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i am going to use the next 10 minutes to reflect on the past 10 years of my life.
2009: halfway thru my freshman year of high school. which means i was soon about to join the school jazz band and begin my now 10-year journey of hitting things like drums n stuff in a way that was good enough to get me into college.
2010: sophomore year – simultaneously the peak of my productivity as well as the beginning of the decline. while i was practicing drums every day and i often attribute this time to one of the most significant spikes in drum skillz, i also started gettin’ into the greens with my friends which i’ll never regret but i do wonder how different things would be if i never did… actually nah i think i’d be pretty lame. funny enough, the year after this was the first and only year (so far) that i’ve gone without inhaling the ganja, but it was for a girl. this year i am going to try again, but for myself this time. also, sophomore year was a dedicated no-girls-or-romantic-pursuits year, and i think it led to a very clear-minded year, even with the hazy introduction to mary jane.
2011: junior year – no greens all girl. and yet, my mind became more smoky when sober. i often attribute this year to the beginning of my depression… or at least, this is when it got to the point that i started realizing i have little control over my desire to sleep all the time, and i started to feel the idea of existence begin to burden me… that probably doesn’t make grammatical sense but i think it gets the idea across.
2012: senior year? wait but i graduated 2013… did i get this whole time frame wrong? eh it’s at least halfway right… yeah so fall 2012 woulda been beginning of my senior year and the spring would be the end of junior that makes sense… idk why im going over high school so much but it is the beginning of the past 10 years so yeah… also it’s a little past 10 minutes now but whatever ima keep going… i think this paragraph so far is a good summary of the year itself tho in it’s own way lol, lotsa distractions… ADHD hittin hard and my strong internal disagreement with how the public education system functions not allowing me to get good grades… as in, myself not allowing me to get good grades, which, in turn, got in the was of my music, man.
2013: end of senior year, graduating, applying to college. only applied to one, thank dog (miss u cloud) i got in but i got waitlisted a semester so i actually did not start college til 2014. back to ’13 tho, the beginning of the year woulda meant second semester which means jazz band again – where it all started – however, unfortunately, i managed to Fuck up my grades enough with capital F’s to the point where my mom pulled the plug on my jazz drumming privileges and so i was banned from joinin’ the band for my senior year… so that kinda sucked but luckily that is about the same time i started playing in bands outside of school – one being a 5-piece jazz combo, Augmented Fifth, and the other being that good ol’ fashion indie-rock, Serviette Couriers, which eventually led me to my current band, Oak Palace. so once we graduated i did the usually post-summer high school stuff and partied (not really) hung out with friends n stuff and im pretty sure we played at least a few shows. but when everyone left for college in the fall i was still waitlisted so i just chilled out home and just binge-watched anime for like 4 months straight lol. good times.
2014: freshmen year at berklee college of music… first week of school got cancelled due to the blizzard so we all met up at snowball fight… that was pretty cool. then i did the summer semester to catch up for missing fall… that was kinda depressing. boston is a ghost town in the summer. that’s when i started smoking cigarettes… quit now thankfully, that’s definitely a thing i am going to leave behind in the college years. summer semester was some tough love on my drumming skills as well, was playing in 4-5 different groups and was getting critiqued and yelled at and told my drumming wasn’t good enough in all sorts different ways, literally every day of that semester… i had a rehearsal the same night i landed on the plane and had a scheduled practice every day of that semester, so it was a biggun. semester as a whole took a toll on me mentally, but i like to think it toughened me up a bit.
2015: sophomore year, again… i don’t remember much about fall 2014 or spring 2015 to be honest, just kept on chuggin’ along school in boston, but i did come back home to san diego for that summer… i played drums for Oak Palace as a temporary fill-in cuz they didn’t have a drummer but i was already accepted to study abroad in Spain for the fall so i couldn’t be full-time just yet, but those were a good few shows… honestly it’s hard to distinguish between all the San Diego and Boston time over 10 years everything kinda starts to blend together and i’m sure my memory only gets worse from here, but Spain was Fall of 2015 for sure that’s pretty hard to forget. i still find it hard to believe that i got to travel the world, essentially, for playing drums. for hitting things. obviously, there are a hell of a lot of other factors, to stay i am blessed with privilege would be an understatement, but i am going to do my best to make the most of life with what i got and see if i can get my shit together enough to help other people out as much as i want to. anyway, Spain is where i studied Music Technology, which got me more interested in computers than i already was, which has led me to where i am now studying computer programming.
2016: decided there was no way in hell i was going back to Boston after experiencing Spain – the whether and atmosphere made me too homesick, Valencia seemed to be like a balance between Tijuana and San Diego so i knew i had to go back home. plus, my grades we’re still shit anyway so there was no point in making my mom pay ridiculous amounts of tuition to maybe-not graduate. i got the experience needed. so, i came home and have been here since. started playing with Oak Palace full-time, at first we had to ask around to get every show and i would make most of the flyers myself, they were shit but i got a little bit of experience so that’s cool. by the summer our shows were really starting to ramp up and that’s when we threw the legendary Sushi Gig – where i met el amor de mi vida Evykinz who’s laying down behind me waiting for me to finish typing this so we can do yoga. some political shit happened at the end of that year that i’d rather not taint this post with, but let’s just say – 2019 is about changing myself, 2020 will be about changing the world around me.
2017: feels like last year still… not really much to say, the last 3 years back here at home have really gone by fast, i still feel like i just got back from spain sometimes, but not at all at the same time. oh, i cut my hair for the first time since i started college on new year’s of that year and donated it so there’s that… i feel like i tried to externalize change a lot that year but i don’t know how much actually happened…
2018: this year changed me a lot. not by choice, but by things happening to me. which i think i needed. april was a huge learning experience i’ll just say that… then in august, my dog died. and i miss him so fucking much. cloud was my comfort and i don’t have that anymore. i have comfort in many other things, but i don’t have an excuse to lay in bed all day anymore. no more. getting off my ass and getting shit done. for cloud the dog. make em proud.
2019: we’ll see. clock just turned midnight so it might say i missed a post on the first day but i’m glad i can say i actually typed some real fuckin’ content instead of the usual place-holder-for-the-day material. i am proud to see that i have posted at least every month for the past 2 years. i want to say i will post every day this year but i cannot guarantee that, but i can guarantee that i will make better, quality content. i will finally get rid of this pre-made template and design this website from scratch and i will make more music and videos and finally start working on my art. i will not put too much on my plate and overload myself with expectations then not do anything. i am just going to take it one step at a time, but i am going to make a lot of steps. this year is about walking. slowly, start jogging towards the middle/end. no sprinting, not this year. i need to keep a steady pace, build on my foundations, and be prepared for what’s to come. the 2020’s. that’s my decade.
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