Tag: Life

Goal Tracking: April Edition

At the beginning of the year I published a post outlining what some of my goals for the year were. In the spirit of being transparent, here is the progress I made on them over the course of April –

  1. 0 hours of volunteering. I’m disappointed in myself about this since it seemed like I’d finally gained some momentum by volunteering last month. Oh well.
  2. Zilch shyness.
  3. 1 book read – Me Before You. I think this was a departure from most books I’ve read in the past, but I did enjoy it.
  4. 0 research papers. I’ll try to read 4 over May to make up.
  5. 6 blog posts.
  6. I’m quite pleased that I finally managed to do one muscle up this month. My next goal is to be able to do two muscle ups, since after the one I wasn’t able to do any more over the course of April haha.

Coachella

I spent the past weekend at Coachella Weekend 1. I don’t think words can describe how sublime the experience was.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, I love music. Despite that I was reluctant to attend Coachella because I was not too happy about camping. I’ll be honest – I love sleeping on a real bed and using a real bathroom and shower.

However, seeing the incredible lineup and hearing nothing but good things from my friends (who went last year) I started leaning more towards going than not. All it took was a little more cajoling from my friends for me to decide to step outside my comfort zone and join them for Coachella 2015 Weekend 1. I’m so happy that I made that decision.

Each performance that I went to was phenomenal. I got to see so many bands that I like, and also discovered some great new music.  The quality of music at Coachella surpassed all my expectations.

The AC/DC performance was by far my favorite one of the entire festival. Watching their performance was almost an emotional experience since I grew up listening to their music. They were also one of the bands that inspired me to learn how to play the guitar.

I even enjoyed camping at Coachella! I’ve been told that this wasn’t “real camping” but it was still quite a lot of fun (though I did appreciate my apartment a lot more once I got back). It did shed some of my initial “fears” of camping which I’m quite happy about.

All in all, Coachella was stellar. I can’t wait to go back next year.

Log

On March 22nd I had the brilliant (but not really) idea of creating a personal diary to write down my thoughts in every night. More accurately I created the modern equivalent of a personal diary – an Octopress blog running locally that is stored on Dropbox (though now I’m wondering why I didn’t just create a private repository on GitHub for this).

I don’t remember the exact reason why I decided to do this. And no, my life is (unfortunately?) not that exciting that I need to write down everything that happens to me each day. But writing in it has helped me log the smaller, more subtle things happening in my life. It could be something someone said, or something I noticed, or something I did. I think that something happens to you each day that is worth remembering, but it is simply not possible to remember these things as time goes by. My diary is an easy way for me to capture these thoughts and moments.

There have been times in my life where I’ve asked myself “Hm, I wonder why I did that?”. Hopefully my diary will be able to answer these questions.

The other day I was on the Caltrain and had finished reading the book I had with me and decided to read some of my diary entries from the past week. It was amazing how much I’d forgotten, and reading what I had written was a surprisingly enlightening experience.

Another plus – it forces me to write each day which I hope improves my writing skills in the long run.

I’m really glad that I started this.