Today, I turn 15. Today was a fine day.
Out of all of my birthdays, this one probably felt the least special, and I'm fine with that. I wanted it to just be another chill day. A few teachers and school staff wished me happy birthday, as well as a classmate of mine, so that's neat. Probably the only part of the day that concerned me was with my ELA class, since I've been continuing to struggle with it. My ELA grade's at its worst it's ever been this year, and it really concerns me. But now that I've gone on hiatus from Twitter to avoid some procrastination I think I'll do better.
Celebrated a bit with my family and got some gifts. My sister got me a Spike Spiegel plush which is great! My cousin's family gave me some money which is good. Most shocking of all though was the MacBook Pro my parents got me, which is even what I'm using to write this right now. I know it's supposed to be useful and special and all, but it doesn't even mean much to me. When I saw the box, I knew it was going to be a computer, but not this. My family expects me to migrate from my current Windows computer to this since this runs way better, but I see this only as a secondary computer. This isn't capable of things my Windows computer is capable of, but I still find some use in this (mainly GarageBand), so I'll be sure to keep this with me.
But whatever, the gifts is not what I care about. As I grow a year older, I look back at a year ago and see how I've changed and think about how I'll continue to do so. I'm still awaiting for next year, when I'll finally be at the appropriate age to release music off of Bandcamp and profit off of it. I know I shouldn't be waiting to grow older and should be spending my time cherishing my youth and teen years, but I can't really find a way to. I've never really gained the opportunity to hang out with classmates, and even if I did, my parents wouldn't allow me. I've consumed so much media depicting teen life, and it makes me long for those times, but those times depicted seem as simply the past, as now we live more isolated.
Instead, I feel more like spending less time with friends and family, and spending more time with my interests and talents. Earlier today I was looking through Brockhampton's YouTube channel and saw Kevin Abstract's music video for his song "Drugs" 8 years ago. Seeing him jamming to his music with his friends (who he'd later form Brockhampton with) at a young age was really cool, as well as seeing comments about people at the time discovering him through Soundcloud. This isn't the only case of a young musician in the modern age just casually spending time working on music to later put out online. Seeing more of it's really inspiring, and it makes me want to do the same thing, so I probably will.
I wanna try to continue to listen to more different music, practicing instruments, and experimenting around with making music. I hope to put out a lot more stuff. I hope to express myself a lot more artistically, and I hope you all will look forward to that.
-Anthony “Salteh” S. • • •
