One of the most amazing things to happen to me is that after almost 20 years since college graduation, I do more studying now than I ever did as a student. Rather than learn the ins and outs of being a lawyer or an accountant, I used my time to get better at delivering new and unique sounds with the bands I performed with. Doing everything from hip hop to ska music gave me many classic opportunities to learn and present new things. Since then though, I’ve almost gone an entire 180 degrees. Since before the cancer surgery and definitely after it, it's all about helping myself learn all manner of new information I may have missed years ago.
While part of it can be seen as some sort of crucial change in the world, it’s easy to see the rest as a regular change of getting older. I now hope to learn as much about the world as I can. While part of that is connected to my battles against various forces trying to hold me back, a lot of it is also a desire to understand as much as I can and one day give back even more. It is no longer enough to think things will be ok one day when I can dive in and change where things are right now.
The Growing Desire to Study
I bounced from being a biochemistry major to an accidental computer science major to the last one where I learned about film and film studies. The University of Texas was considered one of the best public schools to learn film back then. We had stories of Robert Rodriguez leaving school to make El Mariachi for only $7000 by selling his body as a science experiment with his friends. Eventually, actual Colombia Studios called and offered him $7 million to do the same thing with Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek.
I managed to get a job working at the campus television station and was pretty sure I would be in the Rodriguez boat in no time! While that obviously didn't happen, I would get to run Master Control for the Monday night campus news program and during the day rent out equipment for other news auteurs and burgeoning filmmakers. It was the best equipment you could want in the year 2000. Hopefully, you didn’t need to get too many different ridiculous angles, because your battery would never last that long.
Eventually, I learned I wasn’t so much the filmmaking type, but it didn’t take long for me to quickly decide that screenwriting would be a much better place for me to end up. So I went from studying directors to studying writers instead. It’s wild to think back to how much studying and work I put into it.
Any studying I did in those days took place as I worked my way up the ranks in college. As different musical apps began to come out and shift how we would listen to music, I started using these apps to write what I wanted to write. I started with using music with vocals first but often found myself incredibly distracted. I love a great story, but to really make myself work on film scripts, SEO marketing, or even driving home after a long night at a coffee shop, it didn't take long before I started listening to music with much less in the vocal department. I needed something to vibe with a bit more strongly on the energy scale.
This was a great success at first, but then I figured I could become a writer at any time. What I really needed to do was become a rocker first. Playing music was already so much fun, why push that further away if no one was going to make me stop? Why waste my time trying to learn about other things like hyperfocus, communism, or where cancer comes from? Sure, some of it might be important at some point, but right now it was time to write new songs! It was time to let the world know who I was!
Eventually, I’d played my shows in all my bands and made kids go nuts, but suddenly all of my friends had new opportunities. What had they learned that I'd given up on that caused them to leave me behind? They had new jobs and moved up in their companies. They used their study time a little differently than I had. As unclear as I felt about what I wanted to do, I knew that I also wanted more of that action too. There had to be something better than slinging juice, so I got a job renting out vacation properties on the south side of Austin, Texas. Now, I could study and learn all the things I never spent time learning about in college.
Enter Study Music
Never one to leave music too far behind, I needed new music to get into studying. Since I couldn’t read or learn anything with words and phrases going on around me, I instead started listening to the dance tracks made popular at the end of the ‘90s. French musicians like Daft Punk, Justice, and Kavinski were the first dance wave I went through. Tracks like One More Time, Nightcall, and D.A.N.C.E. became the start of my new study jams as the years went by.
When I finally tried to write my first-ever screenplay and study how to write articles, I had to slow things down even more. I needed more background music for the effect of reaching the type of calmness I was searching for. That was when I was very glad to find the Chillax Playlist on Spotify. Songs like Crossroads by Vincent Roy, Only Time by Enya, and even Song to Comfort by Marie Mørck became part of my inward expression as I wrote. I studied and learned even more throughout my investigation into the parts of life I had left out years before. It’s the soothing music you can write to as easily as you can drive or code with. It’s music that makes it easier to study, and as your brilliance raises a bit, you'll be very thankful you made the change.
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