Procrastination

I just finished reading an article on procrastination from the New York Times.

I have often wondered why I never did what I wanted to do. It's irrational and painfully frustrating both for myself and others. I love playing music: I understand that it takes work and practice to become more proficient in making said music: Yet I have struggled to get into the practice room and open my violin case for many years. Ultimately, at least for the present I stand by my decision to pursue my Master's in music and I continue to hope for a career making music. I don't think I'm crazy for being here. I'm crazy to not be in the practice room at least a few hours a day.

Something I have noticed in my behavior is that I do very well at work. I don't think I missed a single day of work last summer when I delivered newspapers every night, and I worked close to 100 days straight before moving to Colorado. I do very well at my current job at Beau Jo's, as well. Jobs where I have a set schedule and can punch in and out of a clock are easy for me. If practicing is my job, right now it's to prepare for unknown auditions in the future. Yet even the shorter term goal of being prepared for a weekly lesson isn't enough to motivate me.

Because I cannot claim ignorance, I am constantly plagued by guilt. I know I can, and I know I should. But I rarely do. I feel like a man-child this year, irresponsible and unwilling to face the realities of adulthood. I had a fun week. I even took today off, except for German, which I missed all of last week because of opera rehearsals. I ate out and played video games. And I'm glad I got back to a point where I felt that my life is worth living. I loved opera week, as I always do, and that's encouraging. I'm hoping that will help me understand that we work hard because it pays off in fun.

I have made a real effort so far to address my depression and energy problems, and I need to keep working on taking care of myself better. Now I feel it's time to finally tackle my giant problem of procrastination. Well, tomorrow. I didn't practice at all tonight and it's now too late to start studying for my Master's Qualifying Exams, but the first step I can take in this new process is to get to sleep at a decent hour.

Changes

It's been a long time since I last sat down to set my ruminations to imaginary paper on the interwebs. I think it's important for me to continue to reflect and organize my thoughts, but though it would probably have been beneficial to do so earlier, I have only recently had some breakthroughs that allow me to take a breather. This tone of this semester for me so far has been stressful. I've felt like it's all I can do to keep my head above water.

But I've looked for and found help for my sleep problems and depression, and things are starting to turn around. I'm glad that I broke through my apathy and took real steps to help myself succeed and feel better. It means a lot for me to get back to normal. But I want to do better than normal, I want to really live my life to the fullest.

I have made a good start to taking better care of myself. Eating more healthier (and more food) and establishing a regular sleep schedule have been my main focus for the past few weeks. Finally, I talked with counselors who made me realize that the depression I've been suffering from needs to be addressed directly. The medicine I'm trying now has made me a bit sluggish in the morning and I have felt muscle soreness I can't fully attribute to work at Beau Jo's, but it has been a good start and I will continue to see if it is the best fit for me.

Cooking good meals at home has been very rewarding, and I need to continue such a positive habit. I found a nice small cookbook that is perfect for me. Simple recipes made for someone with limited space in the kitchen.

I am much more vigilant about going to bed on time, and I think I am beginning to sleep through the night. I think I am getting better quality of sleep as well, which is helping me wake up with more energy for the day.

Another aspect of my life I am trying to focus on is my social life. I enjoy work at Beau Jo's and have made some good friends. I'd like to spend more time hanging out with people and less time watching videos in the computer lab by myself. I even think about Facebook occasionally, because I definitely need to establish a support system. Mary has moved with Shreaf to Denver, so I won't get to see them as much anymore, unfortunately. But by finding a group of friends I think I will be happier and enjoy life a lot more. And then hopefully I can address all my doubts about myself and my future.

My future and career are coming into focus better now that I'm addressing my depression, and I am starting to find enjoyment in music and my other hobbies that I had lost. It's been hard, but ultimately I feel like working through these struggles has made me a stronger person. It has forced me to take care of myself and I am optimistic that I can take control of my life.

What can I gain?

My last full day with Facebook - if I decide that I have truly gained something valuable by giving it up -  is coming to a close and I feel like it's the right decision. That could change and as I've told several friends, if I weigh the pros and cons later and find that it hasn't been worthwhile, I'll return to FB. Part of this decision was arbitrary. For me, I think it's more important as a symbol of the changes I want to make in my life. I have always appreciated Facebook as an extremely useful tool. I know that deactivating won't instantly make me a better person. The real steps I have to take have little to do with my FB account.

In all honesty, I have two very different sides. One part of me believes that a simple life is possibly the most rewarding. At the end of our lives, what do you think will be important to us? If there's an afterlife, we certainly can't take any of our stuff with us. I believe it was a professor of philosophy that told my class that every time he goes to a museum, he only picks out a handful of paintings or exhibits and spends a lot of time absorbing what they have to offer. We only have so much time and an infinite amount of things vying for our attention.

My other side loves luxury. I like lots of things and appreciate quality work. I understand that often the best things have specific purposes. It's that side that wants a fifth camera lens, a full library, several more movies from the Criterion Collection, and wishes that my chosen career path might eventually lead to a relaxing summer home in the country. You might argue that I'm part hedonist.

I go to bookstores instead of libraries because I love the way new books smell and feel. But I still think about how nice it would be to have hundreds of books on one small tablet. I consider myself a romantic. Yet I can be undeniably practical. I'm a complex human being and I am still figuring out who I am. I want to take positive steps towards becoming someone I will be happy being.

Originally, I wanted this post to be about my almost obsession with endings. I'm an extremely nostalgic and romantic person who feels sad reading about endings and last things. Last words, final stands in battle, goodbyes at graduations, moving out of a home. They are bittersweet. I don't dread those moments but try to savor them. But I will have to expound on those thoughts another time.

In the simplest terms, I am hoping to gain a new understanding of myself through giving up Facebook. Maybe this will be a step towards deciding the kind of person I want to be. Life isn't black and white and I doubt I will become a real Ascetic or Hedonist. But whatever I choose to be, I must overcome my apathy and strive for more than mediocrity.

Pride

I want to be proud of myself. Frankly, I'm not happy with who I am as a person, and I believe that I would be wrong to be satisfied with myself.

There are two different kinds of pride: negatively, being proud means arrogantly overvaluing your own self-worth; positively, being proud is feeling satisfaction from your own or others' actions, or rather, the effort that went into said actions. Achieving great things is the most rewarding when we know that we tried our best. We realize that by pushing ourselves, we have overcome obstacles, succeeded in meeting the goal we set out to accomplish, and ultimately have grown as a human being.

I have ceased to strive for greatness in my life. I became complacent and lazy. And naturally I did not achieve great things. I settled for less than I have to give, and soon I was mediocre and I knew it. I resented what I had become, but I didn't have the courage to truly change myself.

Afraid of failure, I didn't push myself. I lowered my expectations. I sought for joy in mostly all the wrong places. The friendships I have built are undoubtedly the most meaningful things in this part of my life. I am proud of who I am as a friend. But my relationships with others has very little to do with my relationship with myself. Man's actions towards other people have nothing to do with his purpose for being. And how could I be the best brother, son, uncle, and friend that I can possibly be if I am not the best me - the best Austin Stevens - that I can possibly be?

Fear led to apathy. It was a defense mechanism. If I didn't care, mediocrity couldn't hurt. But mediocrity is unfulfilling and boring and crippling. Inertia works both ways: it can help carry you forward through momentum, or it can make attempts at self-improvement a Sisyphean task. Apathy is the enemy of life. To live we must take ownership of all we do, and that necessitates Pride and Shame.

I know it will be hard to unlearn all the bad habits and overcome my apathy and laziness. I love making lists, but no 5 or 10 step plan is going to have much of an impact without internal strength. Making choices as to who you want to become is not a simple matter of writing them down after reflection.

For now, this is what I wish to make my motto: Always be doing something that you love. There is never a moment when you shouldn't be investing in yourself.

If I can live that idea out in my life, I am sure that I will be able to take pride in who I am again.

Dissatisfaction

I keep hoping that I have finally reached a turning point in my life and I will find the purpose which will drive me to make something of myself. I'm giving up Facebok. I thought about changing my email and getting rid of my YouTube account. Martha is gifting me a (practically) new computer and old iPhone. I've only been in Boulder, by myself, for less than a year. And I have only been working at my job for close to two months. This is clearly a big time of change for me.

I have struggled for years to ignite my life's passion again. I know the things that I love. My expectation of instant gratification and my short attention span certainly don't help me realize that true satisfaction comes from hard work. Thank God for the fun, inspiring times, but a great deal of any successful career is diligent practice of necessary techniques and concepts needed to excel. Practice can be an artform, but it's not real art. It's a means to an end. For me, playing scales is about as far from a creative act as writing out arithmetic on a blackboard.

However, my knowledge that any good thing requires work has not actually increased my work ethic. The result of attaining a worthy goal down the road rarely proves to be more attractive than all the fun things I could be doing instead. I think the power of all those distractions finds root in a constant appetite for entertainment. But in the end, entertainment is cheap, and like eating only junk food, it will lead to an unhealthy life if consumed excessively.

In most first world nations we face an ironic problem. The overabundance of choices (combined with a startlingly ruthless consumer culture) leaves us overwhelmed and things begin to lose meaning as we lose our perspective on the world. Today, so many things compete for our attention that we focus on how these products can improve our lives immediately. "This will save you time" or "there's an app for that." But things that require no effort have little value, regardless of utility. As the fox from The Little Prince says, "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." That's why handmade gifts generally hold more value than store-bought gifts.

I have placed the easy distractions of YouTube and Facebook at the center of my life. And so at last I experience something more strongly than ever before in my life: ennui. There have been times which I would describe as existential crises. I lose all desire to do anything; I feel as if life itself is futile and empty of real meaning. Looking at those times objectively, I think that for me they are precursors to times of growth. But now even the internet, the embodiment of entertainment, has lost its appeal. When I don't even want to watch YouTube videos, something is going on.

You clearly get what you put into life. And lately I have been coasting, not really trying to live actively or better myself. It was too much work and I settled for being comfortable. But just as I have become dissatisfied with eating pasta every other day, I have been longing for a more meaningful life for a long time. I know there is more to life than what I am experiencing.

Borrowing another idea from The Little Prince, it takes time and effort to tame something. But it is the things we care enough to tame that fills our lives with beauty. The stars are special for the little prince because he knew that somewhere was his flower. Work is not fun or appealing, but "I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” 

The end of the Facebook era

I decided to finally remove myself from Facebook and deactivate my account. My last day will be August 3, the same day that I joined FB 7 years ago. I'm not sure what exactly is compelling me to leave other than a general wish for a simple life. It has been a huge distraction but also a great blessing, and I know I will miss seeing what friends are up to and being inspired by their comments and posted links. Part of me thinks that I'm just isolating myself for no good reason, and that - though of course FB is no substitute for real relationships - I will abandon the last lifeline of many of my old friendships.

It's hard to explain my thought processes without appearing to totally contradict myself on several points. So let me say right at the beginning that I am aware that I am of two minds, and as much as the romantic in me is hamming it up, if I find that the decision I have come to is wrong for me, I will simply reactivate FB in the future. I am preparing as if these are my final weeks on FB, because it is an important decision and shouldn't be taken lightly. I want to give this part of my life an appropriate end.

Being who I am, though I have long thought about leaving the FB world, I never could because in my mind, the things I might gain weren't as important as what I would lose. I already have realized that while nothing is wrong with waxing nostalgic about old times, friends lose touch and drift apart. This is natural and good. Time spent dwelling on the past, or even worse, the 'what-ifs?' take you away from the present. I didn't ever talk with at over half my friends list (I had close to 700 friends at one time on FB) but I didn't want to unfriend them out of respect for our former friendships. I hoped that maybe one day things might continue just as they had been. But given enough time, both parties change into new people who are at different parts of their lives.

So I let people go. My newsfeed (I can actually remember when FB didn't have any feeds. I always regret not documenting all the evolutionary stages of FB) became much less cluttered. And I found out that, though it should come as no surprise, I cannot remember most of the people I unfriended. I had simply accepted what had already happened in real life.

I thought that with a much more manageable group of friends FB would become more meaningful. It would remain the easiest way to stay in touch with those friends I would actually take the time to communicate with. FB was (and is) all about sharing funny and serious stories, thoughts, and life events. And pictures really are worth a thousand words! I would show my support or amusement or admiration by liking statuses. I could read interesting articles friends would post to actually learn something about the world I lived in. I tried to be as snarky as I could be in every comment I wrote.

Not to say that all the little comments we leave each other on posts and pictures are insignificant, but I began to think that they weren't what the great friendships in my life had been based on. Ironically, being constantly 'in touch' makes it harder to sit down and communicate on a deeper level than bite sized remarks.

People make choices every day as to what they will do with their time and energy. If my friends want to talk with me, there are several other ways they can contact me: e-mail, text, skype, and even through this blog. I want to start writing letters again. But my final point for this post is simply the fact that we hear from people who choose to put effort into the relationship. When I deactivate, how many messages and wall posts will I miss out on? That's the real cost I have to consider. Though honestly, what I will likely miss the most is seeing pictures.

Actually, that's not quite true. The real cost is the entire group of friends I care enough about to want to see how their lives are going, but who I don't / can't e-mail, text, or skype with on a regular basis. When I wonder about them, I will regret deactivating.

Gedanken

I think that I've finally come to the end of my rope. Somehow I've managed just enough of a semblance of responsibility to have not destroyed myself with idleness. I think on some level that I needed to feel the danger of losing all that I've worked for, at least musically. For the majority of this summer so far I have hardly been able to play the violin. What I've let myself become is a mediocre player and uninspired person. I'm like an addict looking for his next kick, drowning in what is ultimately amusement and fluff. But you can't get the true, exhilarating joy of success without slow, dedicated work. There is no substitute for hard work.

I have doubted myself countless times in the past few years, wondering if I'm doing the right thing devoting my life to music when it seems that I never want to work at it. Maybe I'm not a true musician, and just meant to be a music lover. But when I get my act together and prepare and I perform well, I know that's what I want to do with my life. That's why I dislike concertos so much. They are good for learning advanced techniques, but I'm not a solo performer so why should I prepare pieces which I will never perform? I am so disappointed that my piano trio is not going to continue this year. I am very happy that Rachel was offerred a job, of course, but I will miss that chamber experience. Hopefully Robbie and I will find others and form a new ensemble.

A very real problem for me is that, however practical I would like myself to be, I am an impulsive person. If I don't feel like doing something, I will put it off. It's so difficult to put off immediant happiness in the attempt to secure future happiness. For whatever reason I do much better when work is it's own, defined space. I get ready, I clock in, I am in work mode. I work hard and I take pride in being the best employee that I can be. I clock out and feel accomplished. I don't have a systemized way to prepare and get into a work mode for practicing. I want to want to practice. I certainly feel guilty when I don't practice. But the closer I get to my violin, the weaker my drive to practice becomes. Until I practice for at least 15 minutes, I would rather be wasting time doing anything else. It's a psychological block that I can't explain and have struggled to deal with.

I know I suffer from first world problems. It's frustratingly hard to save up money for the future, and I'm already sick of worrying about buying a 6-pack or going out to eat. But I don't want to be in the same position I'm in in 5 or even 2 years. And that's with the addition of taking on my own health insurance and rent. I want to be a strong, independent, black woman. Wait, what? I've clearly been watching too much AttackingTucans (and Lucahjin).

But beyond work from a financial perspective, I think a main, underlying factor in my general unhappiness is the lack of purpose in my life. Of course, we should work to live, not vice versa. It's been too long since I've thought about religion and having God in my life. As I work to be a better person, I have to return to God in some way. I don't think I've ever explicitly denied the existence of God but He hasn't been in my life for some time. I was thinking that if asked, I might not associate myself with Christianity. I try to be a good person, of course, and my fundamental Christian upbringing is still present in how I think about things, when I take the time to think.

I don't want my religion to be a simple crutch because I don't have the inner strength to form my own purpose of being. I haven't returned to Christ because I think it's cheap to use God as a philosophical band-aid to messily wrap up anything troublesome that I don't understand. My relationship with God should form the core of my being. But that means grappling with my doubts head on. I could never wrap my head around Faith, and I never felt comfortable accepting the fact that Faith isn't something to be fully comprehended. I hope I have spent enough time in the desert wandering around aimlessly. It's time to find the promised land.

2013

I'm not exactly sure why I have neglected to write in so long. I am feeling confused and lost and unsure of what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. It was a real struggle preparing for my first Master's recital, and I had to push it back from February to March. It went very well and for the first time I felt like it was more of a performance than just a student recital. I've definitely made some great progress during my first year at Boulder, but my program is halfway through and I'm not where I'd like to be, nor do I feel ready to attempt to move to the professional arena.

Lina has been a wonderful teacher and has supported me so much. My sleep study didn't turn up anything, which surprised me, and I need to keep searching for ways to focus and have more energy. I should look into counseling right now, actually, though I'm not sure if there are counselors on campus over the summer. I have been so unmotivated and apathetic it's depressing.

I'm so glad that Rachel and Robbie and I are staying together as a trio next year. We think we will play Schubert's second piano trio in Eb. I wish people could hang out this summer and play some chamber music. I acquired a large number of quartet parts from Paul Miller, who is going to Cornell. I'm happy for him, but I will miss him. His class was really great and I hope we stay in touch.

My new job at Beau Jo's Pizzeria has been going well so far. I really enjoy working there and everyone is nice and it's a very relaxed atmosphere. I should pick up more hours if possible, but it looks like I'll only be scheduled for about 20-25 hours a week. I probably won't make as much money as I need to, but hopefully I should have some savings by fall. I think both my computer and phone are on their last legs, so I am planning on replacing them when they finally fall apart.

In the attempt to escape reality and practicing, this year I've been obsessed with a few things. Since China I bought another old manual focus lens for my camera, as well as an old SLR camera, an Olympus OM-10. This brings me up to a total of 4 lenses, and I am itching to buy one last lens to round out my gear. I would like to get the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 pancake lens. It's small enough that my camera would fit more comfortably in a jacket pocket. It would have higher image quality and Autofocus, and wide open could take indoor pictures. It'd also be nice as a general walking around lens and for landscapes. Unfortunately, there's no way I'll be able to shell out $350 in the near future. I still want to go to Austria / Germany after I graduate so that's where my focus is, financially.

I also got into the prepper mindset which sort of intersects with an interest in camping. I've always wanted to be self-sufficient, and it is just common sense to plan for possible emergencies. I personally don't think a major economic collapse in the US and Europe is likely, but it's not out of the question. While it's good to have some extra supplies, I can't think of anywhere I could go in case of a major disaster. So I haven't thought about prepping as much, but I hope my dad can come visit and we might go camping.

Most recently I have been watching videos on YouTube obsessively. Besides discovering Epic Rap Battles of History, I have watched 5 Let's Plays in the past two weeks. Majora's Mask, Super Mario Sunshine (Versus), Super Mario 64 (Versus), Paper Mario, and Shadow of the Colossus. I also played Paper Mario on my computer. The emulator for N64 is still glitchy at times. It was an awesome game, though. I think it would be fun to record my own LPs. My best games are for the N64, though. There are many excellent NES and Super Nintendo games I want to play. It has been incredibly difficult for me to practice, and yesterday was the first time I touched my violin in two weeks. I practiced more today, but not nearly enough, and I know I can't distract myself by starting any more games.

There is a lot on my mind and I hope to sort things out this summer, so I should return to blogging more regularly.