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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...

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.

t’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.

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.