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 I saw a post on Tumblr that convinced me to try this thing out. It looks fun! I'm not really sure if I'm supposed to write about a certain thing or not but for now I'll just write about my life. Here's to hoping that I don't get so swamped with college in a couple weeks that I totally forget about this thing.

I think I did two things today that are worth taking note of:

The Revisit

I spent last night in my hometown at my mom's house after we had a family gathering at her place. I woke up before anyone and decided I already didn't want to be back here. Everything about that part of the state reminds me of my high school years, which were pretty cruel to me. In the healing process from those years and everything after, I've learned that one of the best ways to make progress is to know when to leave. Forcing yourself to stay somewhere that your body refuses to think is safe is like staying in a burning room, thinking that the fire will just get put out by some miracle before it engulfs you. The only way to ease something like that is by taking the supply out of the equation -you- and fighting it from a safe distance away. So I decided to pack up the record player and the parts of my collection I still wanted and go home.

I only mention the record player because I've been meaning to come grab it since I moved out on the first day of September. As I was sitting there today sifting through a record collection I blew every penny on before college, I decided I was gonna start collecting again on a smaller scale. There's two record stores in the city just 15 minutes away from my mom's house, so I decided to make a few stops on the way home. Maybe this could put some of the flames out?

The first record store I tried to hit, I didn't even go inside. I parked on one of many horrible city hills but before I got out of my car I decided to go search their catalog online, just to see if there would be a single thing I was interested in before I went in. (I hate going into a small business and walking out empty-handed! It feels like I've somehow robbed them.) However, I got slapped in the face with the business making AI posters to advertise themselves. I tend to forget how many people actually use generative AI until I go outside. I'm proud to say I've never opened ChatGPT or Sora or whatever else there is now. Yes, I have a superiority complex about it. The only time I used it was in 2024 to start the outline of my resume, and I still feel guilty about that. 

The point is, the thought of willingly letting a bot ruin your brain scares the shit out of me and seeing anyone do it really sucks the light out of my eyes for a minute. I was just gonna give up and make the drive home but then I remembered the second record store I used to hit.

There's this weird little spot in the college-town-ish part of the city that sells comics and records and all sorts of other nerd stuff. They hold card tournaments on weekends, and if you make the mistake of going at the same time as these events, you're going to come across Some Odors. I was friends with a strange cast of characters in high school who were obsessed with this store, so we went after school together at least once a week (I wasn't exactly normal either but man I have stories). Those memories are why I didn't even think of going there again in the first place, but I decided to give it a shot. I just had to accept that I might run into someone there that has an entirely different version of me still existing somewhere in the back of their head. 

What made the visit tolerable was that so much of the store was rearranged and they actually doubled the size of the store too. It was like being somewhere else entirely with just fragments of memories scattered around. They have a much larger selection of records now that beats their old little selection by miles, which, for a long time, never recovered from my weekly purchases of all their good stuff. A man maybe 10 years beyond my age told me he loved my Have a Nice Life shirt, something he hasn't thought about since college. Maybe it'll get so better that I'll forget that soul-crushing music too?

I picked up LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening, Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, and Alan Moore's Watchmen (a series I haven't read since 2022) and drove home, with shards of old memories still stuck to my coat and leaving new footprints behind proving safe travel is possible. I ran into someone I met in college across the state but I tried to give him no space in my mind (another story for another time). 

The Revision

When I got home I actually had some professional business to take care of, and the records and comics I bought are still unwrapped in a paper bag pressed against a fistfull of crumpled cash change. 

I have a complicated relationship with a professor I had for two classes in the fall semester. They're a cool and interesting person that's clearly very smart and I think does care about their job. We're even mutuals on Instagram. However, their classes were a mess. There were some issues with one of their syllabi that I translated into my email basically as "hey dude you owe me 4% of my grade." The second thing was how impossible the final project, worth half our grade, felt. This class was acoustics and this was basically an architect's project. Not to mention, half the calculations we were asked to do for this project, we had never done before for anything else. It also didn't help that I bombed the floor plan aspect because I had a total misunderstanding for this project (it turns out we were supposed to copy the example, not make a new thing). It was a stupid mistake but with the other issues on hand, I'm begging them to push my final grade score from a 50% to a 54% so my grade can be pushed another 2% to hit a blesséd B-. 

Wait, you're doing all that to push your grade from a 74 to an 80? You didn't even fail? 

Yep. A C is a 2.0 weighted grade and I genuinely cannot afford my grade being pulled down like that. My audio engineering program has a retention requirement where we need a 3.0 average in strictly our audio engineering classes. I could get A's in a trillion classes about art or whatever and it wouldn't matter. I have a 2.88 'retention gpa' right now despite actually having a 3.5, being on the Dean's List, having other merit scholarships, etc., outside of this godforsaken program. If I can't bump that to a 3.0 this fall, they're going to hold me back a year and I physically and mentally can't afford that! I also explained this in my email because my professor is probably asking themself that same question as they're reading my appeal. Besides for that, this person does need to get flagged by the school. I've already talked to the chair about them because they're teaching another class I have to take next semester. I'm definitely not worried about that at all! 

Updates on both stories will be posted soon, as I'll actually unpack my records tomorrow and hopefully receive a response from my professor. See you tomorrow. -G