VexVox

I finally realized what my personal motto is:

• You need to get out of my way.

It's a phrase I tend to mutter a lot, particularly on the road but also while waiting in line or getting through a crowd. Yes, it's a quite a conceited world view, but I don't intend it to be threat. Just a realization of a problem and how to go around it. The traditional perception of "You need to get out of my way" is "You need to give up your ground and let me pass." Too confrontational. For me, "You need to get out of my way" is a statement of fact that allows another follow-up question: "Which way can I take so you're not in it?" It's all about expediency.

A friend of mine has a better personal motto, one which applies to potential relationships as informed by her own divorce:

• Keep up.

But to some folks, it may look like it is.

I enabled the cross-post to Livejournal feature from Vox a while back, but I haven't really employed it. First, I don't post here much. Second, I like having a blank Livejournal. For a while, I even called it 「死気」, which means "dead journal".

At first, I wanted this Vox site

to be something of a hidden-in-plain-view kind of site — something

that would be fairly open but nothing I would actively promote. Thing

is, I get the impression all the friends who could read this site

aren't because they're not inclined to seek it out. My original online journal

has been defunct for more than a year now, and I've done little to

dissuade people from thinking I'm out of the online journal business.

Besides, I've got about seven different blogs, most of the overshadowed by Musicwhore.org. It's not like I've become an Internet hermit.

So I'm going to making this site a bit more available. I'll be posting select entries to Austin Stories and to my Facebook

page. And I'll cross-post to Livejournal when I write something public.

Vox supports some privacy features, so if you want to keep up with the

very rare secret entry, you'll have to come here. Aside from that, I

hope to make this easy on everyone.

Honestly, though? Most of my blogging is the micro format. Yah, I'm one of them Twitter users.

So for the folks on Livejournal who might run into this entry, I invite you to catch up with past posts. And I'll maybe see you around there some time.

An inventory of my refrigerator includes the following contents:

• Meatloaf
• Spicy chicken tamales
• Turkey breast
• Wilted spinach
• Broccoli sauté
• String beans and nuts
• Carrots
• Green tea ice cream

All of these items were purchased from Central Market at Westgate. A while back, I lost the enthusiasm for cooking, but I didn't want to revert to my drive-thru/takeout ways. The Central Market restaurant serves some really tasty dishes, but they can get pretty pricey. Then I discovered the Chef's Corner, where prepared food can be bought by the pound and heated at home.

It turned out to be the perfect solution. I buy half to three-quarter pounds of dishes and spread them out over lunch and dinner for a number of days. Some dishes are more successful than others. The turkey and grilled chicken are nice and light. The flank steak — being flank steak — can be a bit chewy, and I tried some Asian BBQ pork once. A bit stiff.

The big boon are the vegetable dishes. I'm not much of a vegetable cook, so the broccoli sauté, wilted spinach and string beans add some much needed greens to my diet. I didn't list the bok choi since I already dusted it off. Nor the fresh berries. Yum.

The recent heat wave, which started the weekend I went to Hawaiʻi in freaking May, does not make a hot kitchen a welcome prospect. So I've relied on the Chef's Corner to feed me. At some point, I'm going to get tired of the menu, but at this point, I haven't exhausted it yet.

Are the dishes really all that healthy? I can't say. But they don't taste like they've been dropped into a vat of oil.

I've mostly stayed away from ice cream on this weight loss regimen, but going through July weather in freaking June without ice cream is, well, uncivilized. I saw the green tea ice cream in the Central Market freezer and was intrigued. So I checked the label and discovered 33 percent of the calories come from fat. That's 3 percent above the FDA recommended allowance, but it's close enough not to be excessively fattening. The same goes for the green tea mochi ice cream, which I didn't list because it too has been dusted off.

Other Central Market items currently a regular part of my diet is zucchini bread and bananas.

So, yes, I am Central Market's bitch. It helps that the Westgate location is literally across the highway from my apartment.

I'm starting to resent the trip back home I took in May. It was essentially an eating trip, and it's absolutely thrown off the trajectory of my weight loss.

I was already reaching a plateau before the trip, and afterward, said plateau seems to be more like a floor. I haven't been able to get much further than 173.8 since April. I thought I had plateaus before, but this one is for real.

I'm already exercising four times a week, so that leaves calorie counting. And I can't say I've been very good at it since May.

This past week was terrible. I started it off by caving into a Pizza Hut craving and ended it with a work lunch that canceled out any work I had done to mitigate the pizza.

Cutting any more calories means drinking the rancid SlimFast shakes twice a day, instead of the breakfast dosage I've been chugging down since, well, forever. I've been neglectful of fruits and vegetables as of late, so I'm reintroducing them to my diet. The dirty secret of weight loss is having a regular bowel movement — you could lose a pound by having a very productive sit-down. (Yes, that's TMI.)

At the same time, shedding 40 pounds is not subtle. People who see me notice. And in another bit of mixed news, the size 36 jeans I bought because I couldn't fit the size 38 jeans are also now loose. Damn it, I sank $30+ on three pairs.

I'm approximately 10 pounds away from my goal, and it's always the last 10 pounds that are hardest to shed. I think maybe I should settle in with being comfortable at 175 pounds.

I would very much like to see myself at my ideal BMI weight (166 pounds), but when I look in the mirror now, I actually don't mind what I see.

It's been a month since I filed papers with the Travis County Clerk's Office to create two businesses — Observant Records and Eponymous 4. Of course, Eponymous 4 isn't really a "business", but if I want to sell merchandise or get paid royalties under an alias, it's probably best to be somewhat official.

In this past month, I've reacquainted myself with accounting concepts, got familiar with creating formulas in Excel, shopped for office supplies and visited the post office many, many times.

A long time ago, I took some kind of online personality test to see if I had the fortitude for entrepreneurship. The test results told me to keep my day job. I can't say I'm getting into this whole record label thing with the aim of quitting said day job, but at the same time, I don't think I'm total inept at being my own boss.

The test — I wish I could find it again — did attempt to gauge my opinion on a number of situations. How did I feel about putting money in a business without a return on investment? How comfortable was I with being financially insecure while getting the business off the ground? Speaking on generic terms, I'm honestly not comfortable with those situations. But with music, hell — I'd be surprised if I got paid for anything. So that kind of fear can be nicely mitigated by nihilism.

Besides, it's not about the money — it's about the music. Right?

Here's what I've learned so far in trying get a business off the ground:

• Filing a DBA ("doing business as") is ridiculously easy and cheap.

  It came out to $16.20 for each company registered at the Travis County Clerk's Office. The hardest

  part was carving out the time in the day to do it. Just show up, use

  the clerk's office database to make sure the name you want isn't

  already taken, fill out the form, wait for your number to be called and

  pay your $16.20 in cash. Nope, no checks or credit cards. I filed both

  Observant Records and Eponymous 4 in less than half an hour.

• Take an accounting class. In fact, take it even if you're not considering starting a business. It takes the mystery out of all those mysterious financial reports, let alone your bank statement. And if you're going to sell stuff, you will need to collect sales tax. It's better to do that with your books in order.
• Yes, even if you sell a t-shirt at a show, you'll need to tack on the sales tax at the time of the sale, or take the sales tax out afterward. Getting an sales tax license in Texas is not difficult and costs nothing. You can even do it online.
• If you don't take an accounting class, you might get away with being able to use Quickbooks, so long as your remember it's not Quicken. But it's better to take the class, so you can understand why Quickbooks won't let you delete anything. No, really.
• Download and install PDFCreator. It comes in incredibly handy if you're dealing with government forms in fillable PDF format or when you're prompted to print something out. With PDFCreator, you can print to file and have a backup of any form, label or printout you create. Not all fillable PDF forms allow you to save a copy.
• Using the Post Office's Click-N-Ship for Priority or Express Mail is cheaper than doing it in person or using the kiosk. The cheapest online rate for Priority Mail is $4.75 with free Delivery Confirmation. In person, it's $4.80 with Delivery Confirmation an extra $0.65. Mailing stuff is going to become a regular part of life, so it's best to get very familiar with the Post Office web site.
• Get lots of mailing labels in various sizes. If you plan on selling stuff through your website, stack up on envelopes.
• If you ever wanted to get in touch with people you haven't spoken to in a long time, asking them to buy your stuff is a good excuse.

I'm certain I'm going to learn a lot of new things later, especially when I discover I'm doing things now that are totally wrong.

Back in 1998, web-based e-mail was touted as the on-the-go solution solution for people tethered to a desktop client. Widespread use of the Internet was still new enough that folks more than familiar with UNIX shells could bypass these free web-based services in favor of telnet, rlogin or ssh.

I scoffed at the idea of having a Hotmail account. I had one, of course, but I would log into it rarely. I would rather telnet into my e-mail and use pine than be bombarded with obnoxious animated GIFs.

But I was reckless with my e-mail address. It was my default address for every account to which I signed up. As a result, it managed to get on every SPAM list conceivable, and by 2000, the number of SPAM I received outnumbered mail by real people. The advent of online journal writing — which would eventually become blogging — made correspondence through e-mail more of a business action. Why write to individuals when I could just point them to my site instead?

I installed a shell-based SPAM filter so good, it filtered out legitimate e-mail. It was then I got into the habit of moving over false positives to the inbox, which would then be sucked down to my desktop client. I'd clean out the filters every day.

Having learned such a hard lesson, the Hotmail account then became my SPAM catcher box. Every site to which I registered would use that account. As a result, it's become the area to which I'm willing to be marketed. I don't mind if some business puts me on a notification list with that address — that's why it's there.

My shell account changed hands, and the business with which I original signed up got acquired by another company. After a major change in e-mail platform, the rot began to sink in. The overprotective shell filters became too permissive, and the number of SPAM messages filtered out dwindled against what went through. By 2008, Twitter, social networks and web-based communication essentially made my desktop e-mail client neglected. I would go for months without firing it up.

The shell access came with its costs: $16/month. However portable ssh is, the shell e-mail account had lost its value. It was not worth that expenditure.

So after 10 years, an e-mail address familiar to everyone I know is no more. I canceled my Illuminati Online (actually it's Prism.net) account today, and nemesisv@io.com is no more. I would usually try to obfuscate addresses, but the SPAM scrapers took that address a long time ago.

I couldn't really kill it since it was already dead.

At the same time, it almost feels like I've torn down a house. It's a destination that hadn't changed for a decade. When all else failed, you could always hit up nemesisv@io.com. Well, not any more.

So goodbye, nemesisv@io.com. You lasted in an environment where permanence is an anomaly.

Rather than adjust to Hawaiian time, I've opted to remain in Central time. My dad sometimes needs help in the morning, and my mom really needs to sleep in. If I keep my body fooled into thinking that 4 a.m. is really 9 a.m., I can assist in that manner.

That just means when it's noon in Hawaiʻi, my body will think it's already time to start winding down for the afternoon. I went to bed before 10 p.m. HST last night, which means I stayed up till 3 a.m. CST.

The house and the neighborhood tend to wake up around 4 a.m. anyway. If it isn't my brother getting ready to go to work — long bus commute — it's the roosters all throughout the neighborhood, reliable alarm clocks you can't shut off till you need something to eat for dinner.

About the only thing I'm doing on this trip, aside from making sure my dad gets around without incident, is eating. All the discipline I've exercised in the last nine months have pretty much been thrown to the proverbial wind in the face of all the fatty, delicious food here. After shopping for CDs on Friday, my sister and I stopped by Grace's Inn for the requisite plate of chicken katsu. I thought about splitting the plate up between lunch and dinner, but who was I kidding? I dusted the entire plate off, including the chow fun.

I didn't bother eating dinner that night. But I did indulge in some malasadas.

I have been getting some exercise, though. On Friday, I accompanied my sister to get her daily Starbucks at a nearby shopping center, a round trip of 2.2 miles. This morning, we drove to Kapiʻolani Park and walked the perimeter. Neither excursion got my heart rate up to my usual workout, but at least I feel as if I've mitigated all the bad eating of the past three days.

I did, however, insult my mom when I refused to eat the breakfast she cooked Thursday and Friday morning. I drank SlimFast instead, to which she objected saying it didn't provide sufficient nutrition. I think she doesn't like having her cooking rebuffed.

After the walk around Kapiʻolani Park, we stopped by Island Manapua Factory to pick up some manapua. On the Mainland, they're called dumplings. They are actually called bao in Chinese. I stick with manapua.

I've weighed myself dutifully, as prescribed by the Hacker's Diet, and I'm not pleased by the numbers. According to the scales here at the house, I've gained eight pounds in three days. I think they're just miscalibrated. But I bet when I get home to Austin, my scale will corroborate theirs.

It's 3:48 a.m. in Hawai‘i, but it's 8:48 a.m. in Austin. Guess which time zone my body thinks it's still in.

The flight here went a lot smoother than last time, but I still got off the plane wishing my family lived on the Mainland. I tried to get some sleep on the plane, but everyone walking down the aisle brushed past me, waking me up. The guy across the aisle spilled over into it — he was a big dude — and it frustrated me that he had to occupy that much real estate. I didn't realize till we got off the plane he took up all the seats in that entire row to accommodate a leg in a cast. Oops.

My mom asked me to take a cab home since my flight arrived pretty much at midnight. My Mainlandness showed its true colors when I realized I would need to give my cabbie directions to my house. Austin cab drivers have frakking GPS navigators in their cabs. I am beginning to take for granted just how wired Austin is.

I made it to the house at 1 a.m., knowing full well three hours from then, the damn roosters in the neighborhood would start to crow. I hadn't anticipated a stray cat catching the attention of the neighbor's dog would trump them. In short, I didn't sleep, and I made no effort.

I spent my first day here throwing all my exercise and dieting out the window. Between bad airport fast food and a Zip Pac for dinner — with Ryan and Jen! — I've packed on five pounds in 24 hours. I was hoping to spread that out over the entire week. Oh, well. I guess I'll have 35 pounds to shed when I get back to Austin.

I drove my dad to his physical therapy session, then went to the Shirokiya in Ala Moana to see if there were any Japanese CDs to be had. Ala Moana has always been a mess where the parking was concerned, but the opening of Nordstrom's has turned the traffic patterns of the lot into some weird maze random one-way turns. As I announced on Twitter, I would gladly contribute to the rehab of the engineer who designed that traffic flow. Much crack was ingested during the design of that traffic flow, it seems.

And no, I didn't find anything on my shopping list.

I tried to get some sleep before what was supposed to be family portrait photo shoot that afternoon. Except it wasn't that afteroon — it was the next day (today.) Mom had leaped to some conclusions about the portrait taking based on my sister's availability.

So it was off to Zippy's with Ryan and Jen for dinner. LOST, Battlestar Galactica, my new record label, the kids — the usual catching up. We stopped by Best Buy afterward because my mom asked me to get a VCR — no, not a DVD player — but the only models available were VCR/DVD combo players in the $200 range. Huh. No. At least Jen found a double-disc set of Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity.

The rest of the night was spent trying to ignore Don't Forget the Lyrics before LOST. I didn't watch last week's episode yet because it was a 'shipper episode. I'm glad this week's episode actually moved the story forward.

I have a friend who's an astrologer, and about a year and a half ago, I asked him to do a reading about what I'm doing with Eponymous 4. He said to watch out for nine opportunities. I kept that in the back of my head, but I proceeded blindly — I didn't want the search for the nine opportunities to get in the way of the nine opportunities happening.

So which events altered the course of what I'm doing today? Looking back, I'd have to say:

• Took courses in synthesis at Austin Community College. I was a lot less skilled with how to work effects processors before these classes. After manipulating sound waves to sound like other things, I have better confidence in tweaking things, although I'm not inclined to tweak too much. I'm not skilled enough of as a mixer to make anything incredibly polished, but I don't think my recordings sound terrible or crappy. Of course, I took advantage of my student status to get academic discounts on a number of software, including Sibelius, Sony Sound Forge and QuarkXpress. That last one is important.
• Bought a crossgrade license to QuarkXpress to practice cover art design. I had a very ancient copy of Adobe Pagemaker, which I bought for a newspaper layout class in college. That was in 1996. Quark offered a crossgrade for Pagemaker users, of which I took advantage. Thus armed, I researched about CD package design, leading me to work with templates from Mixonic. That led to the next event.
• Had some blank CDs pressed with my own cover art. How CDs are made was always a process shrouded in some degree in mystery. It's not all that mysterious. Mixonic, in particular, makes it incredibly easy. They're a bit pricey, and they use some unconventional requirements for submission. But having gone through the process of designing a CD cover — then seeing that package come to life — was incredibly instructional.
• Moved to a bigger apartment. In May 2007, I faced a steep rent raise. For the size of my apartment, I felt that was a rip off. So I went to the leasing office to see if they had a bigger one-bedroom available. In fact, they had a two-bedroom apartment for $13 more than my proposed rent increase. If I'm going to end up paying more, I should get the square footage to go with it. So I moved to a bigger apartment and turned the master bedroom into my studio, something I've been longing to do. The walk-in closet was configured to become an isolation booth, and for the first time, I was able to make consistent vocal tracks. I couldn't do that in the smaller apartment because I had to break down the mic setup after every session. As a result, I've actually made tangible progress.
• Helped a friend record vocals for a stage production. The problem with doing it yourself is that sometimes you need to be in two places at once. By helping OmarG with his own recording project, I was able to work exclusively as an engineer, not as performer and engineer. That night of work gave me the confidence to produce recordings that didn't frustrate the hell out of me.
• Sent out a compilation of demos to select people. Now that I had some decent enough recordings, I mustered up the courage to send out a 13-song compilation out to friends as "Christmas cards". It's the closest thing I got to releasing an album.
• Formed a label and a publishing company. I felt really restless on my birthday. I was in the office when I didn't really want to be. So I found myself researching how to file a DBA in Texas. Before I knew it, I was filling out the forms, then told my boss I needed to run some errands. I filed my DBAs, then went straight to my credit union to open some business bank accounts. Without really thinking it through, I had set up business.

That's seven out of nine events. Kramer, my astrologer friend, mentioned something about working with other musicians becoming a difficult part of the endeavor. It's the step I've been avoiding because I'm still grappling with the idea of letting other people in on the work. I like working alone, and it's a modus operandi completely in my comfort zone. But I know I can do a lot better with some collaboration.

Now that I've actually taken some really serious steps — in fact, I just filed an application for sales tax permit — I have an incentive to produce something worth buying.

I've got another reading with Kramer over the weekend. Maybe he can shed some perspective.

In preparation of the release of enigmatics, I have …

• … remixed and remastered the recordings.
• … sequenced the tracks and burned a test disc.
• … applied for membership with ASCAP as both a songwriter and a publisher.
• … filed DBAs with Travis County to operate as Observant Records and Eponymous 4.
• … opened business bank account under Observant Records and Eponymous 4.
• … signed up with CD Baby.
• … revised the cover art to include a bit more in the way of credits.
• … set up a payment mechanism with Paypal.
• … gotten a sales tax permit.

I still have to …

• … set up a DBA with Travis County to operate under whatever publishing name ASCAP approves.(finished 5/6/2008)
• … establish a business bank account for the publishing company.(finished 5/7/2008)
• … revise the credits to include the approved publishing company name.(finished 5/6/2008)
• … burn the actual CD to be duplicated at the printing plant.(finished 5/3/2008)
• … file Form SR for the sound recording with the Copyright Office under Observant Records.(finished 5/16/2008)
• … file Form PA for the songs with the Copyright Office under the approved publishing company name.(finished 5/16/2008)
• … register, at the very least, the tracks on enigmatics with ASCAP, after membership is approved.(finished 5/16/2008)
• … have the CDs duped and printed.(ordered 5/16/2008)
• … send five to CD Baby.(sent 6/4/2008)
• … maybe put three on consignment with Waterloo Records.
• … consider signing up for Amazon Advantage.(signed up 5/20/2008)
• … let people know it exists.

Right now, the only thing holding everything up is the name ASCAP approves for my publishing company. Once I can get that determined, everything else can proceed. I'm kind of anxious to get things rolling because my momentum is pretty good. I managed to do everything else in a day.

Now that the label is out of the realm of fantasy, I want to get back to working on the material at which I've been chipping for the past three years. These aren't just casual demos any more — I'm actually working on something I intend to sell.

I'm somewhat nervous about that. The independent part of me wants to forge on ahead in full DIY fashion, while the objective part of me knows I could make my "product" a lot better with outside talent. In short, do I really want to charge people at least $10 to hear my weak singing?

Another funny side effect of this whole endeavor is the feeling of being split into multiple personalities. If Eponymous 4, Observant Records and [whatever name ASCAP approves] Shinkyoku Advocacy were three different people, negotiating the finer aspects of mechanical royalties and artist royalties would matter. Since all three are me, what difference does it make?

That's the thing — I don't want any confusion arising from which entity gets what share of a sale. I could "award" myself full statutory rate on the music publishing, but I would like a little more cash in the label to cover those operations. So I'm — ooops, my publishing company is actually going with the standard 75 percent of mechanical.

At some point, each company is going to have to pay the other. It'll be weird to handle that accounting.

Ultimately, I'm doing all of this to see whether I can. Everything related to Eponymous 4 since 2005 has been an exercise in answering that question.

Can I record an album's worth of material? Yes, at least five times over.
Can I learn how to make my recordings sound somewhat decent? Yes, if scant listener reaction is any indication.
Have I still retained enough of my layout sense to design the cover art? Yes, I still know my points from picas.
Can I do this well enough to send something to a CD pressing plant? Yes.

We'll find the answer to this latest question soon enough.