Back to some kind of normal. Again.

It really feels like it's been a series of false starts lately.

About a month ago, things were beginning to open up again after the latest lockdown. Restaurants, gyms, and then even pubs and comedy venues. I was mostly just interested in comedy clubs and the climbing gyms. My son's climbing squad training had not resumed yet but I thought he and I could just go climb and get some exercise anyway. Then we found he had an ingrown toe-nail. We took him to a doctor to have it cut, and then he took 3 weeks to recover from that fully. And then, we found that Covid vaccinations for teenagers were available in private clinics, so we got him vaccinated and that was pretty much 5 weeks of staying home (3 weeks between the two jabs, and then 2 weeks for the vaccine to build up the immunity in the body after that). And then my wife caught Covid, and then a few days later, she was feeling much better but I got Covid. So for the past 3 weeks, I pretty much stayed in the guest room and watched Youtube and Netflix.

But now, finally, we're all well again and it's time to start thinking of what our new schedule is going to be. It's going to involve leaving the house more. For me, I'm basically going back to comedy and twice a week rock climbing. I have had to cut back a lot on livestreaming because it was hard to fit into the new schedule. I think being stuck at home for such a long time did challenge me to learn some new skills and when I look back at this period, the main feature was livestreaming. At first, it was kind of a replacement for performing stand up comedy. I thought since I can't perform at a comedy room, I could figure out some way to perform online. At first, for the first few months of the pandemic, it kind of worked because there was quite a huge demand and hunger for live content online. Many of my friends on FB were watching streams then. Brian, Prakash, Keren, Me, Zak, Kavin all had daily streams, which seems insane to me now. At one point, I even did two streams a day - a morning one where I just read the news, and a nighttime one where I have a chat with another comedian. It boggles my mind to think how much I was streaming then. And I was excited for it every day. As time went by, I think people started going back to their lives, and I felt like the livestreaming audience was much smaller. But I stuck with it this whole time because I couldn't really figure out what else to do.

Now that I'm going back to comedy and rock climbing and driving my family around, I have to come up with a new schedule but I also want to make it a point to have livestreaming in my life. My reasons are partly emotional and partly practical. I do feel guilty to just stop streaming because streaming was the thing that kept me sane during the pandemic. But I really do believe there is a place for streaming in my life. All this stuff that I had learnt during the pandemic - how to set up good audio, how to get a good video feed, how to sync up your video and audio, how to edit a thumbnail, how to talk to chat while doing something else... I do feel like all these skills have to be useful to a modern comedian, but I just also don't see how to tie it all together neatly. They're all content creation skills. You know what they say, that to a guy with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Maybe there is a bit of that going on. Maybe I just don't want to feel like I've been wasting my time learning useless skills. 

I think ideally, my content creation assembly line might be something like this: - 

A Just Chatting livestream -> podcast -.> joke writing / general writing -> stage / blog / book

That's a simple version. It's probably going to be a lot more elaborate and non-linear and probably messy.

Yeah, so I just wanted to say, I'm not livestreaming much at the moment, but I will eventually settle in to a schedule where I will do at least one regular weekly livestream. Right now, I can't see it happening because I'm swamped with a lot of unscheduled stuff.