@ertyu (appreciate how easy it is to type this username
) Have you lived in China before? After reading it started googling 'Chinese cities with the cleanest air'.Internationalist
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guitarplayer
- Posts: 1333
- Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 6:43 pm
- Location: Scotland
Re: Internationalist
@Solvent, Inspiring journal, thank you! I'm just listening to your stuff on soundcloud, thanks for sharing it.
@ertyu (appreciate how easy it is to type this username) Have you lived in China before? After reading it started googling 'Chinese cities with the cleanest air'.
@ertyu (appreciate how easy it is to type this username
) Have you lived in China before? After reading it started googling 'Chinese cities with the cleanest air'.Re: Internationalist
@ertyu I'm in Bangkok. Yep, living in developing countries can be cheap depending on your standards... But if you want to live at wealthy country standards in a developing country, and particularly if you need to use an international school, it may well not be cheaper. For single guys or gals who don't need to please anyone but themselves, this is probably not something to pay too much attention to. But even those of us with families can still pay attention to price differentials and make out as best we can. For example, in Addis I managed to get my grocery bills down pretty low - basic foodstuffs are cheap there (except dairy).
@guitarplayer You just reminded me to check what I've left on Soundcloud. That's where I post stuff I'm looking for feedback on. Make sure you also check my finished work at www.newnations.bandcamp.com. Thanks for listening! I thought I was getting close to enough material for another release, but haven't managed to finish any tracks in quite a while, so I don't know when I'll regain sufficient momentum on that front. Although I'm just now sitting in front of my laptop about to open my DAW again so let's maintain hope.
@guitarplayer You just reminded me to check what I've left on Soundcloud. That's where I post stuff I'm looking for feedback on. Make sure you also check my finished work at www.newnations.bandcamp.com. Thanks for listening! I thought I was getting close to enough material for another release, but haven't managed to finish any tracks in quite a while, so I don't know when I'll regain sufficient momentum on that front. Although I'm just now sitting in front of my laptop about to open my DAW again so let's maintain hope.
Re: Internationalist
COVID-19 is now way out of control here in Thailand (Bangkok especially) with case numbers setting new records daily. The latest outbreak started in April. It hung at around 1000 cases a day for a long while, then gradually edged up to 2000 a day, and it seemed like measures to keep a lid on it were kind of going ok. But then it became apparent that things weren’t really working and case numbers and deaths have been blasting off. Now at around 17k cases a day, 100+ deaths a day.
My wife and I have been vaccinated, but kids obviously not. I’ve been working from home since about April, I think, and schools have been close since then, too. I am currently on leave, but it’s sort of dull since I’m just hanging around the apartment anyway, trying to keep the kids entertained. I do not feel like I’ll be any way refreshed going back to work. All my work is just waiting for me anyway; in the kind of environment I’m in, I’m not really working in a team so everything I left there is just sitting and waiting for me, which I think makes it hard to feel like anything is actually different even though I’m on leave.
The restrictions have kind of been changing here and there as government tries and fails to get a handle on the virus. There’s a lot of criticism going around about how the restrictions in place haven’t adequately brought down the virus spread, but to be honest, I’m getting the impression that Delta is just so contagious that there’s a fairly low ceiling on what you can realistically do in a middle-income country with these resources. Even a high-income country, if your borders are sufficiently porous and population dense.
My apartment building’s gym and pool closed for a while, but they’re open now, which is nice. Even so, after the gym opened I lasted about 7 days before giving myself some kind of bursitis in my shoulder. Getting old I guess. I really do feel like I hold myself back when I go to the gym after time off. My perceived level of effort is fairly low. But apparently I don’t hold back enough and injure myself anyway.
I’m really in a weird place now with work. Having been unsuccessful in applying for a position I was very well suited for recently, I’m kind of getting the feeling that I’ve hit pretty close to my limit with this organisation. I am happier with the location here in Bangkok, rather than Addis Ababa, but I don’t think the work here is a good fit for me. Not that it was great in Addis, either. And I don’t want to move again right now, or try to shift employers. I’m just in a low place. I’ve lost a lot of confidence in my professional skills, and I don’t really think this is a misplaced feeling – the kind of work I’ve been doing for a few years now is very undemanding. With the pandemic, it’s even harder to feel any sense of achievement at work. A large part of what I have been doing is organising meetings/events. But now that these are all online/virtual meetings, there’s just no sense of buildup and after a meeting all the participants just evaporate into the ether and it feels like nothing has been done. Again, not that in the best of times the work was highly impactful, but now it’s all worse.
The buoyant financial markets make this sense of staleness at work all the worse really, since I’m able to consider that if this bull run just continues a bit longer then it doesn’t matter much if I wind up unemployable anyway. The last few months have been insane, I’m seeing five-figure capital gains month to month. I know this is all ‘paper gain’ and can be wiped out at a moment’s notice. The rule of thumb is that you need 20-25x your annual estimated expenditure to be FI, right? Well to put this in perspective, the last few months have seen me stack on about half a year’s estimated expenditure, or even close to a year’s estimated expenditure, each month onto my net wealth. This is just bonkers.
On the musical front, I have joined a few online music collaborations, which at least have been quite fulfilling. It proceeds in stops and starts and I think online (volunteer) collaborations like this can be very fragile, but it is interesting to work with others and somewhat motivating. Independently, I feel like I wrote a good song recently, with lyrics even! It’s quite satisfying for something like that to come together. My attachment to the old ways though means that I don’t want to release it as a one-off single, but rather with at least a few other songs as an EP. So now the pressure’s on to write a few more good songs in a similar style so they can be packaged together. I’d still love to be spending more time on this, but about the only time I have is a few hours after the kids are in bed, on nights where I’m not too sleepy to get things set up and still alert enough to work. I almost need to put together a more structured curriculum for myself, where I can learn the things I need to in a more lasting manner rather than flitting back and forth between topics (e.g., recording a cleaner guitar sound, getting a better mix, adding interest with background sounds and pads for a denser arrangement).
My wife and I have been vaccinated, but kids obviously not. I’ve been working from home since about April, I think, and schools have been close since then, too. I am currently on leave, but it’s sort of dull since I’m just hanging around the apartment anyway, trying to keep the kids entertained. I do not feel like I’ll be any way refreshed going back to work. All my work is just waiting for me anyway; in the kind of environment I’m in, I’m not really working in a team so everything I left there is just sitting and waiting for me, which I think makes it hard to feel like anything is actually different even though I’m on leave.
The restrictions have kind of been changing here and there as government tries and fails to get a handle on the virus. There’s a lot of criticism going around about how the restrictions in place haven’t adequately brought down the virus spread, but to be honest, I’m getting the impression that Delta is just so contagious that there’s a fairly low ceiling on what you can realistically do in a middle-income country with these resources. Even a high-income country, if your borders are sufficiently porous and population dense.
My apartment building’s gym and pool closed for a while, but they’re open now, which is nice. Even so, after the gym opened I lasted about 7 days before giving myself some kind of bursitis in my shoulder. Getting old I guess. I really do feel like I hold myself back when I go to the gym after time off. My perceived level of effort is fairly low. But apparently I don’t hold back enough and injure myself anyway.
I’m really in a weird place now with work. Having been unsuccessful in applying for a position I was very well suited for recently, I’m kind of getting the feeling that I’ve hit pretty close to my limit with this organisation. I am happier with the location here in Bangkok, rather than Addis Ababa, but I don’t think the work here is a good fit for me. Not that it was great in Addis, either. And I don’t want to move again right now, or try to shift employers. I’m just in a low place. I’ve lost a lot of confidence in my professional skills, and I don’t really think this is a misplaced feeling – the kind of work I’ve been doing for a few years now is very undemanding. With the pandemic, it’s even harder to feel any sense of achievement at work. A large part of what I have been doing is organising meetings/events. But now that these are all online/virtual meetings, there’s just no sense of buildup and after a meeting all the participants just evaporate into the ether and it feels like nothing has been done. Again, not that in the best of times the work was highly impactful, but now it’s all worse.
The buoyant financial markets make this sense of staleness at work all the worse really, since I’m able to consider that if this bull run just continues a bit longer then it doesn’t matter much if I wind up unemployable anyway. The last few months have been insane, I’m seeing five-figure capital gains month to month. I know this is all ‘paper gain’ and can be wiped out at a moment’s notice. The rule of thumb is that you need 20-25x your annual estimated expenditure to be FI, right? Well to put this in perspective, the last few months have seen me stack on about half a year’s estimated expenditure, or even close to a year’s estimated expenditure, each month onto my net wealth. This is just bonkers.
On the musical front, I have joined a few online music collaborations, which at least have been quite fulfilling. It proceeds in stops and starts and I think online (volunteer) collaborations like this can be very fragile, but it is interesting to work with others and somewhat motivating. Independently, I feel like I wrote a good song recently, with lyrics even! It’s quite satisfying for something like that to come together. My attachment to the old ways though means that I don’t want to release it as a one-off single, but rather with at least a few other songs as an EP. So now the pressure’s on to write a few more good songs in a similar style so they can be packaged together. I’d still love to be spending more time on this, but about the only time I have is a few hours after the kids are in bed, on nights where I’m not too sleepy to get things set up and still alert enough to work. I almost need to put together a more structured curriculum for myself, where I can learn the things I need to in a more lasting manner rather than flitting back and forth between topics (e.g., recording a cleaner guitar sound, getting a better mix, adding interest with background sounds and pads for a denser arrangement).