+++ title = “04” date = 2019 +++ About a decade ago, I posed the question to my Facebook feed: do you know anyone who actively dislikes music? No one responded. At least no one responded with evidence of someone that actively dislikes music. Sure, there were some who disliked some forms of music but no one seems to just dislike it altogether. Even religious sects that think music is evil seem to form their beliefs tribally, in the same way that eating pork is a sin to a Muslim but they don’t, as a culture, dislike its taste necessarily.

This is the message we sometimes get when we’ve reached the end of our latest updates on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. When I first saw this in my feed, I thought that the creators of these networks were trying to do some good. To let me know that it’s okay to stop scrolling and to close the browser window the play in the physical world for a while. But after my social media fast last month, I’ve realized that it’s quite the opposite.

+++ title = “04” date = 2019 +++ I remember the first time I saw this stargazey film. I was really into ambient music at the time, and the philosophy of creators like Brian Eno, who believed that sometimes we create art that is meant to let our mind drift, the way he did with his famous album Music for Airports (and many others that followed). It was the first time I had met up with my parents since I had gone to college.

+++ title = “04” date = 2019 +++ I was told in elementary school that I was probably not an artist. No, my teacher didn’t explicitly say that. But the grades I got on art projects were always low. I remember creating a painting once about people who looked like mushrooms living in the woods. I thought it was interesting, and clearly it was since it’s memorable to me years later.

When I was in elementary school, I was labelled “gifted & talented.” What this essentially meant is that I had shown some level of acquiescence to the policies and procedures set forth by my school. I achieved decent grades and was seen as a high achieving student. I eventually ended up winning some kind of academic award signed by the president (Bill Clinton at the time) and at the awards ceremony all of the parents took pictures as the 6 of us held our awards.