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

:

[garote]

My pop's comments:

I like A because of the social outlet.
D is 2nd for the adventure opportunity for which you will be too old soon.
B is too restricting (too few people)
C is not good because you're depending on other people for the success of your plan.

[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.

[aaangyl.livejournal.com]

I suppose I did (B) a few years ago. I had a drive to get my career established and the "dues paying" out of the way early. This was because finding a "good" job, one that I enjoyed and learned from, was extremely important to me, and it's a lot easier to get this kind of job if you've got solid experience and success behind you. I used to be very oriented on seeing the world... until I found a place I liked so much I didn't want to wander anymore. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have been able to identify the place I wanted to be if I hadn't seen tons of places I didn't want to be, so there's a lot of merit to that approach too. I'd advise saving (C) until you've done some (B) for reasons I hope I don't need to explain, especially given the genre of music you're interested in. ;) (A) It's always nice to fantasize about going back to school, but it's only worth it if you're actually committed to working your way through all the crap and actually finishing it. However, if you just want to use a college as a social outlet, it's easy enough to live near or work on a campus and get the same thing. Not that most college kids are worth the effort anyway. I mean, if you dig hanging and flirting with 18 year olds, that's totally your thing and you're welcome to it, but I find that I generally prefer to hang out on a personal basis with people that have an understanding of "my world" (you know, jobs and bills and taxes and local community and having your own place and having money to spend occasionally, teehee).

So I guess that's a vote for (B), (D), (A), (C) in that order. Though my inner diversity freak shouts that you can probably find ways to combine several of those interests, for example a high-travel job, job at a university, or even a normal job that pays well enough for you to travel to something musical every 2-3 months and mess around with music in your spare time.

What am I doing commenting when I should be packing? Oh yeah, because I'm taking a break. Back to work now!

:

[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'...

[kjfishie.livejournal.com]

You gave me a comment, so I shall return the favor. ^_^

As a mere high school student, I would go for D. I never want to have to travel when I'm older. Without so many things to tie me down I would see as much of the world as I could.

Yeah, but like I said, I'm only seventeen and cooped up in suburban America, so, I wouldn't listen to me if I wasn't me. That made a whole bunch of sense. XD

:

[garote]

Interesting and helpful thoughts.

In defense of the college atmosphere, I have to say that there's more to it than hanging out and flirting with 18-year-olds ... a better place to do what would be downtown, or in a coffee shop, or at a random party whether on or off campus. What interests me about it is the general concentration of smart people. Granted, a lot of kids who go there are interested only in boozing up and getting laid, but they're easy enough to avoid. I think my dream-job would be as a grad student teaching small sections and helping with research work, except that it doesn't pay for shit, especially in Santa Cruz where one bedroom in a shared household will run you $600 a month or more.

I think zeugma made a good clarification when he said that one does not have to be enrolled in, and paying for, a college education to enjoy the local benefits of it. That sort of neighborhood effect is what I'm after. I'm surviving very well in the "wild" out here. I just don't give a tin shit about what most of America is interested in, and I don't care for the way that most Americans socialize.

So if I was to follow plan B, and concentrate on improving my "lot", I fear I would inevitably decay into a frusrated, bitter old hermit. This is essentially what I'm doing right now ... I'm saving up money, improving my lot, and hating every second of it. I can feel myself getting more and more angry, day by day, with this facile world around me. There's no meat to it. I feel my joints rusting, and my happiness turning brown. Do I really want this situation to continue forever? Bleh.

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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