In or Out - Decide!

In February 2020, I went to the PINK 2020 conference in Las Vegas, NV. I have posted about that trip, spread across several posts, and I don't really have anything new to add to my analysis / perspective about that trip. In summary, it was a great trip and I have no regrets about attending.

I still receive PINK emails. PINK is gearing up for the PINK 2022 conference in Las Vegas, NV, and today, I started my day by looking at the sessions for the PINK 2022 conference and know what? I think I've reached a crossroads regarding the content being discussed. It's very simple and, actually, applies to several subjects in my life: shit or get off the pot.

What I mean is that I thought about what it would be like to actually be a speaker at a future PINK conference when I saw their "call for speaker" page: https://www.pinkelephant.com/en-us/Pink22/Be-a-speaker. However, I have zero chance of doing that unless I become a SME about ITIL, DevOps, and LEAN methodologies. I have the opportunities, in theory, to become a SME when I receive emails from PINK throughout the year about various classes they offer. As you can see from their July 2021-December 2021 schedule, they offer many classes about these topics. I just need to tell my manager I want to take this or that class. For example, I took a Foundations of ITIL class, which is the first class in a track to become ITIL certified. Simple, right? I've taken the first step to becoming a SME. However, I know something is holding me back from going down that road. I'm interested in learning about all of these topics, but not enough to invest the time in what it would take to master these topics.

I feel that way about a lot of topics about which I am passionate in non-work areas of my life. For example, I want to be a drumming SME. I don't have any reason to not be a drumming SME - I've been playing drums since ~1980, earlier than that if I factor playing on the black metal stove with the Tinker Toy cylinder, the Lincoln Log cylinder, and a red Indian drum, as though it were a set of drums, while listening to the Gene Simmons tune "Tunnel of Love" on his solo album on 8-track tape in 1978. 

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However, I have not made "finding a band" a reality since Uncle Rico the Band disbanded 2568 days (7 years, 1 week, 4 days) ago. Sure, I played with Koop & Company at a gig at Pitcher's in Cedar Rapids and have had some jam sessions with other musicians, but I've never found my Ideal Band (IB). I thought I had found my IB with RPM, starting in October 2019, but that has fizzled. I know that gigging as a drummer, in a band, once a month, is a reality that slips away from me with each day and it frustrates me to no end that I can't find other kindred spirits to make music with me. However, I have not seized the last 2568 days to become a drumming SME. I have not rigorously practiced the drumming rudiments on any sort of regular cadence. I have not made becoming a drumming SME an ideal that I work towards reaching. Why? Because becoming a drumming SME is hard work. If I were serious about being a drumming SME, I would learn how to play drums like this dude:

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To bring this post back to the PINK conference, becoming a ITIL SME or DevOps SME or a LEAN methodologies SME is hard work. It is hardwired in my brain to not want to do hard work. Thus, that's why I haven't become a SME in any of these things and have sentenced myself to writing about my desire to become a SME and simultaneously bitching that I won't do the hard work to become a SME because I won't do the hard work required.

Why I Became a Drummer

In my awesome discussion yesterday with the stranger in the waiting room, I talked about why I became a drummer. It made me want to find the following videos as I tell people that these two songs were what made me want to play drums. It wasn't the Beatles or Van Halen or even AC/DC. It was a song about "living in sin / at the Holiday Inn" and a song about a "tunnel of love" that I heard as an impressionable youngster.

I distinctly remember hearing the songs below. This was on a 8 track player in the basement of the first house I lived in on Red Bud Road in Cedar Rapids. This was back when I thought there was a band inside the stereo and I'd lift up the flap that went up when the 8 track was inserted to see if I could see the band that was playing the songs. I had no concept of how music was stored or written on the tape.

It was these songs and, honestly, listening to them over and over, and playing along to them the best that I could on the makeshift drumset I had created that helped me decide that I wanted to be a drummer. This was in spite of being very young and not really having parents 'into' music. I recalled yesterday that when I was very young, my parents bought a pair of drumsticks - one for me, one for my brother - because we were supposed to "share." How do you share a pair of drumsticks? The worst part about it was that the sticks were way too big for the makeshift drumset I had created. 

The makeshift drumset was a a black iron stove. I assembled a drumset, more or less, with a small red Indian drum, a canister of Lincoln Logs, and a canister of Tinker Toys. The Indian drum was my "snare" while the Lincoln Logs canister, with its green plastic lid, was my tom. The canister of Tinker Toys had a metal lid so that was, essentially, a cymbal. I used the purple sticks that had come in the Tinker Toy canister as my drum sticks. The purple ones were preferred because they were the longest available. The green sticks were next longest and I quickly began to use them because I broke the purple sticks because I was slamming away on this "drum set" and there was no 'give' for the metal.

Listening to these songs now makes me smile.

Living in Sin

Tunnel of Love