I was hoping to compose 5 minutes of music a week, starting last Tuesday, but unfortunately I was only able to compose 2 minutes and 46 seconds by this past Sunday. So I fail! Shocking, no?
I blame a few things:
1) My job. It’s a part-time job, so I can’t blame it for taking up too much time, but it does take up time. So I must blame it.
2) Fatigue. This is also job related. When I have to work at 9 AM, that means I am pretty much tired throughout the day. Which isn’t a problem for doing most things. But I think a lot while I’m composing; it’s a very mind-intensive activity; it takes a lot of focus for me. And when I’m fatigued, music has a way of lulling me off to the land of pleasant dreams, especially the incredibly fantastic music I compose. So it is extremely difficult to compose while fatigued. I did try taking some caffeine tablets, but alas, no effect. I must have high caffeine tolerance. I could feel it make my heart beat faster, but nothing else. Of course, caffeine really isn’t supposed to be used to counter sleep-deprivation, so maybe it has nothing to with tolerance. But that’s what some people seem to use it for and they swear by it. It doesn’t help me though.
3) Not being able to stay up all night. Again, job related. Since I have to be at work at certain hours, I am not free to simply stay up as late as I want composing and then just sleep until I am not tired anymore. (Not that this problem doesn’t plague most people.) I sometimes seem to think more actively at night, perhaps because there are fewer distractions; the TVs and radios are off, no one’s on the phone and no one calls, etc. But I can’t use the time to my advantage if I need to get some sleep in before going to work.
4) Perfectionism. Or pickiness. I spent 2.5 hours a few nights ago composing and orchestrating 4 bars. I think that’s the longest 4 bars ever took me. But I’m very pleased with the result. Though I suppose I could fiddle around and tweak orchestration for many many hours, it always eventually has to come to a point in which I am pleased enough and must move on.
5) Other stuff. For example, on Tuesday, I had to spend time tidying the house for guests. Chores are evil and must be blamed.
That said, I must say I’m extremely pleased with the progress I’ve been making with my latest piece so far. I went to bed yesterday with the melodies I composed annoyingly humming through my mind uncontrollably.
A big disadvantage of giving myself a deadline has emerged: I get angry. And stressed. And a bit depressed. And what fun is that? I blame all the other stuff I must do, like go to work, which just makes going to work that much more painful and annoying. So I’m very much considering throwing away the deadline and just composing as often as I can. I don’t want to be angry by having goals and then not reaching them due to things like having to go to work that I can do little about. Or I could just blame my undisciplined self for not being more disciplined and getting more done when I do have chances, but that won’t make me any happier either.
FEDERATIONS
Since I don’t have much time for composing, I have even less time to read, but in what short moments I can spare, I’ve been reading a collection of science fiction short stories in a book called Federations
Mazer in Prison by Orson Scott Card: 4 stars. I actually read this in another book before, so I skipped reading it again, but I almost always enjoy Orson Scott Card. Very good story from the Ender’s Game universe.
Carthago Delenda Est by Genevieve Valentine: 2 stars. Though the premise was very interesting, the author didn’t seem to do much with it. It was more of an idea story, as nothing much really happened. A world was presented, some unimportant things took place, and that was it.
Life-Suspension by L. E. Modesitt: 0 stars. Interesting characters with interesting dynamics. But nothing very interesting happened. And there were these battle scenes that were too cryptic for me with all their pilot-in-battle speak.
Terra-Exulta by S. L. Gilbow: 3.5 stars. Not really a story, but a very fun fictional letter. I enjoyed it.
Aftermaths by Lois McMaster Bujold: 1.5 stars. Again, an interesting premise, but an uninteresting story.
Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy by Harry Turtledove: 2 stars. Had it’s funny moments, but most of it’s humor was just stale and annoying, as if the author just wrote the story off the top of his head, writing down every stupid joke he thought of. Didn’t really work for me.
Prisons by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason: 3.5 stars. Started off a bit confusing, but once the story started rolling, it was actually quite good.
Different Day by K. Tempest Bradford: 0 stars. Yikes. While I like the idea of not portraying an alien race as a clichéd “monoculture” (as we humans certainly aren’t), this not-really-a-story didn’t really do much with it. It’s just a three page ramble.
And that’s all for today, methinks.
, it’s a good book.
Last Friday my mom and I went to Wolftrap to see a 
A few days ago, all the applications on my laptop, from Firefox to Microsoft Office programs, kept crashing. Then I’d often get the bluescreen of death saying something about a physical memory dump and then restarting the computer. I was sure it was a RAM issue, and thought one of my sticks of RAM was bad and needed to be replaced. So I took out one of the laptop’s RAM modules and, voila, it worked! Though I was out 2 GB of RAM. I wanted to go buy some more RAM just for the quick fix of it, but my father insisted that I call Dell support. So I did (well, actually, he did, and then handed me the phone) and, by switching the working RAM into the other slot as support told me to, I discovered the problem wasn’t with the RAM, but with the motherboard; it couldn’t communicate with that RAM port for some reason.
Last week, I finished reading 
. It was written in 2006, and in the computer world, that makes it outdated already. (Though there is now an updated and revised edition that I haven’t read, but I’m linking to it anyway.) YouTube wasn’t as big when the book was written, and it mentions Google Froogle every now and then. But, overall, the ideas in the book are very good.
I also recently started some projects with a friend. The first idea was to create cartoony shorts, similar to PowerPoint presentations we used to give in high school. You can see our first animation 
Also, I don’t think that just doing something over and over will alone help you get much better. You must also have in your mind something you’re trying to achieve, some skill you’re purposefully working for and know you don’t have yet. You could doodle scribbles all day, but that won’t help you draw like Rembrandt; you must consciously pursue drawing what you know can not yet draw.
.
I suppose much of it can seem like cliche self-help and marketing blither; certainly MacLeod’s thoughts are not unique or revolutionary. But at the same time I find them quite encouraging and inspiring. Even if you immediately agree with MacLeod’s writings, they might be easy to forget, because so many people in the world act as if they don’t agree.
I’ve noticed that most humans, including myself, tend to never really live in the present; we’re always thinking about some event coming up or what we need to do tomorrow. We’re filled with plans. Everything we do is for some goal we’re trying to achieve. I think even at the millisecond level, our brains are focused on what to expect sensing milliseconds in the future. It’s extremely hard, perhaps impossible, to truly live in the present.
But some parents I’ve met (and thankfully I don’t have these kinds of parents) seem to define success as something that can never really be achieved. You must just become as rich as possible, as successful as possible. You must get your foot in the door of some company and keep rising through the ranks until you own the company, and then own all the competition, and then eventually own the world I guess. Or you must become famous, and then more famous, and then more famous. And some parents believe their children are amazing geniuses and they firmly believe, or expect their children to be successful. Unfortunately, every day there are way too many children born for each one to become rich or famous. Only so many people can be rich and famous at a time. These parents’ definition of success depends on their comparing their children to other people, which has always been a stupid way to define success. (Part of me thinks some parents only want their children to succeed so they can brag about them to other parents. “My little Bobby is doing so well, he’s the vice-president of Boring Old Company X, and making a lot of money!” “Oh really? My little Billy still works at the grocery store, but he’s happy gosh darn it!”) And if their children don’t “succeed” then that means they are normal mediocrities…