Or as my daughter puts it: “Ballet-tines day” – she wants to wear a leotard and tutu all day in honor of this special occasion. I’m sticking with my shirt and pants combo.
Valentines day is supposed to be romantic.
So is travel to a far away land. More so, when you travel to be with the person you love. Alas, it is not all sunsets and roses.
Tune in to the podcast tomorrow to see how Rachel has managed a massive move from Africa to Scandinavia.
By all accounts, my next guest on the podcast was smart about her move abroad – Even though she did it in part for love!
It is tempting to romanticise travel. The grass is always greener on the other side of the Pacific – so the saying goes.
Here’s the thing – travel and moving your life is TOUGH. The simple reality is that when you move, you necessarily are uncomfortable. The fact that you are no longer in a place of comfort hits you from all sides as soon as you touch down. Romanticising a move, and lying to yourself about why you are traveling only makes this worse. So what to do about it?
It helps to be as specific as possible about the reasons for your move. It helps to define this explicitly before you travel. This creates alignment.
If you don’t pay attention to your reasons and to your own desires for travel, you might fool yourself and end up not being true to yourself. This can bend your life in all sorts of ways.
Sounds dramatic – but Rachel got this right. In my opinion, She’s in Denmark for the long haul and for the right reasons.
Tune in to the podcast (now on iTunes and Spotify) this Friday to hear her Romantic story.
Tomorrow I’ll be publishing the first of my series of 4 weekly podcasts!
I’m excited and I want to introduce the guest properly today so that you’re all ready with ears wide open tomorrow.
Carlos Amato (https://www.carlosamato.work/) is a cartoonist, illustrator and writer here in South Africa. Based in Johannesburg, Carlos is one of the foremost commentators on South African sport, politics and the zeitgeist for our times. He also chased his passion in cartoons from a very young age and recently landed a dream job at the Mail & Guardian, taking over from a local legend Jonathan Shapiro as the political cartoonist at the paper.
We talk about a lot, but you’ll get a feel for how he has managed to be true to himself and succeed in a challenging art form and an industry under strain.
I hope you enjoy it.
In my early adventures in podcasting, I’ve learned something important: Guests need to be considered.
Guests are very important (obviously), but they don’t automatically know what you want from them. Already I have had guests who thought there would be videos of the chat posted on the internet (only audio btw), and who felt very uncomfortable with the whole idea of being recorded, right up to the point that I bullied them into a room to sit in front of a mic. I was oblivious to this. I thought they all wanted what I wanted and intrinsically knew my intentions – but why would they?
If you are going to interview people, you also need to work hard to line up a roster of interesting people. I have decided to start with a series of 4 interviews – one a week for a month. As a little teaser, let’s play have you ever.
Have you ever:
4 guests, 4 stories. Coming up on chimpwithcans.com
Continuing with the podcast preparations, I am going to try and embed a Soundcloud track on this blog post.
This blog will be the primary place to go to hear my podcast. Therefore I want to be able to embed tracks so that they are playable without having to leave this site. This involves getting HTML code and pasting it into WordPress. I’ve never done this before, so here it goes with an old track I digitised from an LP a while ago:
Cute song. Radical embedding of audio!
One step closer to my podcast.
Free form conversations. Structured research pieces. Reviews of products. Scientific discussions. Interviews. Creative stories. I want to create a podcast, but what sort of podcast should it be? I thought about this yesterday – I came up with a quick list of desirable characteristics:
After thinking about it for another day – I would stick with what i said, and I would focus on the stories as much as possible. Everyone has a story to tell, and humans relate to each other primarily through stories. Narratives. Archetypes.
I am going pretty well in lining up some guests. There are a few stories to tell already so we’re looking good. It’s an interesting exercise trying to find people to join you in a creative project like this. It forces you to look at your network of people around you, and to think of who might be interesting to listen to. It is the work that you have to go through to produce a series of podcasts. It is more intensive than i thought it would be.
I am already buzzing with my creative pursuit. It is happening alongside my office job career which is going just fine too. But the creativity is food for the soul.
Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire.
One of my goals is to be more creative – specifically I want to create a podcast. So far I have gotten all the equipment, I have created a proof of concept and then a first pilot episode with my friends. These can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/chimpwithcans (you’ll also see some early soundcloud recordings I uploaded as a favour to my mum 🙂 )
All of this was done with the creative process in mind rather than the end goal (ie. wanting to just create SOMETHING, rather than knowing what sort of thing do I want to create). It has been fun. There is a long way to go, though.
Now I am trying to line up some guests for the more formal Chimpwithcans podcast. It is not an easy process and it is making me think more about what the goal of the podcast is. I thought to write down here what exactly I want to achieve from the podcast.
It’s broad and will be whittled down. I’m really looking forward to being more creative. I’ll keep updates here as they happen.
Overkill is a common phrase.
At the moment I have a 150 Watt Onkyo receiver linked up as a preamp to another class A stereo amp just to drive a couple of small bookshelf speakers in the living room.
I am aware of my addiction and am working through the issues at hand! I need to sell the Onkyo ASAP.
Sure was fun to set up though.
Hifi is my weakness. I immerse myself in all the mythology, the hyperbole, the salesmanship of the audiophile industry and I am like a pig in poop.
Pigs really like poop.
This week I am lusting after this relatively budget amp, which is simpler than the one I have at home, and matches my speakers perfectly.
Or so I am lead to believe.
Because sometimes you just need someone to show you how best to listen to a masterpiece:
https://www.audiostream.com/content/hi-fi-hierarchy-according-me
Chimpwithcans 