Welcome back to the final installment of Music of my Life, a series of blog posts that started as an exercise of “what songs do I love” and quickly spiraled out of control into something that has occupied a ton of my time and sent me down a ton of nostalgia rabbit holes. If you missed any of the previous posts, check out Part 1 and Part 2!

For this final installment, we’re talking about the 10 year stretch that has happened since I graduated from college, ages 25 to 35.

Welcome back to Music of my Life, a series of blog posts that started as an exercise of “what songs do I love” and quickly spiraled out of control into something that has occupied a ton of my time and sent me down a ton of nostalgia rabbit holes. If you missed Part 1, check it out!

Last time, I talked about music that imprinted on me from ages 12 to 20. This time, we’re talking about 20 to 25.

I was talking with a group of friends in our Discord this past weekend, and a great prompt came up. “Share 3 songs that you feel like summarize your musical preferences/your journey through discovering new styles of music.”

Y’all realize how hard it is to narrow that prompt down to just three songs? Cripes.

Anyway, I fulfilled the prompt, but a lot of us were talking about our honorable mentions. This led me down a rabbit hole of figuring out what were my personal defining songs from my life, and now… well, it turned into 3 blog posts.

Man. A lot has happened.

So I really wanted to do a theme this year. Thought it’d be a nice thing to do instead of “goals” or “resolutions” or anything like that. However! Life is gonna get a little complicated with a newborn arriving in February, and I knew that was going to throw everything into whack.

With that said, my theme is: Year of the Garden.

I love writing.

Technically, I guess you could say that I love words. I’ve been an avid reader since I can remember, and I found that I really enjoyed writing as I got into jr. high. I’ve always had an extremely vivid imagination, and it was fairly easy for me to manifest those crazy daydreams into decent stories.

When I woke up this morning, I was following 733 Twitter accounts. As of right now, I’m following 435. 298 just got the boot.

I’m not sharing this to brag, or to to make you feel bad. I’m sharing this in case it helps you out.

<Insert the 30 Rock “What a year, huh?” “Lemon, it’s June” graphic here, because right now, generating that meme is just too much effort>

2020 is. It doesn’t rule. It DEFINITELY sucks. But here at the end of June, I’m just trying to make do with what I’ve got. I think that’s all any of us can do at this point.

There’s really no rhyme or reason to this post, at least not yet. That might change as I go, but for now, this is just going to be a nice little “life update”.

I KNEW that doing the smaller goals in 2020 would pay off in spades.

My entire goal for this year was to set small, achievable goals every quarter. Then, if I hit a goal, I could set a new one for the remaining time, or if I missed a goal in a quarter, I could analyze why and reevaluate if I should continue to aim to achieve it or replace it with something else.

To that end, I said that one of my “Get Healthy” goals was to lose 6 lbs in the first quarter of 2020.

I did it in 2 weeks.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on my 2019 goals, it’s pretty apparent that I whiffed on juuuuust about all of them.

If you read my recent post about patience, you’ll know that I intend to be better about that by breaking them down into much smaller, more easily achievable chunks.