Quite a few things happened during my break from blogging.
I submitted the admissions blogger application. I flew back to Boston. My internship ended. I started to taper off my antidepressants. I received very good news about the music I was working on in July. I got platform Dr. Martens. I started blogging in uppercase (I didn’t realize it at first and now I’m too lazy to make everything lowercase again lol). I did a VR study at the Media Lab (it involved playing tetris while electrodes recorded my brain waves). I got to skateboard again! I walked around Boston and Cambridge. I DJed at a party and played songs from my discography. I started applying to internships for next summer. I got access to a music studio on campus.
Now that the school year is approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time.
One aspect of this is ensuring my financial security. I’m not planning to receive financial support from my parents this school year, so I have to make enough money to cover my regular expenses. My salary from my internship this summer was good, but a lot of it went towards rent and a new laptop (my current 7-year-old MacBook Air just isn’t it anymore). Going forward, I’m hoping that working as a LA for 6.009 and UROPing will be sufficient. I’m also being more mindful of my spending—eating out less, cutting down on material item expenses, thrifting and choosing more economical options—and focusing more on investing and growing my savings (I recently moved my emergency fund into a high-yield savings account, and am pursuing a 3-fund strategy for my Roth IRA).
The consequence of this new situation is that I have to spend a non-trivial time working each week (compared to last year, at least) on top of classes and extracurriculars. The additional commitment somewhat worries me, because while I tried to clear out my schedule to make more room for music, there always seems to be more things filling up the extra space.
I wonder if this could be solved my being more efficient with my time and trying to be more “productive.” I recently read an article about being “terminally online,” and I realized that the term could apply to me. For a while, I was operating under the assumption that I was exempt from this title because I don’t use TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram—but I realize that I could save a lot of time just from cutting Reddit, Hacker News, and news sites out of my life. There have been periods of my life where I was more strict about these things. Lately I have been more lax, but this policy doesn’t really make sense given how these diversions don’t add any value to my life.
The other part of this conflict is that I always feel a tension between spending time on music and spending time on other things. I tried doing some coding interview prep on LeetCode, and it was discouraging to see how much I’ve forgotten. Would it be better to spend more time on computer science projects than music? I’m not sure, because I genuinely care more about growing as a musical artist than most other things right now.
At the same time, music is hard. Music is slow. If I want to grow my audience, I have to invest time into marketing and connecting with other musicians.
However, many artists I look up to and respect don’t do music full time. Even if we are at different skill levels or points in our careers, I am in a similar situation as them. If they can do it—if they can make art successfully—maybe I can as well.
P.S. Have a wonderful painting of blahaj camping (source: MS0214 on pixiv)
lyricist 