I'm watching a Train concert right now - The Bulletproof Picasso Tour that's streaming live from George, WA on Yahoo! Pat and co. are performing one of their very first first hit songs "Drops of Jupiter" and that brought back some old memories. I went back and found my old blog and I simply had to pen something today.
Pat, what a brilliant musician. I've had the fortune of attending one of his concerts a couple of years back. Originally hailing from cloudy San Francisco, he and his band have had their own share of failures and successes, and I'm glad they're doing so well. It's also nice that Train always perform a fair number of songs from their older albums. It's like they want to remember and remind fans of the place they started out from. Most other artists simply perform most of their tracks from the album they are promoting.
The last entry was in 2012 after I graduated from UCLA. I'm now somewhere in California working at some place that isn't extremely large and still related to my field of interest which is nice. I also work on or very close to hardware. I've always enjoyed writing a good program to make LEDs blink, or motors move or speakers make music. Work had been good and the organization (starts with A and ends with another A) has been simply fantastic. The team I was the 4th member of has now grown to about 10 so I'm apparently a 'senior' member of the team now! Woah! Feels mature and all grown up.
As I read the names on the previous post, I realize that I've lost contact with most of them, as expected. Some of them are simply what I like to call 'friends on hold'. People who I don't communicate often with, but I know they'll be only an email or a phone call away when I need to talk to them. Some enriched my experience at school and were instrumental in helping shape my thoughts and beliefs whilst I was studying in Los Angeles. Most I will never end of communicating with unless our paths cross again in some meaningful way.
Being a lazy person with respect to keeping in touch with people, quitting all social media doesn't help matters. Facebook feels like this shallow platform for advertising that you are connected and in touch with people hundreds or thousands of miles away by showcasing the best of yourself, leaving out the boring parts and liking and commenting on other people's photographs and status updates. So superficial! Walls littered with generic birthday wishes every year but not enough IRL (in real life) communication or contact via something more personal such as an email or a phone call. Sad. I do admit it does have its own advantages. You do get to keep up to date with major milestones in the lives of your friends and relatives and so on.
However, I've made a few new friends, most by transitive association, and have gotten back in touch with some older 'friends on hold' from my BITS days, now that more and more BITSians are moving to the US to study and work.
Since the more usual aspects of my life seem to be fairly well off - family's doing good, job's great, living situation is perfect, I have some more personal goals to take care of now. Onwards to the next challenge in the saga called life!
Hoping that it's not as difficult as finding New Earth for the civilian survivors and crew of Galactica. What a great sci-fi political drama that was!
