why am I telling a blog this? Cause I’m pretty sure nobody reads it. I need to just type it out and say that it’s so frustrating. I took a lot on to try and make it work during the throws of the pandemic. And now I’m navigating how to live that, while also having family to come visit, and concerts to attend, concerts to play, rehearsals to have. There was this steadiness to pandemic life, it was monotonous, but you didn’t miss the good stuff that you had scheduled. There was a regularity to it. I’ve carved a schedule that is just kids and work. They’re fun kids, it’s fun work. But that’s it. I see Martin for coffee on Sunday mornings. I see my neighbors on Friday if things are decent at the homestead. That’s more than some people get. That’s more than Rachel gets some weeks. But that’s it. The rest of it is work. Most of it for MPR, plenty for these kids, some of it to help Trivia Mafia lose less money, But I’m collapsing, I feel my spirit draining cause I don’t have time to process. I think changing the relationship with social media is helping, but only to a point. Ultimately, I have to get realistic about what I can take on and still make quality work. But I’m so scared to ever take something off my plate cause entertainment and entrepreneurship is cutthroat. I have to take it, if I can do it I should do it. I trained in on what I consider two of the hardest shifts in the week for The Current. Morning radio is damn hard. Request radio is damn hard. Those were my first two shifts. I can handle a lot of different shifts on the Current. I’m proud of that, but it means I get called a lot. I’m proud of that, but it’s a struggle. I’m proud of all of it, but I can’t front, it's a struggle.