So,

[garote]

I'm trying to decide what to focus on in the next couple years of my life.

Plan A: Educational focus. Save up a chunk of money, move to San Jose, Sacramento, or Santa Cruz, continue taking classes and focus on finishing my college degree (not that it will be of ANY additional value to me at this point). Rent an apartment. Get a decent job that doesn't wreck my studies. Use college as a social outlet. Learn swing dancing.

Plan B: Financial focus. Take my chunk of money and invest in property somewhere, most likely Sacramento. Have a weekend barbecue with my pal Android. Work full-time, spruce up the house, turn my chunk of money into a pile of money. Don't bother with the college degree. Socialize amongst the friends I've got.

Plan C: Musical focus. Take my chunk of money and invest in property somewhere, most likely Sacramento. Split the house payment and floor-plan up with one or two other people who also have musical inclinations. Pad one room into a recording room. Work part-time. Combine resources to build, buy, code, and network our musical equipment. When someone wants to move out, we renegotiate the house loan, and they take off with whatever they invested.

Plan D: Travel focus. Loan out or store most of my bulky equipment, up to and possibly including my car. Drop my money into savings. Join the Peace Corps for a few years and attempt to assuage my guilty consumerist conscience while putting in work hours doing stuff I can feel good about. Lay foundations, chop wood, teach minor computer skills to foreign students. Do a lot of reading and writing in my spare time.

Thoughts?

Comments

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

Don't do 'A'. It's worthless at this point, for practical purposes, and as for the use of college as a 'social outlet' ... well, I hate to say this, but we're really all getting a little too old for that. You remember that story in the Onion: "Guy at House Party At Least 30". Not good to be an object of hilarity, for one thing, and for another, they're all in their early twenties, they're all moving on, and they're doing it soon, too. I know that you know this.

But learning swing dancing is a good idea in any case; or to learn to tango.

'D' is good, as your pop says, but I would worry about being taken out of the tech world for so long. Not that this should actually prevent you from doing this if it's right for you, but it's something to think about. I'm sure you could work something out if you decided to go this way.

'B' is good too, but you seem to forget that you can make new acquaintances at any time, no matter what you're doing. Why not do this and learn to swing dance, too?

As for 'C' ... well, that would rock, for sure, but it could also really suck. Everybody would really have to make it work, and doubtless you would find yourself working the hardest, often. Of course I love the idea. I'm sure you could have predicted that my sympathies would be mostly with this plan. But it's good to handle utopias with care.

C and D are adventurous, A is commonplace, and B is safe.

Plan B is practical; plan C is creative; plan D is spiritual; plan A is a little wistful.

Maybe it always comes down to this kind of choice, for each of us. Will I do 'the right thing,' (B) or will I fulfill my creative potential (C)? Will I go and seek out new, exciting worlds (D), or will I go on exploring the depths of the ones I'm already familiar with (A)?

Each choice means sacrificing the potentials of the others.

:

[garote]

Well, it's 5:01AM and I'm still at work from the previous night. This would seem worrisome, except that I got here yesterday around 4pm, and that was after spending the previous day at home messing exclusively with my own stuff. So the balance is really OK.

But I'm writing this now, because, the last 13 hours or so have consisted of Perl, SQL, HTML, Linux, Windows, and web-browser craziness... And I kicked serious ass the whole time. I turned out 2000 lines of documented perl code.

Now, mind you, it's suspicious to quantify work by lines of code, for many reasons. But this is good solid code for a database-driven web interface, and stuff that I've never really done before, at least to this degree. Especially on Linux.

If I left all this for the Peace Corps, I would be giving up a fantastic talent, and a fantastic wage as well. I would also be giving up the feeling of pride I get when I know I've written good code. It's great to go adventuring, as in choice D, but hell, my Pop was in his mid SIXTIES when he took a tour of Europe, and next year we're driving through Alaska together. I don't see the adventure factor decreasing by that much ... I do, however, know that with each passing minute my skills decrease in value, and it takes effort to climb back up that slope.

I also totally grok what you mean about college being an inadequate arena now. My social group there would probably consist of graduate students and interested locals, and that can be found just by being near a University, without enrolling in it (and paying another $2000 every three months for the privilege).

And yes, setting up a music studio would undoubtedly be a pain in the ass, but I almost want it to be a pain in the ass, because I'm only feeling that musical itch more and more as time goes on, as I keep attempting to sing, as I keep fiending for better equipment and programs, as I hear more and more compositions that make me think, 'I _know_ I can do better than that'...