For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with a "grass-is-greener" tug-of-war in my heart. When I was living in New York, I enjoyed my life there and did good in my day-job as a call center supervisor. I enjoyed most of the people I worked with and was busy as a working musician outside of the office environment. On the other hand, I did not have a lot of time to work on musician and drumming skills that I wished to improve at myself. I quit my job, went on a long road trip, and then moved to Nashville. Now that I am here, I struggling a bit trying to find work as a musician and was hoping that it would be a little easier than this. I'm putting my faith into following my heart that something will come up and even though I am still booking gigs in the coming months, they are not plentiful enough to be able to live off of, which is my desire, at least until I get married. The struggle is to keep on working at what I'm working at and to continue as a drummer and musician until I have the opportunity to use what I've been working on to get a gig that is fulfilling and provides me a way of life, at least for a time until I find another good gig. The only way to not be a success at life is when I stop showing up for life, which I've never been one to do that and have no intention of doing that.
We need music in our schools. With all the focus by the powers that be on testing and getting our kids good at math, science, and english, the extra subjects that are cut out are the subjects that help our students to expand their minds and actually get them to understand how to apply math, english, and science. It's amazing that the people who are in charge of putting these curriculums together are so short-sighted as to not be able to see the value of young minds being well-rounded in order to improve all their cognitive functions. There have been many studies looking at this and showing that such specific focus and "teaching to the test" is not giving us what we need. We need well-rounded individuals who have an innate curiousness in the world around them. Forcing students to only focus on specific subjects is not the way to create great thinkers. There is no much wrong with common-core and it just goes to show how out-of-touch the people who are making the rules really are. If we respected our educators more, both culturally and financially, I would more likely be interested in doing that as a career. But since music is one of the first things to get cut from school programs because we don't put much money into education in the first place, it makes people like myself not interested in getting mixed up in that situation. I taught for two years while I lived in New York and really enjoyed it. I was good at it. But I don't want to risk going through that again for meager pay with the risk of getting laid-off to make way for more classes as left-brain type subjects.