Michael, muttering

2024: Precipice

It's been a challenging year, both in terms of toughness and painfulness. In a way, the start of it has blended with the end of the last one, considering that most of the things I was looking forward to were already in motion, so all I had to do was keep steady and not die - it turns out there's so much that goes into fighting for your life, no matter how fickle it all is.

A friend once commented that I rarely complain about work. I didn't try to talk it off in my usual fashion, especially because my manager at work has mentioned something similar. Instead, I took it as one of the many added benefits of friendship—the part where you get to examine yourself through the lens of others.

Around the time I was finishing my exams at uni, JC called and mentioned how fast time flies once you're out of school. It was less advice and more of a reality check, but I wish someone had mentioned it to me sooner.

Leaving school was a big deal for me, and there's a lot of anxiety that comes with it, considering that it is the end of a phase and the start of another. You see, I have been working alongside school since my first year of uni, and the way I handled that was to treat it as weights on a fulcrum where I'm constantly shifting the weights to maintain the balance. Leaving school felt like the counterweight on the school side was thrown off. I still haven't figured out how to restore the balance. On the plus side, all that pressure turned me into a yapper, which made me grateful that I was surrounded by friends who listened.

I found out I do enjoy working, partly because of the nature of my job and partly because of the kind of people I work with. It's interesting to feel this way about work despite having many more responsibilities. Not to wax philosophical, but there's a pleasure in being able to see how your work is being used and see the impact of your mistakes, and I get to see more of that across the board now. V mentioned how important it is to be proud of the work you put out. I think it's an excellent framework for thinking about the kind of work I want to do going forward.

I don't know if it's adulthood yet, but somehow, I lost part of my risk appetite this year. I went roaming some south-western states with friends. The trip involved rock climbing and it was funny being the person advocating for us to stop. The trip itself was one of the better parts of the year, though, and seeing all those places reassured me that there was magic and beauty in all of the rogbodiyan that is Nigeria.

With school out of the way (for now), I'm rediscovering how much I also enjoy learning—about people and things. I am an awfully slow learner, so my learning is primarily driven by the process and not the results, and I'm grateful that I do enjoy these processes.

  • I went back to learning the piano again, thanks to a book I got gifted by a friend, and I'll hold your hands when I tell you this: it's one of the hardest things I've done. There's a lot of trouble—hand independence, identifying notes on a sheet, and also inconsistency—but the good thing about learning is that progress inspires the process, hence, we pin.
  • I also set up a home lab—a simple setup comprising a Beelink mini PC and three Raspberry Pis. I keep fiddling with the things I run on it. There's a private VPN, a Jellyfin instance for video streaming, and some home network monitoring. I've also offloaded some development infrastructure (local databases, Redis), etc. I should write a separate post on what's in there, but I'm mostly just happy that I could afford one and play around with it.
  • I wrote a fiction story, and it spurred a new-found respect for people who do this in any capacity. It also helped me to be more aware of the things I enjoy in other writings.

Between surviving my final year and throwing myself at work, I realized I couldn't run as much as I wanted to. I had run a half-marathon earlier in the year and ran alongside a fun community for a while. Still, everything else kept demanding more time, no matter how much I gave. I'll count it as a worthy tradeoff if I can complete my marathon training in a month, or it'll be one more disappointment to live with. Similarly, I ended up not reading as much as I hoped to. But at least reading can be done in the middle of the madness. For example, I read Octavia Butler's Kindred while sitting on the floor, packed with 700 students in a 500-capacity lecture room. I like that books are an escape in that way.

Overall, it felt like the year left me hanging on an edge, taunting me to leap or hold on, and I'm mostly just wiggling my legs while I try to figure out what comes next.

Recommendations

  • CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: This book provides practical implications of basic ideas like surrender (to God's will), humility, and sex. It also makes a case for why even the laity needs to understand Christian theology.
  • Tomorrow Died Yesterday: A crushingly sad book made sadder because it is the lived reality of people in Nigeria.
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage: This was the year I discovered Murakami (thanks to his Novelist as a Vocation book), and this book made me a bigger fan. The storywriting was immaculate, but I also saw glimpses of myself in some of Tsukuru's thoughts about himself.
    • Bonus points if you read this while listening to Ludovico Einaudi's piano album.
  • The Bear: Easily one of the best shows I've watched. Each episode was chaotic in a way that kept me glued, plus it also made the idea of going to a culinary school less compelling for me.