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garoteI'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?
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?
:
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'...