Action!

So after a great Thanksgiving break, everything feels much better! I'm not really happy to be back at Bard, but the past few days have really made me realize how great my life is, and how much I have to be thankful for. I don't really want to go back and read my last entry, so I won't comb over the fine points, but honestly there's a ton for me to be excited about. Realistically speaking, whatever happens in the next year or two will probably be the most radical shift in my life ever, and that's a crazy thought, but the more I think about it, the more I'm comfortable with that. Julia and I made a list of things we can do to "be better people," and looking at it, a lot of what we wrote was unrelated to "adulthood" or "moving forward." It was little things, like learning to make soda, or traveling, or getting in shape, or learning to garden, valuable experiences entirely separate from career-mindedness or any expectations of what postgraduate life should be like.

Still, baby steps. The semester ends in about three weeks, and in that time I have a lot to figure out and practice and brainstorm, since I'm spending most of winter break in Brazil before coming back and pretty much jumping right into my first senior concert. Funny enough, my beloved Ajax is going to be in Brazil over the holiday, although they're staying in Sao Paulo so nothing can really come of that. Project or no, it'll be really satisfying to enjoy summer weather in January, and that'll be doubled because I paid for the trip myself. Excitement all around!

Not good enough

It's 1 AM. I'm listening to Vaccine. Today has been such an unbelievably shitty day that I'm seriously considering just fucking driving somewhere tomorrow, getting a motel room, turning off my phone, and letting people think I've been kidnapped or something. I know full well that that won't happen, that I'm too levelheaded to do something even slightly rash or out of the ordinary, but the thought of doing something blatantly for attention is really appealing right now. Such has been my approach to the world that I now feel like people passively become my friends more because they're afraid of letting me down than because they actually like me. Same applies to family, too: I think I spent so much time making it clear that I wanted to do my own thing and that I don't really need help that they're more or less not really in my life, but right now I want to feel like I mean something, and there really is nobody there to do that. For all my grandstanding and pretending I'm my own little island, I really just want to share and love and all that, but I'm scared. Nothing I'm doing feels right and nobody will ever care because I'll never allow myself to scream for help even though every time I'm reminded how alone I am I can privately spend full days feeling like I'm going insane, wanting to vent, and wanting to die, but always being too restrained to do anything but tell everyone I'm fine, which only makes it worse.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how fun Summerscape was, which is a funny thing because while I was doing it I thought it was monotonous and lonesome. As such, I'm not really sure how it was. I think in hindsight, the lack of stress I felt while doing that is very appealing, especially given how up against it I feel now.

The funny thing is, in terms of moving towards graduation, I'm doing better now than ever. I'm positively hurtling towards what I want to do, but I've never felt so placid and uninspired, even now that I've found a medium in which I can create something special. Necessity is the mother of invention, which is why I can keep churning out things I think are cool, but I guess it's always been my nature to get into a routine from which I'm afraid of breaking, but about which I will complain endlessly, to myself and others. For example, the boldness to go get a job is the sort of thing that will get me lots of jobs, but I'm not sure it'll get me any jobs I really want. While I'm only 21 now, I could easily wake up one day aged 55 having, in a blur of monotony, spent my entire normal adulthood obsessing over something (anything: chasing a dream, working a decent-paying job at which I am good, going to goddamn Ghana and teaching English, all for example) but never really attaining the heights I set out for, having settled for nothing special 20 years prior. I guess what this all boils down to is that I'm very good at convincing myself of what I want, but I'm not at all sure where that'll lead me, and absolutely not convinced it'll ever take me anywhere happy or successful if I let myself do everything alone.

Well cooooool

So in the week since I last posted on here, a lot's been going on! I've slowly been recovering my health (I think, though it's not perfect), I started work at that coffee place, and as of tonight, I kind of finished the "Blender." There are a few kinks, like an LED issue I hope to have resolved in the morning and an issue where it starts to distort at higher "blending" frequencies which may be an issue with the buffer or may be an issue with the whole thing I'm trying to do (rapidly opening and closing switches may not be the easiest on the ol' 4066 chip). I made a schematic for it in EAGLE but I had to change a few things on the fly, so I'll be fixing that and posting it on here, as well as maybe on another blog, if I decide to start one solely devoted to electronics.

In other news, my friend Ben and I are making a spur-of-the-moment trip down to Brooklyn tomorrow to see Fucked Up, a band both he and I will always love, as they supposedly prepare to go on hiatus or maybe break up. Their new album isn't the best thing they've done, and they're playing it in its entirety, but their last album wasn't the best thing they've done either and seeing that played live still ruled, and I got my glasses broken. Really looking forward to it, though I'll have to drive back to Bard the same night in order to be around for work in the morning. Oh well!

Longer-term, it sounds like things are shaping up with regards to my moving to Rochester next fall in order to study electronics more in-depth and be closer to Julia. I'm really looking forward to that, and it sounds ideal: both enough space to do my own thing (i.e. learn) but more proximity than I have here, and the ability to see her anytime we want. She also brought up the prospect of, after she graduates, traveling around for a while on very little money and seeing things. I sort of panicked, honestly, because I was thinking like, "wait, what about my career?!" but I've been thinking about it since she brought it up and it sounds better and better the more I think about it. I'll have my whole life to do electronics and play music, but not my whole life to do things young people do, like see the world. It's important to disrupt one's routine, and sometimes I forget that, but it sounds like it'd be an invaluable experience. I don't know where she wants to travel (we've discussed Central America in the past), but personally I'd push for Europe, given the ease of transportation and a certain interest in all things European. Anyway, that's in the pretty far future, but an exciting thought nevertheless!

Back to it!

Just got back from an overall incredible weekend in Geneseo. Julia's so unbelievably special, and there are these moments where I want absolutely nothing in the world other than to spend time with her. I feel like it's a sort of thing some people spend their entire lives searching for and never find; then again, maybe I'm shortsighted and almost everyone finds it at some point, or something. All I mean to say is that I'm an unbelievably lucky guy.

Unfortunately, the bliss surrounding my romantic situation right now does not extend to my own health, which, unfortunately, is less than ideal. My mom raised me to avoid antibiotics at all costs, arguing that they create super-viruses, so I've had a certain intestinal problem for about three months now that I've been trying to sort of treat naturally, by eating things that are right for it and the like. Unfortunately, I feel like that hasn't done much or anything, so my immune system is fucked and I'm experiencing many, many other symptoms specific to this thing. I am now aware that I should've called a doctor a long time ago, but my record of health has been such during my lifetime that pretty much everything has gone away on its own, and I've never really been ill for more than a week at a time. As such, I'm just now deciding to seek medical help, and as such, tomorrow (Monday) morning cannot come soon enough, because it is then that I know when I get to go to Hudson to beg some lady for antibiotics. In my experience, antibiotics are honestly great. I got lyme disease a few years ago and I felt much better a few hours after taking my first hit of doxycycline, although the shitty thing there was that I had to go through the first month of college (the really warm part) avoiding exposure to sun because I was very at risk for sunburn, as well as being too weak to really go to the gym, and probably prompting the first my many slides out of fitness.

And if I don't feel too shitty to function tomorrow (like if I feel how I do now tomorrow I'm not going to class), I'm going to get started on soldering my newest thing, which I might call "The Blender." I'm not sure if I talked about it already, but essentially it takes two signals and blends them in a fucked-up manner. As such, it'll be two-input and three-output, one for the effect and two to bypass each of the incoming signals so the box doesn't just eat two things' signals. To my knowledge nobody has done this exact thing before in one box, although I guess I haven't looked very hard. It uses a bit of that same WSG circuit, plus a cool use for an NE555 timing chip that I found Casper Electronics using, but there's a lot more to it that I can't really think about right now because that is one of the symptoms of what I have. Ick.