What have I done, and what am I doing?
My endeavour to reach my goals only began taking action a few years ago. Through work and meditation I have progressed and grown in many different ways. This page exhibits what I’ve done and my progression here is concurrent to the progress towards my goals.
Club Activities
Probably the most immediate impactful decision I made after joining Moonshot was choosing to join a club. I chose to join a band consisting of four people including myself; I have never been apart of a proper band before, nor have I really considered playing music with other people.
From the naming of our band to writing our first song, I and the group have done and learnt a lot. I remember the first time I had to write lyrics for a song, for whatever reason it was extremely difficult for me to come up with anything I was satisfied with. It was only when I looked at other pieces of creative writing did I understand that there really weren’t any rules when it comes to lyrics.
Joining the club has given me so many opportunities to learn and experience things I could never do on my own; it gave me the push that I needed to go forward and deeper into the world of music. All the skills and information I gain is a step closer to my goal, to my ultimate vision of encompass-sing the essence of learning and discovery. My experience with the band will help be become a better learner, and contribute to my jorney of self-discovery.
Photography
The Tibetan mountains 
I don’t really remember this one 
A picture of my cat 
Chain Bridge of Budapest, Hungary A picture of my cat
I have a strange relationship with photography. What complicates my thought on photography is the feelings the photos I take give me. What I try to do with photography is to transform my emotions and or message to others through the photos I take. I attempt to do this by altering angles, changing the brightness, colour correction, and even creating the scenes myself; however, the unneglectable feeling that the photos I take are not reflections of my message but instead, in a way, enhance the subject of the photo. In other words, the photos I take lack personality.
I believe I have yet to understand both the technical aspect of toning a picture in a way that reflects your own emotions and how personal connection between the photographer and photo. Hence, I have yet to experience the art of photography. No matter the medium in which you wish to exhibit yourself, you must understand the connection between the art form and the artist.
My experience with photography has given me a result very unusual to the my past hobbies interests. Going into photography I hoped to get closer to the first goal that I listed, “To provide value in the form of my work”, however, I was met with failure. The postponement of my progress resulted in my search for a diagnosis, thus my journey with photograph has introduced me to the process of examination. Although I say that my progress with photography is at a stop as of now, I still hope to be able to “experience the art of photography”. I assume this will be a valuable milestone to my goal of controlling myself.
MUSIC
Just like photography, music is also a medium in which people use to express themselves. The act of listening to music induces me into a focused and consistent sate while I also use music as an outlook to communicate my emotions.
Not long after I joined Moonshot I was introduced to who would become the spark my interest to make music. I and Caesar made our first song as a result of our music appreciation class assignment. The project was fueled by our excitement and eagerness surrounding the subject.
The first presentable song that we wrote together was a mess: inexperienced recording and songwriting, low-end equipment, and every part of our project was unprofessional. We were borrowing batteries, staying up, and squeezing time to make our song, everything pointed towards failure. But as soon as everything came together and a considerably structured snippet was played back, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. Even if the song wasn’t as good as I might remember it to be, the emotions I were to communicate were there. I don’t believe I can effectively use music as a way of communicating myself, and the effect of the song may only on me; however, I do believe I can, if not just slightly begin to understand what music really means to me.
TTTime
Our second project started much alike our first one, our second project began as a result of music appreciation class. We were set to make something similar yet refreshing from our last piece; we added elements to our song we weren’t as familiar with. This incentivized us to learn as we made our song.
The most noticeable difference from the first project was probably the addition of vocals into the song. As a result, I gained a lot of knowledge on collaberating with others. We worked with three people in total to record the song.
The song started out pretty rough our ideas were weak, and we had huge amounts of work outside of the project. Looking back now, I think we were trying too hard to make the song good. A few days later, when we were playing around, everything just clicked and we improvised what would be a first draft of the song.
Just like with the very first project we did together, as soon as the structure of the song started taking shape, we both felt like we had made a hit… or at least something to that effect.
Working with Caesar has helped me learn a lot, and I’m extremely grateful to be working with him. I realize how much music means to me and how much I enjoy making music. I can also understand the value of my efforts. Music is used, to comfort, to immerse, and to communicate. I feel like I am beginning to grasp the idea of personifying music, thus providing value. Over the span of these two projects I have learnt and improved a large rage of vastly different skills; from preparing collaboration details to making and picking the chords of the song. This project has helped me develop evenly, and I hope to continue to develop skills, such as communication and learn how to manage and organize groups of people.
