A surreal moment from my trip to Sundance.

On one night, An unfortunate confluence of ride and lodging accommodations with bad timing forced me to traverse on foot a full 1.5 miles through the snow-entombed massif of Park City. The "dancing sun" was noticeably absent,  the snow-reflected moonlight instead providing bright but pale illumination.
Working my way back to the hotel where my ride awaited, I walked along a shockingly well-plowed bike path. The locals were clearly used to the heavy snowfall, even if it was record-breaking this year. The path often cut into the giant heaps of snow as well as the earth itself. Almost all of the path I took was flanked by 30-foot walls of concrete, stone, or snow. Sometimes I passed through tunnels riddled with the most politely artistic graffiti ever.
Rounding one particular bend, the crashes and roars of a machine began to enter earshot. A local would have identified the sound immediately, but it was only clear to me what it was once it entered my view: an excavator, digging out a workplace parking lot. 
Lit by the white floodlights of the nearby building, the hulking machine toiled away as I passed far closer than any real safety laws would allow, its driver barely a shadow in the dark. With the added height of the ledge it stood upon, it towered over me, far more than any other construction machine I've seen in Ohio. In the cold, dark world where this beast was doing what it was made for, ignoring my tiny existence, I may as well have been passing by a grazing woolly mammoth. I found myself childishly imagining what it'd be like to be an explorer on a distant planet or foreign wilderness, to pass by lumbering megafauna that, if they didn't want to eat you, could still crush you if they felt like it.

Elastic TIme

Laura Vanderkam gave a TED Talk a couple months ago on how to gain control of your free time, a discussion of time and priorities. 
(side note - TED talks "titles" on Youtube are all lowercased, save the first word, leading me to believe that these are unofficial names of the talks.)

Laura starts out trying to dispel a few myths; the kind of things that people assume about time management speakers like herself, and the kind of click-baity time management tips that pervade the internet.
But she quickly gets to the heart of what time management really is. It's not shaving bits and pieces of time off of all your tasks, its doing things that you've set a priority to do.

Everyone has to deal with emergency situations occasionally, like a water heater blowing up in your basement, for example. Your current schedule doesn't accommodate for it, so you have to reshuffle your priorities to put the flooded basement on top, you are forced to accommodate it.

It's then an interesting challenge to tackle the things that you want/need to do for your life and career with the same kind of urgency as that water heater.

Your time then, is a choice. When you say that you don't have time for something, you're really saying that its not a priority. Because you will always make time for your priorities, whether the forces at work come from within or without. Time is Elastic.

Laura presents a strategy to time management based on almost tricking yourself into urgency, accomplished through a type of forward-thinking. She suggests to do a yearly review on yourself, a year in advance or plan out your week the Friday before, the point where you are the most relaxed.

Really, my biggest takeaway was something Laura said almost in passing.

"Small moments have great power."

In my personal experience, Laura's strategies are difficult to apply, since I don't know what my primary job will be in a year and currently, my schedule changes almost day-by-day according to the needs of my work. And my part-time hotel job is on the weekends, Fridays evenings are far from my most-relaxed times. I feel like if I ever get a standard 40-hour work week, I'll be legendary at productivity.

But I find that my biggest time-waster is just the small moments, the times when I sit and watch short Youtube videos, or browse Facebook for a few minutes, which start to pile up over time. The bite-sized portions of the media I consume in these moments make them feel like you aren't eating up that much time, ("eh...just one more is fine...") and it's this mindset that causes me to watch Youtube for hours on end.
I think I need to learn to keep these bite-sized moments from piling up. I think what I'll do is never allow myself to watch more than two videos, or I'll set a browser timer. Or even just do something else. I've called myself a binger on both my work and play, and like a person with an eating disorder, I think I have to ration my information diet. 

Website updated!

Ok, I've finally made a website I'm actually happy with.

When I made the original site, I didn't know what exactly I wanted my career to be, so naturally the website was both vague and spread out. Now it's totally focused on audio production for film and music, and its also setup so I can integrate music composition once my reel for that is up-to-snuff.

I like the colors better anyway.

The death of a genius is the death of evolution

A student of Dmitri Shostakovich once described being in the presence of his teacher was like riding a comet past Jupiter, hoping that its might would not swallow you whole. 

Its a Wonderful Life, taught us that every human life has a far reaching impact on countless others. The life of an artist, could affect orders of magnitude more. The life of a genius can affect so many, so profoundly, that many would not be able to remotely fathom what their impact could entail.

Often, the quirks of a genius are well-known. The little things that they do, because it's just how they do things. No one ever questions it, they just shrug it off, not because that the way they do it is the best way, but you don't question the methods of experts.

Do people really fear what they don't understand? 

Why do the masses clamor for radical change during every election season? 

SXSW: Reflection

I saw and learned a lot of things.

In career focus, perhaps the most valuable things that happened were my mentor sessions. Of particular note was my discussion with Jay Skinner, the head of a music library called Sound Arsenal Music. We talked about my desire to work in the scoring business, and I took a bunch of notes.
Most of the panels I went to also centered around my focus of writing music. I learned that sync licensing is one of the most lucrative things in the entire music business. I learned that indie video game developers are trying to get good music for their games. I learned the importance of audio in immersion of games and movies.
I decided that my primary focus after getting back, which was cemented when I talked with Jay, was to make my "reel," the body of work to represent a composer. Basically a listenable portfolio.
Despite all the talk about following up on contacts, and I suppose I made a few, without this reel, trying to make something of those contacts seems pointless to me.

Speaking of contacts, I often found it difficult to talk to people. Maybe it was subconscious; I knew that everyone I talked to had far more experience than me. But maybe it was a lack of communication skills. I fancy myself a good talker, I could manage during the mentor sessions and could hold the occasional conversation, but during this trip, it was getting the conversations started that I found the most difficult. 
The most salient example would be when I was at the grammy association party. I managed to talk to a whole 3 people, 2 of which I relied on Sarah and Dwight to talk with. I was referencing what I could remember from that networking article that Eric posted a while ago, but nothing seemed to be helping. My presence at the party felt similar to stage fright.

Thankfully though, I still have one more SXSW trip left, and I have 2 main goals to achieve for myself before then. I need to develop a reel, and I need to polish my networking skills.