When Life Hands you Lemons

I’d love to do a birthday post, maybe 25 things I learned while I was 25, but I can only count the things I learned in the head. There was a lot of heart learning but it’s hard to write all of them down.

Instead, this will be postlets #3 (4?). Here goes.

Here’s why you suck at driving.

I’ve figured it out: Seattle traffic is so bad because drivers are too stubborn to make traffic flow well. They think they’re driving safely or are just being legalistic. Spoiler: some of our laws have soft contradictions with each other.

I can probably start a whole blog on efficient driving. So many things are now pet peeves:

1. Keep right except to pass: RCW 46.61.100 (I memorized that one)
2. Zipper merge
3. Don’t deliberately block parts of merge lanes (what’s the point? you’re just making traffic worse)
4. Don’t change into exit lanes at the last moment if you’ve got plenty of time to do so beforehand
5. Always let people in (or at least don’t intentionally prevent people from entering your lane)
6. Never tailgate (with exceptions, but especially while stuck in traffic)
7. Never brake check (no exceptions)

I miss driving when there was nobody around. Seven years ago I’d drive down I-405 on a Sunday morning at 8am and there’d be nobody. Now I just get stuck in the passing lane.

Discuss with me.

Churches can be wildly different from each other.

You never realize how different the varying denominations of church are until you start volunteering between them. On paper, it’s a no-brainer, but sometimes the differences just hit you like a truck.

More on this later, once the summer’s over. I’ve got one event left.

Constantly being aware is a curse.

Ignorance truly is bliss. Once you get past a certain point of knowledge, you can’t help but notice little things everywhere. I’ve developed my social skills to a point where I can notice when people are more awkward than I am. This number grows every month, and it’s a lot higher than I expected.

Dudes are the most awkward around pretty women (I’ve been lucky enough to spend a substantial amount of time with some attractive women). It’s awkward to watch and awkward to be around.

Self-awareness is a gift, but only up to a certain point. You don’t want to paralyze yourself by over-analyzing; you just have to know what to let go, and when to do it.

Stop advertising me Grammarly and those writing companions. I’m fine.

$5 says they’re keeping tabs on everything you write.

I’ve been on a Jacob Collier binge lately. His music is so complex that most of it honestly goes over my head, and I’m trying desperately to understand it. How one person so young can have this much mental bandwidth is beyond me.

Inevitably, you will come across some interviews with him where he talks about music theory in depth and some of the approaches he takes when arranging or composing. One topic particularly stuck out to me, and it’s about how he thinks about what he’s doing.

To summarize, he likes to find ways to create moments of tension then release. He also likes to subvert expectations by creating tension, then going somewhere completely unexpected, then ultimately coming back home. The moments of unexpectedness can stack on top of each other, and you’ll end up somewhere crazy. But he still returns home.

There’s no one epitome I can give that would show this, but all of his music has this to some degree.

Rick Beato briefly discussed some problems with the pop music industry in some of his videos. He pointed out that there are no moments of tension and release at all in pop music, and if there are, the buildups are so short that the effect is stunted.

He compares pop songs to junk food.

These two dudes helped me understand what I like about the music I like, and why I don’t like what I don’t like. Many genres of music are cyclical, with the same four chords repeating endlessly. Simple melodies. Ideas condensed to get the job done quickly and cheaply, like a TV dinner.

I suppose comparing my own tastes to a lavish, gourmet meal would be pretentious of me, and I’d love to say that I have guilty pleasures, but I don’t really think I do. I like pop from the 80s and before, but those pleasures aren’t guilty. At least not yet.

So with these thoughts, I’m going to continue pseudo-composing / arranging things, following this formula I’ve found.

Here’s one track I really like, and it’s one huge moment of tension into one huge moment of release.

If ten minutes is too long for you, or if you’re having a hard time paying attention to the whole thing, it might just be because you’ve had too much junk food in your life. But give it a shot. It’s totally worth it.

I wish I was able to make money doing things I do on a normal basis.

This blog is one of those things. I’ve heard there’s money to be made with blogging and ads, but I can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to come here to read my musings. I’d have to turn it into something more specialized.

I wish I could just make content about everything I wanted to. I want to publish analyses of the music of the Disney Renaissance movies. It’d give me a reason to start watching Disney movies.

Maybe some videos or articles covering trends of contemporary Christian music. Things I’ve been immersed in, but and nobody to talk about it. Or so it seems.

I like thinking about and talking about music, so I guess the next few posts will be about that.

I usually like learning things about myself, but sometimes I have to face harsh realities that I don’t want to think about. This happens whenever I get out of my comfort zone.

For the last few years, I’ve taken yearly trips to New York to see the other side of my family, and I’m always exposed to bits of myself that I don’t like. Here are some examples:

1. I’m really bad at hiding my irritation with people when I spend long periods of time with them.
2. I subconsciously refuse to give validation to people who say things that (I suspect) are saying them for validation.
3. I refuse to acknowledge the efforts of people when they’ve come to the wrong conclusion about something, even if I can see it took them a lot of effort to arrive there.
4. I have a high tolerance for physical labor but an extremely low tolerance for mental labor.

Now that I’m aware of these faults of mine, there’s no logical step forward other than to work on them. I was aware of points number 1 and 4 a while ago, but just refused to admit that they were problems for me.

I should pin this post somewhere.

It’s getting a lot more difficult to think creatively as I get older. There isn’t much idle time for me anymore, and if I get some, I’m usually spending it consuming media in some sense.

Most of my non-idle time is spent learning about things, watching “edu-tatinment” Youtube videos, or just playing video games. I spend another huge chunk of my time doing things I’m committed to, like church. There’s a huge list of things I do in the post before this one.

So suffice it to say: I don’t know what to write here. I’m mostly writing as a formality, and I even missed the day I was supposed to post.

Sorry, April. You were kind and unkind to me.

This year has just flown by.