"The Long and Winding Road" or "How I Stopped Worrying and learned to Love Not Knowing What The Hell I am Doing"

I feel like I have too many plans and desires for the future.  Hell, I have too many plans and desires for the present!

   Musically, I want to make a living playing drums at least part of the time.  Whether this means playing on the street 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, finding my way into studio work, club work, band work, pit work, or simply teaching remains to be seen.
   Playing on the street would be the easiest, it seems - pick up a few showmanship tricks and play around New York on my days off either to drumless tracks of classic songs, or with other musicians.  This will push me to get better in every area of percussion until my talent forces the hard-earned money out of tourist's wallets. This sounds ideal - at least part-time it could be a healthy chunk of supplemental change.

Alternatively, to get myself into studio or pit work, I will have to take lessons to get much better than I am now to keep up with the caliber musician with which I would be surrounded.  As I understand, getting a foot in the door is the slippery part - apparently remedied by taking on drum teachers in the NYC area involved in pit or studio work and ingratiating myself to them until a job comes down the line that could possibly be passed on to me.  

A busking or studio gig supplemented by tending bar sounds like a much more viable and satisfying option.  Getting a bar job in New York is, as one may gather, not a piece of cheesecake.  Apparently it helps to have an 'in' to the bars with which I'd like to be in, which involves no end of wheeling, dealing, and verbal canoodling.  Alternatively, I could drink repeatedly at the bars in which I'd like to work, hoping all the aforementioned schmoozing would lead to at least a barback position from which I could work up to bar tender.  This seems like a long and treacherous road, but maybe it won't be, if I'm lucky enough to woo somebody who believes in a long shot.

So I have unconsciously decided to do a little of everything - in bullet form!

• Build a travel-ready drumkit to take to the streets with optional musicians
• Petition connected drummers in the NY area for lessons - I'm looking at you, Tommy Igoe!
• Audition - who else but Blue Man Group would take me?
• Alternatively pay for lessons at a school - Bang!  In Brooklyn or Julliard Evening Classes?  Oh the options..
• Continue informal lessons with neighbors - also useful for bartering.
• Work with new bands and fresh artists for reputation building.
• Involve myself musically and bartendrally with local business .
• Fluff my resume with NYC bar experience - for the craigslist.
• Schmooze and booze at bars where I'd like to work - subject to financial and physiological limitations, inefficient, but fun.
• Start from the bottom again - In keeping with "never move backward, always forward" mantra, convince myself that a potential Barista job in Brooklyn is a step forward from Waiter in Manhattan (which I had to previously convince myself was a step forward from Bartender in San Francisco) and that it can eventually lead to tending bar - It's pretty much an assured natural progression
•  Step 9: Profit.

Yeah, so I don't know if anything I'm doing will ultimately lead to where I want to be, but it can't be any worse than graduating after years of school only to find the economy of your field has withered with the supersaturation of overqualified talent.  And at least my way is exciting sometimes.