Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Yearly music top 10

It’s weird seeing people posting their Spotify and Apple Music yearly wrap-ups when there’s still a whole month to go in 2022. What if there’s a new release in December that you simply cannot stop playing over and over? That song or album would count towards this year, right? I don’t know, it just seems like people are treating December as a throwaway month. As if it’s already time to wind down 2022, even though there’s still 31 more days to go.

As for me, I don’t stream music from any platform, so no year-end wrap ups for me to show. Like a dinosaur I still buy and download each album, then use iTunes to catalog them all. There’s something to not being beholden to an Internet connection to enjoy my tunes. I’m sure Spotify and the like allow users to download playlists. Music is super important to me, so I rather have actual files that I can fully backup onto an external location. A lot would have to go wrong for me to lose it all.

Not that a year-end wrap of my musical listening would be of great interest to you readers anyways. Every song on the list would be Kpop, the only genre of music I’ve listen to for the past decade. I do make my own top 10 songs of the year, which you can check out in my year-end blog post that comes out on the 31st of December. That list is not about the most plays, however. What counts is the impact and meaning a new (to me) song has during 2022.

And there’s been times when a new song coming out in December have made it onto my year-end list. There might be one this year!

Light show.

I don't know about you

Hello there! It sure is wonderful to see the dawn of another day and a new year. The COVID pandemic rages on, but I’m rather optimistic about 2022. I really wish to be able to travel to my beloved Asia again - sans the need to quarantine. We shall see. For now, the cold and rain of winter is the reality, and the routine of every day life.

It was nice to not have a routine from Christmas Eve onwards until New Year’s Day. Working in higher education grants me the privilege of having that week off every single year. My last day of work in 2021 was the 22nd of December, which is something to be smug about, honestly. I don’t have to work in tech-bro land to have this perk! Granted, I don’t get paid like I would be if I worked in tech.

So it was a splendid week of rest and relaxation. I slept about 10 hours every day, and then went about my business as slowly as possible. I spent an hour just to eat dinner! It’s incredibly nice to not have to rush through things or treat the mundane stuff as mere obstacles to get onto the fun stuff. Taking my sweet time to perform my morning grooming because I don’t have to rush to get to work on time is a small joy.

The Hawaiians and their “island time” are kind of geniuses.

Anyways, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions because any changes I want to do, I don’t wait until the calendar flips to a new one. However, I did make one tiny but significant change to start 2022: I deleted twitter off my iPhone. I now have zero social media apps. No longer will I waste half an hour (at least) each morning and each night browsing through the feed in bed. It’s not a good use of time, and it’s not healthy towards my quality of sleep.

I wish us all a great 2022. Let’s get after it.

Where is my food, human?