Change is in the wind. No, no mid-life cri­sis, but I have been engag­ing in a wee bit of intro­spec­tion these past few days. My life ain’t what I want it to be, and I’m the per­son best suited to chang­ing that.

On the job front, I’ve been search­ing for a job for about eight months now, and have sent out lots of let­ters, had a few inter­views, and even with­drawn from one search (still a good idea: seven months later they still haven’t found a sucker to take the job). I have a cou­ple of irons in the fire at the moment, and a cou­ple of prospects pos­si­bly on the hori­zon. It has been a bit depress­ing, but I do still believe it’s not me, it’s them. That is, the jobs that have been open haven’t been up my alley, though I’ve still applied for many of them. So, I’m okay there.

To hedge that bet, how­ever, I’ve spent these last eight months sorta kinda try­ing to work free­lance web design. I set up a busi­ness site, set up a bank account, did some solic­it­ing, and while I got some nib­bles, I’ve had no bites. I also started blog­ging in earnest, build­ing my per­sonal brand, and dip­ping my toes into a cou­ple of niche mar­kets (shop­ping blog, tele­vi­sion blog, sports blog, etc.). And while the per­sonal blog has been pretty suc­cess­ful, the other avenues haven’t. And it takes a lot of time. Not reward­ing + a lot of time = unhappiness.

And per­son­ally, I’m get­ting fat(ter), I’m los­ing my tem­per more often, I’m ignor­ing my dog (those of you who know me may be most shocked by that admis­sion), I haven’t made any friends here (and we are well past the one-year mark)…

It all adds up to a lit­tle bit of depress­ing, and a lot o’ bit of frus­tra­tion, because I still think I’m bet­ter at these things than my suc­cess (or lack thereof) indicates.

So. I’ve been think­ing. And I have come back to the sim­plest of prin­ci­ples. Keep it sim­ple, stupid.

So. I’m going to pare back the online ven­tures to just two: my per­sonal brand site, and my design site. All the niche blog­ging is going to get rolled back into the per­sonal site, which will make it more eclec­tic even than it is now (which is a whole ‘nother issue). I am actu­ally greatly relieved to have just two work sites to think about: in just the past day, since I’ve been beta test­ing this idea in my head, I feel more relaxed and much skippier.

I’ll keep look­ing for work, I’m com­mit­ting to walk­ing the dog daily again (I know!), I’m going back to my aware­ness eat­ing plan (which worked well until Thanks­giv­ing last year), and hope­fully I’ll find time for some of the things I have been miss­ing: self, books, my lifestream, fun, friends, art.

It’s a good feel­ing to be doing some­thing, even if it’s all in my head that the doing’s get­ting done.

By the way, the like­li­hood of the head trim­ming is going up.