lowquality.net

So today my 667mHz Power­book Tita­nium finally shit the bed. It’s been used and abused by me for about 3 or 4 years, and even though it has sus­tained a few spills and thrills it has man­aged to hold itself together (mostly). Today I was attempt­ing to rip the new Asobi Seksu CD (which is great, by the way) and my sys­tem froze and then when I forced a restart it never came back up– just a des­o­late gray screen fol­lowed by a flash­ing ques­tion mark. Disk Util­ity revealed some kind of “invalid B-tree Node Size” cor­rup­tion error, which amounts to my hard disk being unmount­able. With a lit­tle research I dis­cov­ered that this error can be repaired using one of the many third-party disk util­i­ties out there for Mac OS X, but I really don’t have the 80 bucks for Disk War­rior at the moment. So my power­book is going to sit in the closet for a lit­tle while, at least until I remem­ber that there is some­thing impor­tant on it that I need to retrieve, then I will fork over the money for Disk War­rior. This issue, com­bined with the bro­ken screen and non-charging bat­tery have made my TiBook more of a invalid grand­par­ent than a per­sonal computer.

I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a new Mac­book with my credit card today. I’m seri­ous. The thought actu­ally crossed my mind. Of course, my bet­ter judge­ment got a hold of me and I didn’t do it. If I am to throw 2,000 bucks on a credit card it’s going to be to pur­chase a bass.

Speak­ing of which, I have been seri­ously neglect­ing the bass lately. I picked it up today for a few hours and it felt like I hadn’t been play­ing. Never a good feel­ing. I have been seri­ously con­cerned that by going to ECPI and divert­ing my focus away from music, that I will even­tu­ally aban­don music com­pletely. The fear may prove to be a kind of become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the thought of music being crowded out of my life has bummed me out so much that I haven’t really been in the mood to do much musi­cally. Basi­cally, I haven’t touched my bass in about a week.

I have also decided to quit the Jay Rakes Band so that I can have more time in my sched­ule to do school and work a day job this sum­mer (I will talk more about that on a later date). Know­ing that I am con­sciously sac­ri­fic­ing my time spent play­ing music just so that I can (hope­fully) have a job I am not so excited about is scary and depress­ing. This is the stuff week­end war­rior cover band musi­cians are made of. The alter­na­tive, how­ever, is play­ing awe­some music and fight­ing off the col­lec­tion agen­cies that come pound­ing on my door down so that they can retrieve my missed stu­dent loan payments.

I owe a con­sid­er­able amount of money for the excep­tional edu­ca­tion I received at Berklee Col­lege of Music, where not only did I obtain an incred­i­ble musi­cal foun­da­tion, but also made the best friends of my life. So, while I don’t feel as though my tuition was wasted, I am over­whelmed with an after­math of debt. The funny thing is that the only way I can get make a decent enough income to afford my Berklee edu­ca­tion is to get a job (and another edu­ca­tion) in a field that barely allows me the time to play music.

So I am going to chalf uo my TiBook’s implo­sion as a bless­ing in dis­guise. Hope­fully I can spend some more time with the bass and less time dick­ing around on the inter­net. I still have a second-hand Dell that I use for Windows-centric school stuff, and it works well enough for any­thing I need to do (I’m using it right now).

Oh well, I’m going to bed.