This is the last full month of my thirties, a decade that has involved an MBA, a marathon, four years in a Fortune 500 company, a book, five albums of original songs, a farewell to alcohol and a massive reduction in toxic relationships.
Here are some things I got up to in January:
Activities
Every person I have talked to from every walk of life has said that this has felt like a particularly long January. For me, time passes much slower when I am not able to work or be productive, and campuses have been gradual in their reopening.
Thankfully, this past week has been busy with tutoring and study support work and the coming weeks promise to be even more so. Also, to fill my days, I have been racking up accolades on Duolingo, and have started with Arabic. I plan to be able to read it fairly well within five years.
Although I have been creatively a bit drained, I have been taking time to jot down ideas and two new The Kev songs seem to be slowly coming together.
I also did two new music interviews including this one. My latest radio appearance was on Hannah’s Bookshelf, where I discuss ‘The Book of Beijing’ from Manchester’s Comma Press at around 1:32:00 here.
Output
As part of a strategy to fit my work into neater categories, I have been running three YouTube channels side-by-side, one for comedy, one for music, and one for Mandarin. I update the comedy one twice a week, and the others once a week, and all are pretty good, but still have a long way to go to fulfil their potential.
Highlights this month include this song
an introduction to one of the most famous Chinese poems of the past half century:
‘Two Miniatures’ by Bela Bartók
I also wrote this Substack essay about having an inferiority complex, which I didn’t promote anywhere, because it might not be any good.
Wider World
There has been talk in the media about a possible all-out war with Russia and not just a proxy war. With the armed forces so depleted, there has been talk of a military draft being introduced.
The poet Edward Thomas was too old to be drafted to fight in World War One, but did anyway, even though he was acutely aware of how stupid the war was. When it comes to military life, it is not so much the violence I object to, but the collectivism. Like Holden Caulfield from ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, I think I would prefer to contribute to the war effort in some other way, maybe sit on the bombs to test whether they work.