I am writing this 3 days before Lunar New Year (February 17th) from my hotel in Kaohsiung. Kaohsiung is the last leg of my travels in Taiwan. Tomorrow I head to Hong Kong, where I will enjoy the LNY theatrics before heading home after three weeks away.
Home is a strange word for me to type, speak, or think at this moment. There are three distinct “homes” I feel a significant pull towards at present: (1) Massachusetts (broadly), where I grew up, and where my parents and other relatives are clustered around, and my only true “permanent”(-feeling) residence, (2) Los Angeles, where I spent the last four years + change working on my PhD, and (3) San Francisco, the home of my immediate future—a lease has been signed.
When I arrive back in LA after Lunar NY, I am only staying the night before driving up to SF to begin this new chapter of my life, folding home (2) into the past (for now, anyways), and firmly arriving in home (3).
This year, I have decided to follow the lunisolar calendar for my goal-setting “quarters”. In 2025, I had already decided to begin my first quarter well after the Gregorian New Year. January 1st is just too soon mentally to begin a new year; I need about a month to just increment the year digits in my mind. Plus, the December burnout in academia is real—and I will likely continue experiencing it in the corporate world—and then the following holiday vacation time (“play hard”) inevitably spills into January.
Tonight I settled on one specific goal for this first lunisolar quarter: produce and (independently) release my first song as a single on major streaming platforms. I decided on the specific song as well. Its most concrete form at present is a rough demo consisting of a verse and a chorus, but all the bones are there, in my head at least.
The end of this first lunisolar quarter is May 16th—roughly 3 months from February 17th, Lunar New Year. Three months feels like an overly generous eternity to grant myself for finishing just one song, but I am simultaneously scared shitless by this timeline. It feels impossible. I think this might mean I have found the sweetspot.
This past Fall, in the final semester of my PhD, I was faced with a timeline I felt similarly towards. I needed to finalize one more project for my dissertation. This final push was the most intentional and focused I had been during my entire PhD, except perhaps for my first paper (which I finalized and submitted just after suffering a knee fracture and undergoing surgery—that era of Robby had a level of focus and determination I still reminisce about).
I aim to carry some lessons from this final PhD push over to my music ambitions. The first part is done—the scope and deadline are settled.
Another practice that was successful from my PhD push was the quasi-daily and weekly check-ins I conducted, in which I wrote brief status updates to myself (my advisor was on sabbatical, and I was not collaborating with others on this project, so I was essentially on my own to keep on top of things). At the time, it occurred to me to possibly publish these check-ins as blog posts, but I didn’t have the “infrastructure” in place (more of an excuse, really), nor did I feel comfortable sharing details of my research online (I’m hearing another excuse, to be honest…).
But now that I have this little website, which I created as a sharable creative sandbox of sorts, and because somehow my music struggles seem easier for me to stomach publicizing, I figured this quarter’s music goal—a published single—would be a fun thing to blog about on a weekly basis (and if not fun, maybe still useful).
However, publishing just one, solitary song on streaming platforms is a prospect I find unnerving. That’s a lot of pressure to put on one song.
Or, it would be if I made a big stink about it.
So I plan to not make a big stink about it—and save the stink for when I release a collection of songs, which is a goal I am tentatively setting for the next quarter (ending in August), although this feels incredibly ambitious from my current vantage point. And maybe I’ll indefinitely save the stink—keep it casual—who knows (I’m only thinking that I’ll probably feel the same about just one, solitary album, but at least the songs themselves will have friends).
And it’s fitting—or so I find it—that May 16th, and the rest of the quarter demarcations in my lunisolar system, fall on a new moon. Among the possible demarcations, it is a quieter symbol of passing time, certainly compared to a full moon, which is a much bigger (and brighter) stink.
Anyway, these cycles are something I intend to play with in 2026.
There’s much more to say, but saving it all for next week.
再见👋
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