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

Re: :

[aaangyl.livejournal.com]

Well, for one it looks like you're wrestling with two different issues here. One is the discontent with your current "place", and the formulation of your long-term plans is a second. That is to say, you don't need to decide on a destination to leave where you are for a better place. Something else is keeping you stalled there, I suspect. I haven't been able to gather from your journals thus far what that thing is, but I'm sure you can discover it if you reflect in the issue of your stagnancy and wandering itself, without the added burden of wide-sweeping plans.

There's a Toad the Wet Sprocket lyric that I long ago pondered deeply and took to heart that might apply here:

You can take me down,
You can show me your home
Not the place where you live
But the place where you belong

Growing up in Florida, a place I never felt I belonged, the lyric never made sense to me except in a vaguely symbloc way. However, as I traveled around and learned about and lived in various places, I realized that communities were as diverse as the individuals that populate them. I developed hope that there would be a place I would be able to call "home" in the sense of the lyrics, and began to actively search for such a place. A "home" is more than a structure in a lot, I slowly realized. It's an environment, a climate, with its own sets of challenges and advantages. It's the people that also choose to live there, how they think, what they learn and believe, how they vote, what they spend their time doing, how they treat each other. It sounds as if you want to have an intellectual (among other things) "home". The point behind my comment was that you do not necessarily need to be directly involved with an academic institution to live in a community/social environment where free thought, continuing education, and high intelligence are valued.
I've even worked for several companies in which my main "team" was extremely intelligent, far more experienced than myself, and amazing punsters and conversationalists.
Of course, when you do finally manage to find yourself a community of peers, you have a new challenge. That superiority complex you can't help but develop from living among plebians won't survive long once you find you butt up against a concentrated dose of like minds. Or maybe you've been through that cycle already?

Re: :

[garote]

I grew up amongst geeks, gurus, sysops, admins, techies, and techs ... it's a great community and I appreciate it even more now that I've spent some time out amongst the über-materialistic plebians in southern California.

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