This whole photography thing was much easier back before I had realized it was a hobby of mine. I had lower expectations then. Originally, I just enjoyed having a camera and taking pictures of things. Then people started telling me I took good pictures, and in response to that I started trying to take better pictures, and became Wile E. Coyote. I'd run off the cliff, but everything went fine until I realized it, and then suddenly I found it so much harder to do because my ambitions were higher.

Before I took on photography as a "thing" of mine, any interesting pictures I happened to take were a pleasant coincidence. Now, I have this constant desire to produce, and if I'm not taking pictures I feel like something's wrong.

It's very similar to what happened with music when I went to college. Suddenly I had nobody to play with, and playing alone quickly got boring, so my playing tapered off and now I haven't written a song in at least a year or two. In both photography and music, I have this constant nagging desire to create, but no ideas come. I've always found the word 'uninspired' pretensious, but that's exactly how it feels.

With photography, it's partly related to the fact that most photography depends on having access to interesting subject matter, and when your life is spent in two large cement rooms, with a dark drive in between, not much presents itself.

Writing music is less dependent on outside factors. There, the limitation is internal; I've never been very good at music theory, and so I only know a few simple chords, and it's hard to craft something interesting out of Duplos.

Hmm, I guess both problems do seem to share a strange similarity. I don't think it means anything, but it's an interesting coincidence.