The story thus far

For the record: I got admitted to Stanford to get a Ph.D. doing artificial intelligence, and decided to defer till Fall 2009 to have a little music career. Also, to generally give myself some space for creativity and personal growth, self-discovery, and whatnot. When you're busy and stressed out a lot, parts of yourself may go neglected for long periods, and when you're idle you can remember that those parts exist again, and be more of a whole person. If that makes any sense.

For a week now I've been living in Detroit in an apartment building in the Cass Corridor by Wayne State, in an apartment that shares a porch with my friends Dave and Sara who are attending Wayne. Also my family is close by in the inner burbs. So I have the solitude I need but also it's easy to break it when I need to. I feel a lot more free, relaxed, and creative without the 35 housemates I had at the co-op... I liked them but I can't relax with people around unless they're really close friends. The Cass Corridor has sort of a bohemian reputation; there's lots of arts and music stuff in the area. It only looks slightly decrepit, though there's a lot of more seriously decrepit areas within a mile or two of biking.

I took a little trip to Chicago a couple weeks ago, hunting for apartments there based on the fact that there's cooler meetup.com groups there (math enthusiasts, composers, sci-fi writers, etc.). The groups were exciting in themselves, and more generally it indicated there was a broader range of people in Chicago with more opportunities for me to find a niche. I stayed at a co-op there and instantly remembered how stressful it is for me meeting new people, and made up my mind that night to stay in Michigan -- that was when I remembered the vacancy in Dave and Sara's apartment building. I did enjoy biking around Chicago though.