Bad news: Stuck in Vancouver thanks to school. I must make sure the grades are good enough to let me get to take the courses I’m registered for. I need to harass the profs if not as it’s actually their problem for the most part (or their TAs.) Apologies to friends who expected me down sooner; smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.
Good news: Have a rough (probably finished really) rap over a Childish Gambino track from me. Lyrics after the break.
When I haven’t been studying hard, spending time with Danielle or hanging out with friends who decide a Tuesday is a good day to visit Canada for the first time, I’ve been goofing around on youtube a bit to chill, taking potshots at rappers who are much richer (and less talented) than myself, and covering songs in a dubstep style for no reason.
4shared
HotFile
MegaUpload
Ziddu
DepositFiles
For everyone who wanted me to have a forum.
Well, you have one. You don’t even need to register.
So, like a manufacture with an early model android phone, I’ve been bad about updating in a timely fashion. Recently, I opened for Death Star at their CD release party at the Blue Moon Tavern. I had a fun time, Death Star put on a great show, and the Seattle Geekly noted that I “effortlessly kicked out a set that I imagine most performers would happily trade a major internal organ to be able to pull off.”
Speaking of the Geekly, they also did a podcast featuring an interview with myself amongst other awesome nerd musicians.
As to the other stuff? Well, I’m taking summer courses, so I’m staying quite busy. The secondary agenda to school will be helping Nursehella do vocals for her debut record. Considering how quickly Rai’s record went once it had a similar foreground priority, I think it’s gonna go well, and go fast.
My aggressive aversion to facebook apps that want personal data assuredly obscures a section of reality from my vision. However, this section surely contains information about how others perceive me, and thus, in that sense, I am forbidden from knowing a part of myself as I am unwilling to share information about myself.
More pressingly, regardless of which path of action is taken, I will feel some sense of loss. Either I am to relinquish my privacy to a stranger, so that I may know what my friends and acquaintances think of me, or I am forbidden from knowing information about myself. Some might argue I could always ask my friends what they said in a given, but on facebook, such connections are not always as strong as friendship, and even that still requires some exchange on my part. It reveals more directly to those people that I want to know what they think of me.
And well, I do want to know; such concerns are natural to human beings. However, I don’t wish to sacrifice anything personal to know such things. See blog title.
So, I squeaked through my first quarter at SFU with good enough grades (Discrete Math, B-, Comp Sci C+, English B+, Philosophy A-) to continue on my degree track. I’ve moved into my own place in Burnaby off-campus. I am underway properly now as a student. The biggest debate for me should be whether I want to spend the 45-100 something bucks a month to have a parking pass, or whether I should lose a 20+ minutes a day to the bus.
Yet, meanwhile, I have friends without degrees working for Microsoft and Google. To be fair, they are contract or orange badge or some other code word for temporary and hourly, but they are working, now. Doing jobs I could also do, now. Putting the best companies in the world on their resumes now.
I hope the $60K+ of my parents dough I’m about to plow into getting a degree is the right long term play. I really, really do. I really hope it means a salary, a house and all that other American Dream stuff. The grass better end up greener on my side, otherwise why am I gardening, and stressing ’til my arteries are hardening?
So, I’m over in Victoria, visiting Danielle, and clearly things must be chill as we’ve had time to go out for a couple meals, went swimming and we even yet again fed the seals (video eventually uploaded and linked to this parentheses’d text,) but pretty every other waking moment has been spent cramming on Discrete Math, which quite plainly I need to do well on, at least if I intend to continue my pursuit of Comp Sci. I haven’t even browsed my philosophy notes yet, both because I only need a D, and because I doubt I’d get anything less than a B- even going into the exam cold.
Ah, the liberal arts, I’m so good at you, but it’s ever so difficult to eat off you, and you’re boring compared to programming.
Beyond that, I’m taking Danielle back to her mom’s in Castlegar before looping through SpoKant to get back to Seattle. It seems there are tons of shows I’d love to see in my short break between semesters (well, w00tstock and MC Frontalot.) Perhaps it’s a reward for trying so darned hard to get through all this stuff, but in truth, it’s sort of a reminder that I have to get through this. I’m not touring with Damien Hess nor Adam Savage, so I better make sure I am educated such that I have good work, and thus can afford to see them when they are in my locality.
So, in the past week(ish) I:
- Did my first assembly language project for Comp-Sci.
- Cranked out a 6-page paper for English.
- Spent the Easter weekend in Victoria with my fiancee.
- Yeah, in case you missed that on Facebook and Twitter, I proposed to Danielle at the beginning of March. Consider that a different meaning of Nerdcore For Life.
- Burned through the easiest assignment I’ve had all semester for discrete math.
Yet, on the plate for the month is:
- A 6 page paper for philosophy.
- Another assembly project.
- Signing up for summer classes.
- Moving off-campus into the basement suite I just started renting.
- Getting back to Victoria to see Danielle’s grad art show.
- Finals.
- Popping down to Seattle grab a lot of the stuff I didn’t bother to take with me since I was living on campus, like a lot of my recording gear, some of my clothes. Also maybe to see MC Frontalot on the 8th
I would say I’m super busy, but rationally I know I’ve had plenty of leisure time too. I’ve been able to watch what I want on TV (well, I’ve not been keeping up with Top Gear how I’d like, but it’s rerun constantly on BCC America, so I’ll catch it eventually,) incessantly call Danielle, incessantly call home and even do much more visiting than I expected to have time for. For what seemed to me to be a questionable and uneven start, I’ve managed to do okay here. Perhaps until I see the benefits of getting a Comp-Sci degree over the more remedial, but less expensive and closer to home Computer And Software System degree, I may always be a little tense as education is the most expensive endeavor I’ve taken on to date. One year of university costs me more than all the anime and comic book conventions I’ve attended since I first went to Sakuracon in 2003, and I’ve gone to a lot of conventions since then.
Back on leisure, I suppose there is even busyness there. Last Easter weekend was Sakuracon2010, and Danielle and I were not there. For me, that was the first time I’d missed the con since I first started attending it in 2003. In that sense, even time off now comes with some checks and balances I didn’t have before, but truthfully, I had a lot more fun in Victoria. We went shopping, we had an advance birthday dinner and we went swimming. At the pool, I went down a water slide for the first time. It was surprisingly fun, especially in comparison to going into a steam room for the first time, which I also did.
Beyond that, it was nice to not have to inflate a lack of news into a 500-word news post on top of writing a big paper. I suppose I’d have had to review the new Trigun movie, which would’ve been another 800 or more words. I also can’t be disappointed in a dealer’s room I didn’t see (as I have been in the past few years with most convention dealer’s rooms.) Yeah, there are some old industry friends I could’ve said hello too, and with the new CD out I could have hustled at least a half-dozen albums. I mean, there almost isn’t a convention I’ve attended in the past 4-or-5 years somebody hasn’t been “hey, you’re that guy!” Well, except for Google I/O in 2009.
However, I think I’ve realized that while “making my way in the world today takes everything I’ve got,” I guess I’ve grown up enough to know that it’s not about going “where everybody knows your name” but rather where the right person or people knows your name. For a long time I guess that was the cons, but not as much now.
It struck me between classes today that this time last year, I was just beginning to work for my friend Charlie at his now semi-defunct company. I was busy trying to sort through documentation that ultimately would be superseded by Motorola’s version of the Android dev environment where much of the code I was looking for was pre-built and better explained.
Anyways, that then made me realize the last time I had been in school in the spring was in 2006, and the last time I had a full time course load was spring 2005. Reflecting back on it, it’s beyond me how I managed to drag out getting back to school for so long. I guess there was always another little fire to put out or moment of poor planning that cost me time, but at the same time, I could have finished an entire 4-year from scratch if I’d just gone for it then. That’s not even taking into account trying to get into a real university right out of high school. If I’d done that, I’d have been square even sooner.
At the same time though, I think my weird journey forward afforded me a much broader range of experiences than I would have had otherwise, and I’m glad to have had the chance to try on those outfits. I may have only “cosplayed” as a journalist, start-up developer and most tellingly of all, a professional musician, but I think I had to try these things on first.
So after two weekends of heading back to familiarity (be it family and Kirkland or Danielle and Victoria,) this is my first weekend in the Townhouses (which are basically 4 single occupancy dorm rooms with a kitchen and 2 bathrooms.) Like clockwork, there was a party going on downstairs, and well, I had no interest beer pong, not only because of a lack of interest in beer, but also a lack of interest in communicable disease.
However, I definitely feel like I’m getting more and more into the flow of life here. Beyond that, slowly but surely I seem to be making friends with folks in the ARC, so it’s not like I’m without social contact either. In fact, last night, I hung out with some of the nerd crew on campus. It’s much more my pace. I still have some disorienting moments sometimes when I wake up, but on the whole, I seem to be getting used to being at least quasi-adult.
In fact, I even feel comfortable enough to indulge a little. I’m going out for a Starbucks at the mall.