I've mostly gotten over the flare-up of my ego crisis from last month, fretting that I was not cutting as a streamcaster, at least to some arbitrary standard I had developed in my mind, and therefore my life was somehow deficient.
Even thinking such thoughts, I know they are absurd. Yet the demands to be excellent, or at least passingly good, in some many worldly things seems so obvious and overwhelming at times, especially in the modern world. We are supposed to be able to master these tools we have created.
I am way behind the times in tool-making. I am a downright fossil by tech standards. That I still make a living using standard and cutting-edge tools, and therefore need to keep up with their usage, is an outlier for a man of my age. I was supposed to go on to other things, a long time, according to some calendar that someone keeps about such things.
That calendar I always chose to ignore, in part because following this path gave me so much freedom in other areas that made up for the ongoing struggle of being a tool-user.
But that's my day job. Also in my weekly streamcasting gig, I am also a tool-user. The platform and website through which one streams felt like the controls of a jumbo jet when I first starting using them. Well, that's exaggerating, but because I am such a perfectionist, my fumbling in using them were humiliating.
The age thing is surely the thing at the heart of this. I feel envy regarding the ability of the younger generation to get streamcasting--to give the audience what it is looking for, which is a legitimate concern of show business. It is not the technical tools which stymy me,
But fooey on that. I reality I do have an audience, a great one. I've discovered that in my last streamcast in which I realized I had greatly underestimated the value of chatting with the live chat in the minutes leading up to the start of the broadcast, which is at the bottom of the hour.
It was greatly relaxing, and put my mind at rest about the start of the broadcast, when we have gone live and sound is going out over the air. I am ever pessimistic that it won't happen, but being the live chat before we went live made that fear go away completely. I'd already connected with the audience. Now it was just time to come out on stage.
