|
|
Turning Thirty-One
Yesterday was my 31st birthday and I’d like to take this blog post to reflect on the events of my 30th year. I know this blog won’t really be all that helpful for anyone but myself, but it’s something that I need to do and I won’t make a habit of it.
Thirty was a bit of an odd year for me, as it saw a great deal of change in many areas of my life. These have all been rather large shifts and I’ve been doing my best to not get overwhelmed by all the changes.
Music
A couple days before my 30th birthday, I released a compilation through Concatenation Records called “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three” which features seven songs of mine from seven different projects. In my 30th year, I only created songs for a short-lived project (Philistine on the Sidewalk) and under my own name. It was still a rather productive year, as I created 33 songs – 17 under Philistine on the Sidewalk and 16 under my own name. I wasn’t able to release any albums this year, though I did make a couple of attempts that should come to fruition in my 31st year.
Also, now that I’m using my own name again for music, I ended all of my other projects and started putting a new song online each month as of July. It’s been a good incentive to keep productive, but it was an inspiration in unfocused creativity as I was mostly riding the sound I created with Philistine on the Sidewalk.
In fact, only in the last two weeks have I truly found any real inspiration, and it came through searching around in Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. I’ve been dabbling in electronic music again more this year in remixing some of the Philistine on the Sidewalk tunes, but doing a chiptune cover of a Pink Floyd song, an ambient techno remix of a drum and bass song for a fellow Avalancher, and a drum and bass reinterpretation of Little Drummer Boy for a holiday compilation at Avalanchers (that will be coming out on Monday) in the past couple of months have really sparked my interest in it again.
In any event, I took the time to go through the entirety of Ishkur’s guide, wrote down the genres and artists that appealed to me, and searched them out on YouTube. The first one I checked out was L.T.J Bukem’s song “Horizons” – the short clip on Ishkur’s was enjoyable, but once I heard the full song, a switch flipped and I was flooded with musical ideas.
Everything that I did musically over the past year started to make sense. I was able to pick out what I did right, what I did wrong, and how to properly move forward. I was able to identify the genres that appealed to me the most and how they most relate to the work I’ve done and the work I want to do. In relation to my current and old projects, those would be:
• Ambient (Amaranthine Skies)
• Ambient Techno (Amaranthine)
• Atmospheric Jungle (L.T.J’s Bukem’s genre; fairly uncharted territory for me)
• Chillout (aka Trip-Hop – my current tunes, Philistine on the Sidewalk)
• Electro Funk (my current tunes, Natthimmel, Philistine on the Sidewalk)
• Psytrance (every one of my metal/industrial projects ever)
Rather than splitting my musical interests into different projects, I’m going to have albums focused on a specific genre and not mix so many of them together. I asked some folks at Avalanchers about what genre my most recent song “In the Light of the Snow” was, and the response I received was that it’s a combination of ambient, electro funk, post-rock, and trip-hop. It felt like that was a bit too much cross-pollination, so I’ve decided to try and filter things down as much as I can to the above six genres. Of course, there’ll be a little wiggle room here and there, as I’ve never been one to strictly adhere to genre specifications.
As far as how this is going to affect future releases, it should make them more streamlined. I’ve got a system figured out wherein I’ll be generating three new ambient albums a year (well, two next year and three thereafter), I’ve got a psytrance remix album of the Philistine on the Sidewalk stuff in progress, an electro funk VG cover album conceptualized, and “Dreamscapes” – which was an amalgamation of ambient, chillout, and electro funk – is going to be retooled towards atmospheric jungle.
All in all, my 31st year should be my most musically productive yet and I can’t wait to get all of this music to come to fruition!
Fitness
My 30th year was more focused in getting away from the gym and the high cost of personal training in order to find a more economical and more efficient way of working out. I decided to start working out at home and my routines have evolved quite a bit since getting away from personal training in April and getting away from the gym in earnest in June.
The last half of my 30th year was focused on honing my home workout routine in order to get the best results, and I’m pretty happy with the progress I’ve made, especially in the last few months. Working out six days a week for at least an hour a day and working each body part twice a week has been netting some serious results, as I’m a lot stronger than I used to be and I’m started to get some reasonable definition.
The flipside of that is that I’m kind of stuck between 195 and 200 right now, and I’ve still got some leftover flab from all the weight I carried around when I was younger. There’s less than there used to be, but still more than I’d like there to be. I might need to start going back to the gym to use the elliptical and the treadmill, or start jogging around the neighborhood.
I’ve also contemplated exercising each body part three times a week, which would add another three hours a week to my fitness schedule. In comparison, jogging around the neighborhood six days a week would add about the same amount of time, but working out at the gym would take about double that due to exercising, changing, showering, and waiting for a bus.
I could also work on getting back into working on my Muay Thai here at home, as I’ve only put any time into it when I do certain parts of my routine. I have a lot of options, but what it comes down to is that I’ll need to work out with more intensity next year to get closer to my fitness goal.
Finance
This has been a great year for me in this area, as I finally got my head wrapped around the idea of dividend investing and have created a fairly profitable portfolio for myself. A lot of that money came from savings accounts with sub-inflation interest rates, but I was also able to cut out a fair share of expenses and use that extra money to boost my portfolio some more as well.
I’ve gone from knowing very little about stock performance to being able to read the indicators well, which helps me to know if what I’m investing in is a relatively safe bet or has dividend cuts waiting to happen. I’ve also been able to put my investments on auto pilot after doing tons of research this year. It still takes me an hour or so a month to figure out which investments I want to invest in every month, but that’s fairly negligible compared to all the time I used to spend on it.
While dividend investing has gone swimmingly, building passive income through this site and through my music hasn’t yielded much of anything. I know why that is and I know what I need to do to fix it, which is going to be one of my top goals for my 31st year. I’ve already started working on it some, but there’s a lot more work to do before I’ll see any real results.
Cats
If it’s not obvious by looking back at all the blogs and picture blogs I did about him earlier this year, losing Mouse after adopting him when I was 11 was rather devastating. He was a very special cat to me and seeing him go out to tongue cancer the way he did was heartbreaking. The grief overwhelmed me on more than a few occasions and caused me to drink so much that I made myself sick twice.
It also caused me to step back a bit and re-evaluate the importance of spending time and keeping in contact with the people (and animals) that I care about. I had kind of spaced out a bit to Mouse’s presence, as he started getting more and more reclusive once Bootsie showed up in 2005. I tried my best to make up for that in the month he was sick by spending as much time as I could with him, but it wasn’t enough time – though I know it never would have been enough time.
It also really humbled me to the fact of the immediacy of death, even though he had been terminal for about a month before he had to be put to sleep. I’ve been rather fortunate in that I’ve either been really young when people in my family have passed, or I’ve been on the other side of the country and haven’t been able to see them in their final days. Watching Mouse die in the way that he did was so brutal and it really makes me appreciate the time I spend with my friends and family even more than I used to.
The emptiness that losing Mouse left behind needed to be filled quickly, and that’s why I adopted Barclay a mere three weeks after having Mouse put to sleep. In fact, the day that Mouse was put to sleep was the day that Barclay arrived at MEOW Cat Rescue.
I was a little short-sighted in adopting Barclay, as the only reasons I did were that I wanted another cat that was friendly and preferably grey. Barclay was both of those things when I spent time with him at the adoption center, but when I got him home, he became quite the whirling dervish for a few months.
He was hard to deal with at first and was very little like Mouse, but he’s grown to become more like him with time. In fact, he’s sitting on my lap right now as I type, with his head and right paw resting on my left arm, purring away. He’s very affectionate now and has little issue with being held. He used to sleep on my bed by my left foot, though now that he has his own bed set up in the closet (a towel on top of an deflated inflatable mattress on top of my chest of drawers), he prefers to sleep there or in the windowsill.
He’s also taken a great interest to people food (as did Mouse), though he only gets a tiny bit on occasion and he doesn’t beg for it at the dinner table like Mouse did – likely because he’s not fed there. In fact, I’ve been giving him small morsels of Veggie Crisps while he’s been here in my lap and he crunches them up with reckless abandon, but doesn’t beg for them. He’s also eaten a spear of asparagus and a piece of sun-dried tomato, though he also likes the usual cat fare that overlaps with people food (milk, meat).
I spend as much time with him and Bootsie as I can, because I know that they won’t be around forever. I think that Bootsie didn’t really fill the void when Mouse had to be put to sleep because she’s a more passive cat, which is unlike Mouse and Barclay – they were and are a lot more interactive. From what I understand, Bootsie was rather neglected when she was a kitten and as much time as I do spend with her now, I don’t imagine it’ll change her behavioral patterns.
What it comes down to is that I’m going to do everything I can to pay more attention to Barclay and Bootsie than I did with Mouse (and Bootsie before Mouse died) and make sure they can have the best lives possible from here on out.
My 31st Year
I see my 31st year being a lot more grounded than my 30th – I had a lot of plans to execute lots of new things when I turned 30, and that’s certainly not the case for this year. My focus this year will be on building the things that I already have in place, especially in the music, website, and writing areas.
There are certain projects that I had considered doing in my 30th year that never came to fruition (micro brewing) and projects I had originally planned for my 31st year that may not either (selling things on eBay), but that all depends on what I can get done with the projects I have in place. The three things I listed at the end of the last paragraph are all rather time-consuming, and while I’ve freed up some time in the fitness and finance areas in the past year, I have a feeling that music, writing, and website work will more than take up the slack.
I am excited for my 31st year though, as I know that this is the year that I’ll really have some positive momentum in the creative realm. I thought that last year as well, but I was expecting to do so using the same methods that hadn’t brought much success in my 20s. I have real plans with strategies that are proven to be effective, though I have to make the time to implement them (which I will).
One never knows what a year will bring (as proven in my 30th year), but I know now that I’m more focused on achieving certain goals, I will put as much effort as I can muster into making those goals come to fruition and then surpassing them.
Besides, what else am I going to do?
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on December 11th, 2010.
External Links
• A V A L A N C H E R S – A V A L A N C H E R S
• Concatenation Records – Concatenation Records
• Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music – New Home on Techno.org
• L.T.J Bukem – Horizons – YouTube
• MEOW Cat Rescue – Home
• Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three – CCN018 – Concatenation Records
• Philistine on the Sidewalk – Philistine on the Sidewalk
|
|
