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Welp, it's 2025. The year prior I moved out of a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and into a high-population-density hellscape where I started my 7th semester of college, all in two days. I also thought twice about my tolerance for the bureaucratic and cut-throat nature of academia, decided to not shoot for research as a profession soon as I graduate, and as a result I got a very present paranoia on just where I should go with my life. Now I'm spending the first few days of the year writing this, as my social battery recovers from an admittedly wonderful Christmas Eve, and a really underwhelming New Year's Eve that’s not really worth talking about. Oh, yeah, I also finished an album!

I don't share much of my personal life online, but many things happened in the last 7 to 8 months and it all got me in a self-reflective mood, so I thought ehh, why not? Better late than never to start justifying the ~70 USD I spend yearly for hosting this site anyway.

So, what did I do last year? The first answer that comes to mind is "I finished an album." The second answer is "I put out two albums before adult responsibilities got ahold of my life." Unfortunately I can’t say "I uploaded the album on Youtube" yet, because making videos with pretty visuals (good luck retaining viewers without ‘em) tests my patience almost as much as doing homework does. After about a year of on-and-off work, Plastic Bits was done and I got it up online on December 6th. I'll admit, the time span I originally had in mind was much sooner than the actual day of release, but it's DONE now so whatever!

I have plenty of things to say about my time making it, but I'll save it for a blog post later on. The gist is that the reason I began making it was because I realized: I'll never be a professional artist or musician. Before anyone starts going "Nooo! You can't give up! This guy dropped out of high school and then became an award-winning influential figure!" First, that's survivorship bias; stories of failure, of which there are plenty, do not get shared like stories of success do. And second, I really don’t mean it in a self-defeating way! Quite the opposite in fact, that realization made me feel free, because then another one appears: If there’s no one to answer to, I can do as I please. And suddenly, doing things that I find fun but the vast majority of people don’t sounds a lot more fun! I don't like repeating myself, so I have written a little more about this in this journal entry (reenter the URL so it lines up properly just in case). I'll do a post eventually that’s fully dedicated to my experience making the album... eventually. Moving on!

Now for all the boring non-music stuff! A friend of mine brought to my attention a summer program for undergraduates where, for a month and a half, you can work directly with an established researcher for some project of theirs, kind of like a miscellaneous assistant gig. After checking through some of the listings on the program's website, I decided on a project in the southern half of the country. Now, the state in which it was taking place (which I won't name for privacy reasons), I wasn't aware of its existence before. Thinking about it now, it's likely most of Mexico isn't either, because barely anyone is in it! The state is a scattered collection of small, nay, microscopic urban towns, a wide expanse of rural outposts, and jungle. Lots, and lots of jungle.

After searching for a place to rent, getting plane tickets, and packing all of my gizmos and doodads, I finally went away and met an aunt at the airport, who drove me to the house I'd be staying in. After leaving my bags there, we went to a restaurant in a remote part of the region, and it had a BEAUTIFUL scenery surrounding it. From the windows you could see several mountainsides completely covered in dense, bright green tropical forests, and in the distance one could make out the faint silhoutte of a volcano. It didn't hit me until then just how much vegetation and diversity there was, and it’d turn out that rains were not only frequent, but also much more intense than the ones up north. Another thing that was much more intense was the HEAT holy shit the weather was so hot you have no idea. And it was HUMID too, good GOD.

I took a week to settle in while getting used to the weather, as well as learning the nuances and difficulties of having a roommate, something I never had to deal with in my life before. And then the time came to meet the researcher, which we'll call Mr. Gnorts. Gnorts and the group of undergraduates agreed to meet at a coffee shop to talk business. He was a lanky man who slouched as he walked, and I would come to learn that he was the brand of mathematician that appeared in shows and movies. His preferred drink was tea, he came from a largely european background, and he had this certain aura, like he was from another planet. In reality these kinds of mathematicians are few and far in-between, given the ones I’ve seen at least. He knew his area of expertise to the point where he could effortlessly cite who introduced what, when, and why while explaining something, but, as his students would say, he had a completely altered perception of reality. That's just how math prodigies turn out as adults sometimes.

During my stay, me and the housemates I was now living with went to a few places. About a month into the program, the landlord took us to a magic town ("Pueblo mágico") that was nearby. It was a small but lively rural town that looked like it hadn’t even heard of the word “gentrification”, like it came straight out of an early 20th century painting. In one of his random impulses of seeking adventure, my roommate convinced us to get on a random bus that passed by there, and after 40 minutes it took us to an outpost that was somehow even more in the middle of nowhere. We did find a small restaurant nearby, had some tasty quesadillas with roast beef there, but then we had to wait for the same bus to come back because that was the only bus route back, and then we had to take another bus to get home. Believe me, figuring out public transport in a minuscule unknown town is terrifying! Another thing about my roommate: on the very same day he arrived, we went to explore the town a bit, his idea. There were some old-fashioned buildings, a modest gothic cathedral, and an assortment of artisanal shops in the town center. He was very spontaneous, and still had the gall to call himself an introvert.

There were some ancient ruins nearby that we wanted to check out, and they were pretty awesome! They were these flattened, thick pyramids, all made of rock, dispersed in a way that resembled a labyrinth, and the vegetation covered every crevice in pasture and huge bushes. Add to that the feeling one gets from knowing that these rocks were placed by people, by someone who lived thousands of years ago, and it became my favorite place from my time there. Funny anecdote, when we were about to leave, a huge downpour came about, and we had to stay beneath a large tent near the site's entrance. Then some crazy intense winds came, and they were so strong that they caused the rain to reach us from the side. After a housemate had 3 different Ubers cancel her rides, I called my aunt for help and she picked us up later. When we arrived home, one of the huge trees that were in the middle of the street had been knocked over by the storm, and fallen on a neighbouring house about half a block over. The house wasn’t damaged much, but the door to it was blocked by the massive tree. They had to call Civil Protection to move it.

This adventure was a refreshing change of pace from the daily routine, 'cause admittedly the summer program itself wasn't much to write home about, though it did give me a huge reality check on what kind of person one needs to be in order to be successful in academia, especially in math research. I had this feeling that, were I meant to be a professional mathematician, I would've had notable results worth publishing in an article by now. To be a prolific, note-worthy mathematician, like Mr. Gnorts, mathematics should be the only thing you think about in all your waking hours, and unfortunately, I'm not that kind of person, I just like mathematics. Fair to say I was disillusioned, and this feeling would only get more intense as I'd start the next semester, in the farthest place from home that I'd ever be in my life before.

I finish the summer program, then it's time to move. The schedule was like this. Friday night: flight from Middle of Nowhere to Baja California. Saturday: time with family. Sunday morning: flight from Baja California to Mexico City. Rest of sunday: getting to the new apartment, sorting through bags, adjusting myself to the new surroundings, etc. Monday: first day of the new semester at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and with that, the challenge of finding a classroom in ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST COLLEGE CAMPUSES [1]. In a single weekend I went from one of the least populated states in the country, to Mexico City, the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. Needless to say, that week, I discovered levels of tired that I didn't know humans were even capable of. But after some time, I fell into a decent rhythm, learned how to move around in the city's public transport system, and got used to the quick-paced nature of life in this hell made of cement.

...Except I didn't. Not entirely. You know, I'm a city guy myself! I know about buildings and cement! And my thinking was "Pssh, Mexico City shouldn't be that different." But no. God no. Turns out, Mexico City's population density is not that far off from that of Los Angeles. It was a whole 'nother level. I don't know if it depends on where exactly in the city you live, but my experience when walking outside trying to get anywhere consisted almost always of several dozen people in a constant flow, at any given place, at any given hour. You stop walking, and you become an obstacle for the people behind you. You had to be mindful of where you were at all times. Never in my life before did I think so often about the concept of traffic while walking.

While we’re in the topic of traffic, let’s talk about the public transport, because in the hours of highest traffic, people would be packed tight in the subway trains like sardines in a tin can. Luckily, I rarely had to deal with that sort of thing, as the station I used was immediately previous to the station at the college campus, but getting anywhere else meant getting in those claustrophobic metal boxes flying through darkness at amazing speeds. And I’ll sound crazy but guess what, the public transport was actually one of my favorite parts! I had never seen public transport that good in my entire life. I never had to wait for more than 3, maybe 5 minutes for the next train to arrive, and seeing that each one always had a decent amount of people in it really made it apparent how damn high the population count was.

Making my way to the faculty each morning, the train wasn’t all that crowded. The faculty itself however... yeah maybe humans didn't evolve with the capacity to handle so many of us in one place, and a chill runs down my spine when I think about it being just one of the 40 or so different faculties and institutes in the whole campus. Turns out its million bajillion square feet of area weren't just for show.

Alright, I’ll stop being facetious; the campus, named the University City (“Ciudad Universitaria”), was beautiful and amazing when I wasn’t in stupidly crowded areas. The vast green spaces, for example, felt so refreshing to walk around in after being surrounded for days on end by the city’s concrete on top of concrete on top of concrete on top of concrete, and the Central Library ("Biblioteca Central"), famous for the murals painted on it, was striking from how absolutely massive yet rich in detail it was.

Also some sick vandalism!

The campus was unlike anything I had ever seen, and it's on such a scale that they provide buses to move around just inside the campus itself. They had like 13 different routes going on all day! That to me is insane. But it's easy for me to be fascinated now while looking back, because, in reality, learning to navigate around the campus, finding the actual bus stops, identifying which buses took me to my faculty, all of that was a hurdle to overcome. I know, that’s just how it is with being in a new enviroment, but honestly this was the newest, most different enviroment I had ever been in. I was overwhelmed, intimidated, out of my element, and that made handling classes really difficult at times.

Oh, yeah, the classes. Unfortunately, the classes, the sole reason for me being there in the first place, weren’t all that great. I don't wanna turn this blog post into me complaining about an exchange semester that didn't go well so, in short, I wasn’t crazy about them, though part of it was more because of me than because of them. A combination of having mostly teachers I wasn't happy with (shoutouts to my Graph Theory teacher for being the exception), losing the drive to do mathematics in my free time, since I was already doing mathematics in my classes, and growing progressively more cynical about academia and the bureaucracy which penetrates every level of it, caused me to lose a lot of motivation throughout the semester. 2023 was a difficult year for me academically, but the 7th semester I did at the UNAM just... sucked. I felt like I had lost sight of why I signed up for any of this, like I had isolated myself from all I knew because of some abrupt decisions I made on a whim, without thinking any of it through.

But despite how awful I felt at times, I still got approving grades on all my courses, so my degree wasn't thrown overboard. And despite how isolated I felt, I still had friends nearby that I could talk to and hang out with. I didn't mention until now that, actually, a whole bunch of guys from our group agreed on going to the exchange semester at the same time, so it wasn't just me, but also plenty of peeps that I've studied with which came to the UNAM. We were all in the same city, submerged together in this unknown, insane world, and we were determined to face everything it threw at us.

We explored the campus, which itself was bigger than some of my friend's native towns. We went to the National Museum of Anthropology, and walked around the surrounding Chapultepec forest ("Bosque de Chapultepec"). We gathered at the apartment that some in the group rented together and watched the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, what an absolute FARCE that was, in a more just reality Jake Paul would've been dead before the end of the first round, hope Tyson's check was worth willingly embarassing himself like that. And we also went to what I consider to be, hands down, the most awesome part of my time there: Teotihuacán.

As for my emotional state, I had a few talks with them about it, and they helped a lot in clearing my head and lifting my spirits. Funny thing is that, unlike me, who's studying an exact science degree because maths are the 2nd thing I'm best at, but the 1st thing (really the only thing) I'm most likely to get a job for, they’re studying an exact science degree because it's simply what they want to dedicate themselves to, and they’re far more enthusiastic about it than I am. All this time I thought I'd eventually hit a wall where I'd be forced to fully focus on mathematics, and sacrifice everything else. Turns out, the wall I ran into was from simply not liking them enough. My ultimate reason for studying them, beneath all the justifications and rationalizations, beneath my moments of enchantment due to their beauty, beneath the promise of abundance, beneath all of that, had been strong enough to last me for 3 years, but was now beginning to cave in.

On the other hand, somehow, music was still there. I still wanted to make it. I kept working on the album in my off time, and my drive to finish it didn’t fade. Not one bit. Not one Plastic Bit uooughhh. I still got those sudden bursts of inspiration where I’d be tinkering and experimenting for several hours, and I still loved listening back to what I came up with. The fact that you’ve read this far makes me really happy, so I’ll let you in on a little secret: Postponed Indefinitely, the 9th track in the album, helped a ton in keeping my head up ‘cause to some degree it worked as a vent track while making it, and now it’s one of my favorites that I've ever made. At some point I faced reality and admitted it to myself: I’d let my enthusiasm for mathematics die before my passion for music does, and I’d work a dead-end job that leaves time for music before an academic research job that invades all other aspects of one’s life.

With graduation coming closer, and all the academic procedures and requirements that it entails, I decided that I’d be taking two more semesters for the degree instead of just the one that's left, virtually cutting the remaining workload in half. This leaves enough time outside of college that I could even work a part-time job. I’m gonna turn 22 soon, I should be making money by now, good lord. But it also allows for more time making music, and more time thinking about where I’ll go once things are said and done. More than anything though, I don’t think I’m capable of withstanding the pressure of doing so much in just one semester. What I do know I’m capable of, and what I’ll do no matter what, is finishing this damn degree and getting my damn diploma. We’re in too deep now.

So, one year left until I’m done. What am I gonna do in the meantime? Well, for starters (dammit), talk to people and initiate interactions a lot more often, ‘cause remaining isolated and keeping to one’s self sucks and will only lead to apathy toward one’s own existence. I’ll also think long and hard about what I really want to do, and how feasible it is to do it. Not that I don’t have ideas, teaching seems far more promising as a profession given my aptitudes than research; I genuinely enjoyed myself when I gave tutoring to freshmen for extra credit, and people seem to respond well to my ways of explaining things. Who knows? Maybe I could do music commissions outside of that, or offer sound design and editing for indie projects, or hell, sell type beats on Instagram, there’s plenty of options! And I already have two albums to show as a portfolio, so they absolutely counted for something practical!

And yeah, I fucked up by signing up for two massively intimidating changes in my enviroment, one immediately after the other, without carefully considering it first, but that’s how you learn at the end of the day: by fucking up, sometimes royally. At least that way, what I learned last year will stick with me, far better than any Youtube video on life advice, or self-help book with a swear word in the title, or internet article about mental well-being ever will. It really put into perspective just how little I knew about what I wanted out of life, and how much I underestimated the importance of human connection. It was intolerable, overwhelming, even piercing at times, but I did it, and now I'm here, and I've never been more grateful for it.

The semester ended, I returned home and rested while I talked to my dad about everything there was to talk about. Some weeks later, him and I went to LA for a huge family gathering during Christmas Eve. Nearly all of the relatives we knew of were there, enjoying themselves, and it was great talking to aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen in years. Some fourth-grade cousins and I gathered. One of them brought Cards Against Humanity, and we cackled as some of the older adults approached us, deeply concerned about what we were reading out loud in hysterics.

My dad, the most sociable and charismatic man I’ve ever known, was exhausted by the end. Days prior, we hung out with some of his high school friends, spent the night at an uncle's, gone shopping, and helped his aunt prepare everything for the night of the gathering. We had a busy week, but somehow I wasn’t tired at all like he was. Perhaps for the first time ever, his social battery had depleted before mine, and I couldn’t help but be amused, and yet fascinated, by the fatigued, irritated expression on his face.

It was the best Christmas Eve of my life.

1. I couldn’t actually confirm this. The Wikipedia article says it’s 2,500 acres of land, which is as big as the 38th biggest U.S college campus on this table. That has to be pretty big still, right? ^