Category: Website

Life right now feels like it’s in limbo. My quotidian existence for the last 3 years and counting has largely been flattened into three simple aspects: the college student, the dog owner, and the basic self responsible for the lower levels of the Maslow hierarchy of needs who since last year has also been required to take on self-representation in the court of law. That last one has (and still continues to) cost me so much time, effort, and mental-emotional overhead. While I recognize the objective validity of these challenges in my life, they nonetheless feel like a privileged problem set compared to the other horrific realities being faced by people in today’s America and across the globe. People are being aducted illegally on U.S. soil by the government, others are being starved and killed in pointless unnecessary wars abroad, and here I am fretting over finances and the weariness of being “me”.

Right now, I’m little over 1/3 of the way done through my short scheduled student tenure at SDSU. At 16 units the inaugural Spring 2025 semester and 10 over this present summer session, I’m on track to meet my goal of graduation at the conclusion of Spring 2026. Even though that’s still little under a calendar year away, I’m already stressing about what comes after, whether it’s having to find an employment opportunity that puts my hard-earned degree to use or stressing over how to afford the cost of a Master’s degree program. Given that I’m currently on track for a Magna Cum Laude honors designation having a GPA that’s fractionally above 3.7, it’s looking likely I could finish with the highest Summa Cum Laude honors.

As to my dog—my raison d’être, the main motivation in my life to keep pushing forward—I often struggle with the guilt that instead of being able to give him a maximalist life full of adventure, he’s instead apartment bound with me while I tend to these academic and/or profressional obligations. It helps that I’m fortune to have a network of local dog owners that are always happy to lend a hand and dogsit, in addition to my roommate, but it still weighs on me nonetheless.

And on that third aspect concerning legal matters, that headache endures. Hard to believe that it’ll almost be a year since it all started in a few days on the 17th. Given that I’m so preoccupied with academics and the other more urgent demands in life (read: bills) and still in the process of moving through the appeal process, exercising First Amendment rights on this whole saga is going to have to wait.

This trio of personas dominate my life. They leave very little time, energy, or monetary resources for anything else, even something as simple as communicating or spending time with friends. So many blog posts, private journal entries, personal essays, all kicked down the road like the metaphorical can and ultimately left unwritten. It’s a reality/feeling that doesn’t inspire confidence when weighed against the pressing need to do more: finish building out this blog visually and consistently update it, establishing and developing an online presence and voice, become a more efficient interpersonal networker, make a significant and meaningful positive impact on my home city. All in the effort to satisfy a self-imposed existential redemption for past shames that were outside of the control of my younger self.

Despite feeling like I’ve been doing as best as I can and at the expense of so many other aspects of myself, I’m fully aware that the immediate future is going to demand even more of me. In this moment, I can’t imagine how I could possibly manage to fit more into my daily routines. But at the same time, knowing I have a set of self-directed standards to meet, there’s no other option than to find a way; a huevo, as my people say.

This month has flown by so fast. All of April leading up until last week was an academic gauntlet, sole focus on ensuring my academic success while sacrificing every other aspect of my life that isn’t my dog. In the week since finishing the Spring semester at SDSU, I’ve been preoccupied with catching up on personal administrative/financial work, and preparing for the graduation commencement ceremony from San Diego City College.

In this time between classes, it feels like I’ve got a lot to do in order to prepare for the upcoming Summer session and the Fall semester to follow. Optimizations to my homework/study space, and to my lifestyle. Over the past 1½ months, I’ve been sacrificing all of my fitness and recreational activities to concentrate on academics; I haven’t journaled or exercised much at all lately, and any updates here at all.

The goal between now and the start of the upcoming summer session is to apply the takeaways from my inaugural semester at SDSU and get everything in place to make sure the next one goes even better. Not will there be the remaining academic workload to tend to, but also my other projects and initiatives. Things are only going to get busier, and also form the foundation for the things to come—but that’s a train of thought for another time.

It’s hard to believe we’re already almost two weeks into 2025—time’s been flying by, and already bleeding together on account of all perpertual stream of bad news. The state of reality as a whole seems like a sick bizarro joke, a satirical take you would have seen in a 90s or 00s movie and brushed off as far too ridiculous to ever actually happen, yet here we are in a timeline where Idiocracy proved to be depressingly prescient. And just as the National political farce capped off a first-week-of-the-year with a preview of the chaos and farce we’re all slated to endure over the next four years, the current Los Angeles wildfires started.

I’ve known the fear of uncontrollable wildfires for a majority of my life now, having endured the various ones that have occurred over the years since the “first” one in 2008. For as many as San Diego has seen, they’ve pretty much occurred on the county level, never within the limits of the city proper. Yet it’s not lost on me that it’s really only been a matter of fortunate timing—had the current Santa Ana conditions had been in effect back in November of 2024, the fire in the canyons along Fairmount Ave would have potentially turned into a situtation not unlike the one in Los Angeles presently.

Admittedly, I’ve had a hard time with the balancing act of trying to maintain composure and focus on the pressing matters of my personal life, having very familiar sympathy for everyone affected by the fires, and the fear of both the potential aftermath up in LA and the active awareness it could easily happen to San Diego.

In my recent fledgling attempts to start engaging with social media again, I’ve made mention of the ongoing legal issues I’m contending with. This, along with a frantic job search in an extremely competitive and post-holiday slug environment in tandem with a soon-to-start Spring semester that isn’t financially feasible on offered aid alone has really hampered both my private journaling and blogging efforts.

To the former, I’ve been playing it close to the chest the entirety of its duration. Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to get a head start on opening a can of First Amendment over the situation. But each time, I talk myself out of it due to the nature of the details and the active status of the case. To that end, January 29th can’t come soon enough. As far as everything else goes, it’d be really nice if the flow of time could slow itself down, especially in these last days before the incoming Federal Executive Adminstration. Not only is there the time crunch related to vocational and academic matters, but also the delay in other efforts & projects on the personal front.

So many times over the past two decades have I tried to start a personal website. Some with grand statements of intent, others with introspective rumination over how to try to find an online voice in an ever-changing internet landscape that is so vastly different from its original form and rampant with data leaks, content scrapers, and the evolving dangers of AI. And each time, they’ve all ended the same way: abandoned over the need to prioritize other obligations in life and the doubts over self-expressing online; that’s even circumstantially been the case presently.

But as 2025 begins with the expectation of it being a harbinger year of challenges, from the global levels all the way down to the personal, it also comes with a certain confidence to be had from all the lessons learned and ridiculousness endured throughout 2024, from the national stage all the way down to the individual. 

I’ve long joked that I need to find the way to start living life with the unearned confidence of those small breed dogs always willing to scrap way above their weight class. Better and simpler I’m finding it to accept and step into my earned confidence, and committing to leaving the footprint I’ve always wanted to make.

There are already at least three personal essays waiting to be extrapolated from the above, but all in good time; self-patience is an understated key part of operating effectively.