About 30 days without video games. Biggest personal advancements: I have won a very small rhetorics/debate contest (less than 8 contestants, 30 viewers. I argued for a good talking point) and did guided tours about architecture and history professionally. I finally could afford a new top. Now that the weather is getting better, I hope to get into biking and then working out for general strength. My time schedule is significantly unfucked. I am thinking about setting aside one day/week for enjoyment only.

Emotionally still pretty rough, everybody else around me is doing awful. I feel like I am leeching everybody’s luck sometimes. I am not superstitious, but I think this expresses my anxieties about sharing my small successes while other people face a lot of shit.

I’m rubbing shoulders with the upper middle class and rich people again.

We had dinner with this woman who talked about how futile it is to tell kids in inner city music programs that theyll be in major symphonies. I liked this lady, she seemed to have a pretty grounded head. These kids don’t have private teachers everyday, they don’t study with the best teachers, they don’t go to fancy camps and programs. And it’s true, it’s responsible to tell these kids this, especially when they become some universities piggy bank and are saddled with debt forever.

It’s true, painfully so because I am even worse than these kids. I didn’t even have the inner city youth program to lie to me. I am that much of an idiot. I am a dumb hick loser bred to power the capitalist machine.

I don’t know why I exist sometimes, it’s for music but I am so irrelevant and the adversity is so high that I feel like I’m wasting the life that isn’t even mine. I don’t even have a speaking role in other peoples movies, how do people go through life not considering how the rest of us feel? I feel like I should quit music and holding onto the idea of getting really good is futile and more pain than its worth.

I quit smoking weed, done one full week as of today, which is the longest I’ve gone without it in maybe 2 years and the longest I’ve gone without it voluntarily for about 9 years.

Not that there’s anything wrong with smoking in the abstract, but I enjoy it too much to be responsible with it. So I’ve decided that I’m going to let it go so I can focus on things that matter more to me.

Also I’m continuing to play guitar most days after about a month since I picked it back up. I made a thread to get some advice and was overwhelmed by the nicest, coolest hexbears with just SO much advice and support. Very cool and very inspiring. This place can be really great.

Really cutting down on my calorie intake recently and it’s starting to show. I’ve managed to lose 3-13lbs since I started and I’m pretty surprised about how easy this low calorie diet stuff is. For a meal I’ve just been microwaving a whole pack of cauliflower and tossing some lemon pepper on it. A whole ass pound of food and it’s like 150 calories tops, and I feel super energized afterwords

Going to try and start heading to the gym soon. There’s nothing really stopping me other than I don’t want to run into the new year’s crowd. Hopefully by February I’ll go there though

This week I think I’ll practice some piano/synth/music theory stuff rather than drums. I’ve gotten pretty got damn rusty.

Goal: Make 1 song using a bunch different synth layers that I actually play and record with mine own two hands (i.e. not clicking around in the DAW piano roll).

• Make as simple a beat as possible (808, 909?), 4 bar loop is fine, some variations every now and then, some kind of fill every 16th. Really don’t spend too much time on this.
• Live record a bunch of synths-that-are-not-the-lead (there might be a word for this) on top of it. I’m thinking a pad, a 303 arp thing, and bass tracks.
• Live record a lead synth/melody straight from the Hydrasynth to the track. Can of course do re-takes if it’s completely fucked, but try not to fuck with it too much.
• Quick arrangement, quick and dirty mastering, export, done. It does not have to be good, as long as I just make something.

The point is to get more comfortable with imperfections. I tend to rely too much on the DAW to clean up my MIDI tracks, which has kind of made my creativity stagnate. It’s objectively much more fun to just overdub something dope on the fly rather than being a fucking nerd about it and demanding everything to make perfect musical sense at all times. I just want to make something good enough and keep it like that, and then finish up the track before I start analyzing the fun out of it.

I have also come to the unorthodox conclusion that I need to start smoking more weed. I kind of stopped smoking once most of my friends and I got a real, adult jobs, but now I kind of miss it. I can’t exactly remember, but I think I stopped because I was afraid it would fuck with my performance at work or something? Like I valued the job more than getting stoned. I don’t think it was ever mutually exclusive, but whatever, it was probably not a bad idea to lay off the zaza for a while anyway. Now that I have some manner of job security and seniority I think it’s about time to start lighting up every now and then. Looking forward to it.

sad to report the snowstorm fucked with all the good habits i was building. I was extremely stressed being trapped inside for a week, awaiting power outages and possibly trees falling on my house, frozen pipes, and being worried about my cat because their canned food shipment being delayed due to the ice. (Cat is doing good, we have dry food here so they weren’t going hungry, just forced to eat their not-favorite food for a few days. Me too, buddy.)

I think it’s important to talk about this stuff, because habit building/self improvement/recovery is usually more like an upward trend on a chart with lots of little dips and gains and not one continuous line upward. I honestly struggled a lot with my cannabis use that week, i used it a lot as a stress reliever and backslid on reducing. BUT it was an extremely stressful week, and i didn’t backslide *that *far, and my plan was never to completely quit anyway, just be less reliant on it. Still, i was able to keep myself from smoking for long periods of the time the last few days when i’ve been feeling better mentally and can do stuff like go outside and have less general anxiety about my safety/home.

So during that time i was trapped inside, i couldn’t garden. BUT i did actually read a gardening book every day or do seed research so i’m counting that. Yesterday was the first day in… 8 days? i could do anything outside. I just moved a bunch of sticks that fell from the windstorms into a border for one of my garden beds since the ground was still a bit snowy. I’m feeling a bit unwell today, but if i feel better i’m hoping to weed around some of the younger plants. Turns out dandelions are actually great for the soil and bringing up a lot deep nutrients up into the topsoil, and are good for pollinators, so i’m going to keep some around, but i need to make sure there is no other plants around the babies so they have room in the soil for their roots. I hope all the plants survived the 17F icestorm weather. I protected the sensitive ones, but i don’t know if it’ll be enough. Oh and i ordered some seeds for inside, microgreen radish seeds, mung beans, and cinnamon basil. When i feel better i’m going to mix up some veganic potting soil using a recipe a friend gave me and repot a plant that’s been in a broken container for the last six months lol.

My “be active” plan also suffered. It dropped below freezing here and between stress and the cold i just felt like hibernating and had very little energy. The heating system in this place is honestly pretty bad lol. My fingers were going numb just sitting at my desk with the heat supposedly turned up to max. I did some half hearted stretching and called it good. But now i’m on day 3 streak of being active now that it’s warmed up and i’m not snowed in.

So i didn’t do well last week under stressful conditions but now that things are more normal, i’m doing a lot better and are back to making progress in areas i care about :)