Random thoughts on a Friday night

No school today so it feels rather like a Saturday night but good to know I still have a full weekend to enjoy. My husband went out to dinner with some friends while my daughter and I stayed home. We had a chance to re-record the viola track and this time I used the SM57. I haven't had a chance to listen to the recording but I am optimistic that I will find a useable take. The important thing is that we had a much better recording experience. She was more comfortable and, dare I say, actually seemed like she enjoyed what we were doing. At the end of it, I decided to gift her the AT2020 usb mic. I knew that she would enjoy playing around with sounds (seems that she is into ASMR, something that I find kind of weird but whatever floats your boat, kid) but also because she might benefit from hearing herself better when she practices her viola. I know from experience that hearing yourself play through a pair of headphones can make you hear things you otherwise would not, such as if you're hitting strings other than the ones you are supposed to be playing. I know that the first time I hooked up to an amp, I felt like I heard my guitar so much better, so practicing while plugged into the interface actually does help me. I also gifted her with my bluetooth mouse with its matching pink mousepad. Maybe this will inspire her to use the laptop a little more instead of always being on her iPad. Of course, now I'm wondering, should I replace the mouse? 

I don't know if I've mentioned that I bought a Rode NT1. It's really the most advanced piece of equipment I've gotten as it marries the conventional condenser microphone that I plug into the interface with an XLR cable with the plug and play USB mic. As it fulfills both of these functions, and came with everything you could possibly need to set up (cables, shock mount, pop filter), I felt ok about letting the AT2020 go. I wonder if the audio-technica shock mount can be used with a different microphone, should I choose to get another one in the future. 

My husband got home from his meetup and we sat down to chat about the kids of his friends. Before he left, I told him that I was interested in the college plans of their kids. Our eldest is a year ahead of one of them and two years ahead of the other. Apparently, one of the girls had gotten into Penn State's Honors College (both parents are Penn Staters, and they're my husband's friends from college) but doesn't want to go there. She was waiting on UPenn and Northeastern, up in the Boston area. I didn't grow up here and I had literally only heard of this Northeastern last year because one of the teachers at school said her daughter was going there. I don't get the fascination. I also don't understand this trend of applying to so many schools. She applied to 15 schools, I was told. Knowing she can't be an average student, I wondered what the rest of the schools on the list were. If she got rejected by Carnegie Mellon, what are the chances UPenn was a yes? 

All this talk of college led us back to our own experience when our daughter was selecting a school. I admit, I played a very big part in this hunt. In her junior year, I requested one thing of her, that she have an idea of what program of study she might want to go into and from there, I just needed to know how far she was willing to go, as in distance-wise. I curated the list of schools for us to look at. To me, this was the time for the schools to audition for us and we would pick the ones to make our short list. Why apply to a school you wouldn't want to go to? I never understood that. To me, applying to so many just says you don't really know what you want and you're also very unsure of yourself. After scouring various lists and cross-referencing them in terms of overall rating, something good for the specific program that my daughter was interested in, something that offered value for money, we picked out about a dozen to visit and she ended up applying to 4 schools. Granted, she applied to two honors colleges, which requires a separate application and has its own rigorous set of requirements so think of it as 6 applications. I was later told that she's a rarity and the common number landed somewhere between 10-12, minimum 8. Again, I didn't understand that. But also, unless you qualified for free application, I did not get why one would spend so much on applications, not to mention the time it takes to write all the essays for these schools, the letters of recommendation, what else is there, if again, one was not truly invested in going to a certain school. 

But anyway, my husband brings up his distaste for my daughter's selected field of study. I asked why and after much needling, I finally got it out of him. It was because he did not see it leading to a lucrative career-path. There it is again. How everything in life revolves around money. This is them, culturally. Maybe a lot of people are like this, and it's not unique to Chinese culture but this is what I've observed from them. Everything in our life, to him, to his whole family, revolves around money. While I certainly appreciate that we are taken cared of, I do question this way of thinking and have decidedly encouraged my children to stray from it. I have made every effort to surround my children with other viewpoints and to nurture the concepts of satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment and a sense of purpose, while being totally and keenly aware of the financial aspect of everything. For this reason, I encouraged my daughter to prioritize Pennsylvania state schools who would offer a more reasonable in-state tuition rate and really assess the value of the education she would receive in terms of her goals for after graduation (and not solely focusing on how much she would be making right after graduation) versus the amount of money we would be spending on this education. I had hoped that she would at least graduate with very little to no debt but have a world of opportunity before her. I also told her that one of the great values of a college education lies in the people you meet and the connections you make. So, over and above the academic opportunities, the social opportunities should be valued as well.

Despite repeated speeches from my sister-in-law, and the very thing my husband is thinking but not necessarily saying to her face, I have told my daughter that she is free to choose. This is my gift to her, to both my children. Make your own decisions, choose for yourself, not because a parent told you to do this or an aunt said you have to do that. I will defend my children and their right to choose their own direction based on what fulfills them, also because I don't want them to belong to that demographic of entitled young graduates who think that because they graduated from a very expensive school, their first job needs to pay six figures a year or it's not worth working at all. I don't know why anyone would think that we care if we are in their will or not, if our chosen field of study isn't what they think it should be. I am not raising my children to be waiting for us to die so they could inherit whatever money we had. I don't even want them thinking about that at all. I want to live in the now. I want my children to want to spend time with me. I want to enjoy their company and do things because we want to do them. Even if it's a silly game of Clue or Scrabble, or Mille Bornes (look it up, it's fun!), the time I spend with my children is meaningful. My sincerest hope is that they're able to provide for themselves well enough so that they can spend more time doing meaningful things, and at the end of the day, be happy. 

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