Blue Monday

My spirits were at a low ebb today. I noticed it after I got back from my grandad's. I had an hour before I had to leave for work and so I sat in the living room for a bit and listened to an album I just bought by a band called Band of Horses. It's an amazing album but it wasn't the music getting me down. I think I started to feel a sense of routine creeping in to things. I guess it's a combination of being back in St Albans, seeing some of the same old faces, the job losing its lustre. Familiarity breeding contempt is a truism, at least in my case. I just wanted to be back in Copenhagen today at any rate. Whether or not this business ever gets off the ground I feel proud of myself for upping sticks and moving there in the first place. I was so stuck before. The more down I got, the more I tried to get happy by relying on what was familiar. It's true that if you have nothing to look forward to, you just look back. Everything had become so formulaic and staid that I pretended that a comfortable, routine life was what I wanted. I was very wrong. You do have to take risks sometimes. Try something new, things which make you feel nervous. God, this is all real down home stuff isn't it but in my case it was true. I literally was going nowhere fast. Maybe that's why I feel a bit blue today; some of those old feelings have resurfaced. Whatever I do now, I'm just pleased that I have got some of my old appetite for life back.
Read some good stuff in the Media Guardian today, especially this article by Jeff Jarvis. You may have to sign up if you haven't already but it's required reading for anyone blogging at the moment. His basic premise is that with advertisers tripping over themselves to position their products on the web and, increasingly, in the blogosphere, ways need to be found to make it easier for bloggers and ad people to come together. The ad people need to know which blogs are relevant to them and bloggers want a simpler way of realising their revenue potential. Later in the section there's an article about workplace bloggers getting into hot water. It was fairly humdrum stuff but one statistic stood out: 70,000 blogs are started every day. What a daunting thought.