I hadn’t tweeted in a while, so I signed into my Twitter and wrote down one of the first things that came to mind: “Opportunity is my bride”.

Does this mean anything to you or is it just some nonsense?

I’ve been thinking a lot about opportunity these days.  I remember being a young teenager (writing and recording such hit songs as “Typcial Geek” and “He Snapped”… come over sometime if you want to hear those hilarious demos).  I would dream of some record executive finding me somehow and turning me into a rock star.  Somehow, I thought, opportunity would find me.  I would read bios and watch spotlight episodes on Much Music and keep hearing the artists say how they were just at the right place at the right time.  They basically lucked out and caught a big break.

The part that dreamers might not realize is that in order to be in the right place at the right time, you have to get yourself out there.  No A&R guy is going to come to your house to listen to your band practice in you mom’s garage.  No, you have to be playing shows, doing competitions, getting album reviews, getting on college radio and small live TV shows and internet shows.  The more you do the greater the chance people will take notice.

Very few opportunities are going to come my way.  I have to go find them.  This is why I am willing to try anything such as busking and auditioning for a musical (can anyone teach me a couple songs for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?), while also booking gigs and making new web contacts with various people in the industry.

I feel like I’m almost beating a dead horse… I keep writing about working hard to make something happen… but it is very important.

Opportunity is my bride.

I can’t believe I’ve jumped on another social networking bandwagon.  That’s right.  I am now a twitter-er (is that what we call someone who twitters?  Or is it “tweets”?).  I find this whole thing ridiculous.  But when I look back on my experience with these kinds of things, I remember that I took forever to get a myspace page (of which I’m on my third one now) and even longer to get a facebook page… I would resist for as long as I could until I just felt left out.  Well… this time I resisted for just a short while and decided to give in to the cultural psychosis of hyperactive social media.

If you’re interested in “following” my tweets… pop on over to www.twitter.com/JeffHawker

Does anybody else laugh at all the new internet lingo that has arisen in the past ten or so years?  When I was a kid, writing on someones wall was considered vandalism, but now it’s just how we say hello.  Terms like “add me” and “comment me” actually make sense to most people, when really they sound like bad grammar.  Whenever I had a dumb questions when I was young, my dad would tell me to look it up (or he’d make up a false answer and I was gullibul enough to believe it, which is why I bowed like a royal prince at the end of my children’s play)… now when I have a dumb question he tells me to “google it” or “wikipedia it”.  Somehow this language has become a social norm.  We accept these terms without thinking twice about them.  And now I will accept the new term “tweet”.  But I still can’t say it with a straight face.