Tag: Monthly Review

It’s been a rough couple of months for me. It seems like almost every weekend has been marred by migraines and post-medication malaise. While I’m grateful for the medication taking of the harshest edge of the pain, whenever I have an episode I feel quite off for the several days that follow. And whenever this happens, I just don’t feel like doing the work necessary to move closer to my identified goals.

A few months ago I switched gears from aiming to be a primarily online entity to wanting to go outside and perform at local venues such as our beaches or poolside. But when I get a migraine, the last thing I want to do is get up out of bed to go outside. Some of the episodes I’ve suffered have been clearly because of being upright for longer than I should have – I tried to push the limit and paid the price. Other times the reason for the episodes are not as clear. A few days ago I slept for an unusually long time, and woke up with a migraine, with the following use of medication and sustained malaise.

I strongly disliked the entire process of creating and uploading individual songs to YouTube, and so I haven’t recorded anything new since April. Perhaps the reason I got burned out was because at that time I also created enough “shorts” content that I’m still able to post 2-3 of them a week. That pool is drying up though, so I should probably take some time to continue those efforts since they do seem to be the most effective method of growing the channel. Further, I’ve added at least 500 new songs to the “playable” list since April, so there’s a lot of new songs and new content that I could be making. I just don’t like doing it much, and when I feel sick and tired for the whole weekend, I just choose not to. I have to learn to be ok with proceeding at my own pace, or else I’ll just be making myself miserable.

On a bright note, I passed the 1000 songs playable mark! On the other hand, my voice teacher is getting much more on my case about “quality over quantity” and I fully agree, so I hopefully will be able to focus more going forward.

Speaking of misery, I’ve been operating under the assumption that if I just keep at it, I’ll gain more resilience and ability to handle my daily streams. Even after reducing the warm-up period by a half hour, I’m still finding myself mostly exhausted by the end of every stream. I usually don’t want to do anything except watch some anime or other drivel for several hours until dinner, and then I rarely feel like doing work after that. It’s hard to describe what my malaise is like, but I can typically feel the migraines coming on if I’m pushing myself too hard and have a brief opportunity to drop anything I’m doing and relax to avoid it. Several times I couldn’t even watch anime – the visual stimulus would just be too much. So I just listened to music or audiobooks.

Perhaps I’m just being lazy, since I don’t need to do any of this to meet my daily needs, but I really haven’t been able to find a way to get the body to perform the activities to reach the purported goals. The one time I did go to the beach in recent memory, I did avoid a migraine episode, but I was exhausted for several days to follow anyway. Without feeling in top shape, the idea of going out just seems like asking for trouble. I’ve been feeling overextended when even going to my voice lessons lately, which is odd because it seemed to be fine before. I’m not sure.

What is actually wrong with me precisely is still a mystery too. The insurance company denied my follow up procedure with the expert in California who helped me stop feeling sick all day every day no matter what and still holds hope that another operation could fix things. I think I talked about this a bit last time, but there is now a CSF Leak specialist team at Queens Medical Center, and they are in the process of reviewing my case. Well, more like in the process of gathering the pertinent medical records so that they can evaluate my case. Honestly, I hope that they don’t take on my case so I can be seen by the expert whose built his whole career around this issue. But, I have no money to ensure I can get what I want, so I just need to be grateful for whatever treatment I am afforded.

My Isekai Story

I have a story I want to tell that I think will fit in the Isekai Genre, and its starting to come along. I have a few chapters drafted now, and have been working on worldbuilding, though I still have a lot of ideas that need fleshing out. I’m currently a little stumped as to how to make the magic system I’m envisioning, but I’m hopeful it’ll come with time.

With a bit of extra energy over the weekend I some time getting refreshed with the Godot Game Engine which I’m hoping to use to first make a visual novel. The plan is that my first ukulele album will be a soundtrack for that experience. Ideally I’d like to make a full on video game in my world, but a lot of things will need to fall into place to make that a reality.

Work on the computer is hard for me in general. Editing videos requires fine motor control. Music notation software is clearly designed for people who are sitting at a desk with their instruments. Even just typing is a bit difficult, though its mostly the editing with a mouse to fix grammar and typos that gets me. Programming a video game or working with digital art seems like daunting tasks. Then again, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, and can only sing and play uke for so long every day.

There are lots of ideas in my head, but then my body kind of does what it wants. And apparently the body wants to make my head feel like its going to explode pretty often. When I’m feeling ill, I really don’t want to work, and I spent at least 3 days out of each week last month not feeling great. So progress is slow. But steady. Steadily slow, at the very least.

It’s a well documented phenomenon that musicians have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population. In my case, I’m quite prone to depression. I actually underwent Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) therapy after pharmaceutical antidepressants didn’t seem to help because one of the theories for what was causing my malaise before we learned about CSF Leaks was that it was a byproduct of depression.

From my point of view, experiencing constant nausea and being unable to live normally made me feel like a degree of depression was sort of appropriate. Should I be happy that I lost my career and had to move back in with my parents? And felt like throwing up every minute of every day? Even now, being exuberantly happy while being a basically useless human being and still getting ridiculously debilitating migraines after being upright for a little too long seems like an unreasonable expectation.

But the TMS therapy did take most of the edge off. Being alive as I am is bearable enough. It could always be worse. But if I could press reset or just turn off this game I would very much like that. 

Unsurprisingly, my depression typically flares up under periods of duress or stress. I had major migraine episodes again over two weekends this month. Luckily they didn’t happen during the week to force me to cancel a stream, but the effects did linger into the week. There were a couple streams this month where I was just doing all I could to get through them.

My opinion is that any practice is better than no practice at all, even if I’m not practicing the things I “should” be doing to get to my goals. So, a day just playing music I like is better than playing nothing at all. If I cancel a stream, I still have to pass the time every day anyway, and I’d probably spend it playing music in some form, so might as well keep the show rolling. 

I also got news that the insurance denied coverage for my upcoming operation, so that added a significant amount of stress. First there was a scramble to see if we could appeal the denial and argue for keeping the appointment, but then the appointment itself got cancelled and now there’s a whole new slew of hoops to jump through to take the next steps.

The reason for the denial was that there are people in my state who specialize in CSF leaks, which on one hand is actually a good sign. This did not exist 5 years ago when they sent me to Stanford. I like to think that my case was part of the impetus for this, and that it validates and makes use of Dr. Carroll’s research.

On the other hand, I would very much prefer to go see the guy whose career for the past decade has been treating this condition in exceptional cases like mine, and who has been the expert overseeing my case for this whole time. But as someone with very little income, I’m basically at the mercy of what insurance will allow. And, you know, thank goodness for insurance providing any opportunity at all. 

Given the unique circumstances of my case, it’s always a question if the treatment will even be effective at all. It’s really hard to plan for the future when an operation next month could potentially solve the problem… or do nothing at all. Then that date gets cancelled, and now it’s a question of when and where and what is going to be done by who. Instead of just killing time while waiting for a miracle of modern science to occur, I’ve been trying to shift my efforts to build up opportunities that I can pursue even in my current condition.

I mean, I haven’t made it back to the beach since last month since that kind of wiped me out for a week, and then I had two weekends of pain and existential dread. But in theory, if I could make it out to the beach regularly like I have been able to do my live streams regularly, that could eventually develop into a regular “gig” at a poolside, which is my current aspiration. Every pool has chaise lounges that I can stay flat while playing, so I’m thinking there may be hope. 

I had already decided previously to pivot away from continuing to attempt to build up the channel through social media promotion. I’ve made accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and BlueSky, and I hate them all. Even making YouTube Shorts is something I really don’t like to do, but it does seem to be the most effective way to grow the channel.

Speaking of, we passed 200 subscribers this month, and that’s super neat! Yay! Though I’ve kind of made a conscious decision to not care about the number, because I hate the trap of evaluating if my efforts are working based on the measurable outcomes. It seems almost completely random if a short is going to get 100 or 1000 views, and I strongly dislike letting the algorithm determine how I feel about my output. I’m still working to grow the community, I’m just not trying to make a goal of gaining X followers in the next month or whatever. 

Instead, I find that I’m really enjoying seeing regular names pop into the stream. Someone randomly asked what my stream was about, and though I stumbled over the answer at the time, it got me thinking of a good one: the stream is about making friends. If you like my music, I like you. If you like isekai or anime, that’s another plus. And if you like ukulele too, well, we’ll get along just fine. My recipe for friendship is: common interests, common place, common times. If we like the same things, we’ll have stuff to talk about and bond over. Add proximity and regular interactions, and that’s how friendship blooms.

I really hate hustle culture, especially among streamers and social media influencers. Yeah, asking for subs and likes and follows and donations will net you more of those things. But then it turns it into a transactional relationship. I’d rather not blur the line between friends and customers, at least not on the stream. Trying to spend my time on stage trying to sell stuff sounds like an awful time.

I hope to avoid trying to get money out of my audience for as long as possible. The way I want to monetize is by creating a particular product: an isekai story and accompanying ukulele album. Hopefully my friends will like it, but I’m not necessarily designing it for them in particular. Instead, I envision the people who I’m gathering in my stream to help spread the word when the time comes.

To gather more people into the stream, instead of forcing myself to use the social media I detest,  the current vision is to go play music on the beach and by pools, so that anyone who happens to pass by can connect. Then it becomes a kind of thing where you made a memory on vacation, and whenever you feel like tuning in you can see how this guy you met is doing.

I’d love to be a restaurant singer someday, but I kind of don’t see that happening if I can’t be upright. I still need to get much better at singing to reach that level too, anyway. 

I’ve been writing and composing a little bit, but I’m still pretty out of energy by the end of my daily streams. And then with malaise over the weekends, progress has been slow. But, I’m not in much of a rush anyway. That’s the best part of being a useless hikki-neet: nothing is expected of you, and nobody cares if you do nothing. It’s ok. It’ll work out in due time. Or it won’t. Who cares?