Wtf...

I was on my way to work the other day when I started thinking... Where am I? What am I doing? What the hell am I doing here?

I spent 16 years playing the flute, only to have the joy of playing sucked out of me by the rigidity and stiffness of the people teaching me. I love music, and I love playing, but I just couldn't stand the tiny little in-bred world that my playing was boxing me into. Bach must be played like this, Mozart must be played like that... No, you can't do that because nobody else does that... Where is the creativity? Where is the joy? Bach wrote insanely good music! He wrote pieces that makes you want to dance around when you listen to them! But over and over again people seem to find some kind of self-sustaining purpose in framing themselves with unwritten rules and laws about how you MUST play the music, resulting only in the stagnation of the expression. We remember the great composers because they dared do something different, something that nobody could teach them, something that they were the first ones to do. But when playing their music? We are taught to be copies of the people before us, always playing it the same way... I was thoroughly sick of music after I graduated. I did not want to get a job in an orchestra and spend the rest of my life playing the music the way someone else told me to. Besides, with jobs as a musician being as scarce as they are, I probably wouldn't have gotten a job even had I tried.

I applied to a teaching program, thinking I could get a job teaching kids music. While waiting to hear from the college, I surfed around online, looking for a job. Any job I could find. I found an ad from a game testing company in Canada, looking for people with skills in Scandinavian languages. I speak finnish and swedish, so I figured I'd give it a shot. What did I have to lose? Less than four weeks later I was in Quebec, starting my first day at work.

It all happened so fast, I didn't really have any time to stop and think about it. It only hit me when I was sitting in a car on my way from the airport.

I'm in Canada. I left everything behind and moved to freakin' Canada. What the fuck am I doing here?

And the very same thought occurred to me on my way to work the other day. And my conclusion? I like my life right now. I'm in Canada. Things are weird and unfamiliar, I have barely touched my flute since I came here two months ago, and I go to work each day to proofread video games. But I like it. I don't know if this is the kind of work I want to be doing for the rest of my life, or even for more than a year or two, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Right now, this is a pretty nice spot to be in. Life is good.