lowquality.net

It’s 3AM and I should be in bed, but the dull pang of insom­nia is on undu­lat­ing on my brain.

Because I have said it to at least three peo­ple in the last week, I will say it here: Hav­ing two sep­a­rate career tracks that don’t always seem to line up with one another (being a musi­cian and being an IT pro­fes­sional) is giv­ing me this kind of weird Spider-Man/Peter Parker com­plex. The prob­lem of course is that I can’t fig­ure out which path is more akin to swing­ing from roof to roof and pop­ping Mys­te­rio and Scor­pion in their dome­pieces. I sup­pose most peo­ple would think being a musi­cian is more like being a super hero than fix­ing com­put­ers and con­fig­ur­ing routers, but musi­cians rarely “save the day” the way an IT guy might. I dunno, this line of con­ver­sa­tion could is fun, but it is very nerdy, and not at all lead­ing to the point that I am try­ing to make.

My point is that Peter Parker has oblig­a­tions that Spider-Man does not.. and vice versa. If they were two per­son­al­i­ties were actu­ally dif­fer­ent peo­ple they would have noth­ing in com­mon with one another and would no doubt con­tinue their lives bliss­fully unaware of one another’s actions. This is, of course, not the case. Peter Parker and Spider-Man ARE the same per­son, share dou­ble the con­cerns and anx­i­eties of a nor­mal per­son and have to walk a very, very fine thread between the two iden­ti­ties. This is how I feel about my life as a musi­cian / music teacher and my neces­si­tous career path as a stu­dent in the IT field. It seems totally impos­si­ble to make time for all of the things I want to be work­ing on (study­ing for cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and prac­tic­ing chord forms can not be per­formed simul­ta­ne­ously, by the way). The worst part is often feel­ing very much like I am half-assing both of these respon­si­bil­i­ties. It sucks. If by some slim twist of fate I am ever able to nego­ti­ate my time as IT guy and music guy, I won­der how much time will be left for me just to be me.

The orig­i­nal goal of going to ECPI, and get­ting seri­ous about IT, was so that I could afford to pay my stu­dent loans and be a musi­cian at the same time. Also the thought of afford­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of mov­ing out of the area was appeal­ing. Admit­tedly, I was using the few peo­ple I already knew in the field as a model for this day­dream, know­ing how flex­i­ble their sched­ules often were and so on. I know now that this flex­i­bil­ity isn’t always the case and it might not com­pletely work out the way that I want it to, but even work­ing an 8 to 5 and play­ing music isn’t the end of the world.

I don’t know how this all will pan out, which is fine, I’m not sup­posed to know. Now that I am in the mid­dle of the fray I just want to learn what I can and then move on. I am thank­ful for the on-campus job with MIS because I feel like I have learned more in the realm of PC hard­ware than I would have learned in my par­tic­u­lar major’s cur­ricu­lum. Iron­i­cally enough, tak­ing the job with the Governor’s School again this year has forced me to com­pro­mise some of my sched­ule with MIS so that I can teach a small band ensem­ble. Sure, the money is a lit­tle bet­ter but its wasn’t really a deci­sion I wanted to make, I just had to make room for it. The strug­gle con­tin­ues. So, yeah, I don’t know what’s going to hap­pen and I am fine with just being in “learn mode” right now. But keep­ing all of my inter­ests (and they all are equally impor­tant) above the water line is really, really dif­fi­cult right now.

my Spi­der Sense is tin­gling.. I’m tired and not mak­ing sense anymore.

Good­night.