Wednesday, November 18, 2020

this made my heart soar

whoa. i haven't blogged for ages, return, and find this blogging-dashboard's layout looking drastically different. the code for some parts of my blog no longer work now too, so i'll fix that...after this.

but first! the reason i'm here in the first place: 

i finally have something that motivates me enough to blog about. which has been difficult for the past...coming-to-six years, because my life's circumstances took a turn for the worst (and have remained more or less the same since then).

what's made my heart soar? an old dream/ ambition of mine, the possibilities of which were projected onto someone else's realisation (of that same dream). i mean, it's not like it i am (yet) anywhere close to having that dream realised. but — for some reason, learning about it (what i'm about to blog about, i mean) gave me a reason to smile, let alone (day)dream again about my uh, dream/ lifelong aspiration.

it all started when i was listening (again) to owl city's 'beautiful times' at daybreak after yet another sleepless night last month (22 oct, to be exact). that song is dear to me because i found it on my old g+ account, back when i lost my memory and was re-discovering who i used to be in the first place (dw, my memory's mostly all intact now, and i am no longer a stranger to myself, thank god).

(tl;dr — am now more or less healed from all injuries except the one to the head/ brain, all [injuries] of which occurred when i nearly died during a hit-and-run almost exactly six years ago. i still kinda half-the-time wish i did. but i have to say, the past few years of my survival and ongoing recovery have been crash courses on life lessons that most humans seem to take either decades or never to master, from what i've observed of humans near and far.)

so back to the song. i usually hardly look at the visuals, because the lyrics mean more to me in a personal way. especially the part that pre-accdt me had written on my g+ profile:
"this fight of my life is so hard,
so hard, so hard;
but i'm gonna survive,
oh, oh, these are beautiful times..."

and i've often listened to that song at daybreak because:
(i) of its apposite lyrics of "the sun's starting to rise..."
(ii) it'd be a night i wouldn'tve been able to sleep /
was in need of comforting lyrics to put my mind at ease

but this night, i...guess something made me feel like looking at the music vid itself. and...it made me curious as to what keyboard adam young (the singer/ composer) was playing in the vid. searching for images online made me end up chancing upon an image of a floor plan, which was linked to an article of adam's current home-and-studio when i clicked through. 

and that was what made my heart start soaring (i.e. looking at the beautiful studio and its floor plans). i mean, it's not like i wasn't already vaguely aware that he was using a specific go-to studio. because i remember lazily browsing through his official own-name site a couple years ago* and sorta skimming through the details.

*archived here 'coz domain's since expired, and (predictably) someone else snapped it up for use on their own business ventures

but i didn't know it was also where he lives (as implied on his current own-name site). i haven't actually kept up to speed^ with news on this artiste, so even though this is all outdated info, i only started reading up about it that daybreak-turned-to-morning.

^i didn't even know what, or who a hoot owl was until last night, when i was digging up a bit more info to better inform me for the writing of this blog post

as for why i wouldn't qualify as a hoot owl, even more so post-accdt, it'd mainly be because i've totally gone off all this fan-idolising mirage that the media of this day and age keep notification-pushing us with (it's why i'm hardly on social media nowadays, at least not at a personal level). there's just something about...struggling to make it through even living within a state of mental healthiness that —idk, i guess it could be the years of forced lockdown i've had to live with post-accdt, even up till this night— makes inconsequential things like worshipping anybody or anything other than God so starkly...idolatrous as to be (habit-)stopped.

an aside: about the worldwide lockdown and social distancing this year: when it first started, i privately scoffed at the...people-i-haven't-heard-from-in-ages coming out of the woodwork to reach me out of the blue. because hello, i've been stuck in hell on earth under not-my-choice lockdown for years since my accdt and i wasn't even acknowledged, let alone thought about enough to be contacted at the time...which, fresh after the accdt, had initially caused me to regress to my old clingy/ 'i need humans' phase.

but being in that shithole (of getting physically and digitally cut off from people i used to turn to) after so many years has certainly decreased my reliance on humans and (finally, after "decades in the drain") increased my reliance on the One i'll live with (forevermore, in the first place).

so yeah, it's (read: post-accdt years) been an education. and i am still learning. as in, i am still prone to regressing, especially when shit keeps hitting the fan in my current living situation, which is already a stressor all by itself. but, apart from the spurts of my insanity (of emotions acting up and exploding), i am seeing a steady, slow yet gradual ascent of...being more reliant on jesus (and in turn, "self-reliant" when my self is in Him) instead of on (not their fault 'coz we're all imperfect) humans.

so back to pictures of the studio and floor plans. my post-accdt brain gets more easily triggered by visual images than it used to. 

tbh, all my senses are more easily triggered these days...which makes living in a noisy ('coz underage motorcyclists love to give me hell by revving up modified-to-be-noisier engines and cruising around my familial hse even more after i've yelled at them for mercy in what is s'posed to be a national yet not-enforced as usual lockdown) 'kampung' [/ 'village' in malay] area and a room with an echoey high ceiling (that magnifies all outside sounds and causes sunlight to flood into my room like i'm an ant under a magnifying glass) something like living hell* for me.

*i haven't even gotten into other factors yet, and i won't (at least, not in this post)

this is why looking at actual photos of sky harbor studios (and its floor plan) made me start...i guess, envisioning what it would be like to have such a dream home like that. i mean, my mind hasn't meandered on such thoughts since (iirc) i last saw the centrefold of john mayer's continuum cd's liner notes when i bought it years ago.

but it's (my desire to make music for a living) always, always been in the back of my mind...ever since i was ten going on eleven. from then all through college-and-uni, my mother has remained strictly against this notion. and so, i had to find (with much prayer and petitioning) compromises for the courses i've taken and the in-between paths i've...had no other choices but to make. 

the dream's still not dead (as long as i ain't) though, and...especially after surviving yet another almost-died incident. long story, but i've nearly died several times prior to that...either through road rages or nearly kms, though most people (and even that not-worth-the-price-of-twice-my-currency-back-then psychiatrist in sg) including my parents find the latter hard to believe because apparently, i've always been told that i look so happy by default. 

and that (i.e. my early post-accdt years as i started to regain my memory, even for basic things like how to use the internet) was when i started looking into how so many stand-up/ show host comedians suffer from depression. and how i myself now started to understand why, after personally having often fallen back into the unofficial role of 'the jesster' for decades (during appropriate moments...i can't stand it when people are facetious because they want to avoid facing up to dark and serious times).

so again, back to the main topic of this post (i'm about to close). my favourite photo has got to be the topmost one from this interview article because...it reminds me a lot of when i was first introduced to similar gear in college. and the sight of a macbook pro and a mac...also remind me of my pre-accdt past, when i had either the income or the job (depending on the point of time in my life) to be able to afford non-windows computers.

but most of all, looking at that photo was like projecting myself onto adam and imagining that:
-i had my own in-built home studio too,
-my own personal space away from people with the freedom to make as much noise as i wanted without neighbours ratting me out (of unofficial-living-alone arrangements) for talking to myself again, and
-was free to do what i've always been wanting to really do in life (apart from being a novelist, that is).

i really think (and have personally found) that, when i have a room to myself with at least a piano/ some kind of (non-computer) keyboard around to tinker/ make up impromptu songs with (in informal worship to God), i really wouldn't care about needing the company of selective humans as much nor care about how to avoid other selective humans as much as i can.

of course, this doesn't need a home recording studio for that — but i do love tinkering around sound engineering too. not that i've ever been a pro/ know much of the jargon, but (as with most things in life) i tend to know things by instinct even though i may not know the official term or name for it.

one last thing to mention is that...last night, i ended up spending almost four hours (from around midnight to nearly 5am, not counting the snacking and loo breaks in between) just going through adam's owl city IG. i haven't been on that site for years. (i stopped some time post-accdt after it became clear to me that i wasn't going to be free from hell on earth any time soon, and when relatives/ people-i-no-longer-speak-to started spying on me there.)

and although i did 'follow' that account for some time post-accdt (until i started recently clearing up my already-sparse-'coz-it's-just-an-archive-for-now 'follow/ followed' list), i hadn't done so at the time when his captions and videos were really witty (which was somewhere in the middle, at least atm — the beginning and the end look similar to me, captions- and frequency-wise).

so it was all new to me...and it definitely provided me some comic relief (the wit in there, i mean) as night turned to almost-day last night. which...is always something i'm grateful for, especially during this...prolonged (and still uncertain as to duration of) 'night season' of my life.

and with that, i'll end this post with that favourite photo of mine (re:what i wrote) below.

p.s. considering how late it is here and how i prefer taking communion before sunlight fucks up the comforting, easier-on-my-more-photosensitive-than-before-eyes darkness, i'll fix the not-working html parts of this blog's design at another time.