Julio's Musings

Today I’m just going to talk about random topics that are all over the place (Yeah, I know, nothing new).

Facebook

I have been off of Facebook for six months now. Six whole months! I remember that day in August, when I was looking through my news feed and seeing so many complaints and drama about random stupid things that I just went into my account settings and deactivated my account. I remember thinking at the time that perhaps I would just take a break for a week or so. And then that one week turned into another week, which turned into a month, which now has turned into half a year.

So what has six months without Facebook been like? Well, I would say it’s been mostly good. There have been times when I didn’t know what was going on with certain things because they were posted on Facebook. I suppose I miss out on some things with certain people. I also didn’t get to share things while I was on my Italy trip with my family and friends (unless they happened to be on Instagram, but most are not). It also prevented me from using sites that required Facebook to use (and those sites are incredibly super lame!). But, in truth, I gotta say being without Facebook is pretty fantastic! It’s one less thing I need to think about checking during the day. It’s one less thing to be “addicted” to. I would actually say I’m probably emotionally happier without Facebook. I’m not comparing myself like I subconsciously would to other people and their happier more exciting lives (even though they are neither happier nor more exciting, Facebook just makes you think everyone else is). There have been studies that say that Facebook can make people depressed, and I’m going to agree with that. That’s not to say that it’s all bad, but I think perhaps, at least for me, the bad outweighs the good.

So now that six months has gone by I decided that I wanted to reevaluate Facebook. I logged in for the first time last week. I spent about 10-15 minutes on there. I looked through my news feed, looked through some of my friends’ profiles, and looked at some of my old stuff. You know, I’ve had Facebook since 2006, so just about 8 years of my life now. After being back on Facebook for a limited time, I realized that this stuff on this site are really not that important to me. Even though I had 8 years worth of stuff on there, I just didn’t care about it. So I made the decision to have my Facebook permanently deleted. So now my Facebook is deactivated again and it will be forever gone on March 9th. I can always go in and cancel the deletion, but I don’t think I’m going to. If the day ever comes that I want to have Facebook again, I’ll just make a new account and be WAY more selective on who I accept as a Facebook friend. But, for this period of time in my life, I’m happier without it.

TV Shows

So one of my favorite shows came back to Netflix a bit over a week ago. Obviously I’m talking about House of Cards! I absolutely love that show. It is well written, well acted, well produced, well everything! And Kevin Spacey on a power trip is pretty awesome. A lot of people powered through the whole second season during the first weekend it was out, but I wanted to watch it more slowly and I took a whole week to watch Season 2. Overall I would say Season 2 was really good. I, personally, liked Season 1 a bit more, but Season 2 was still great. It’s a show that deals with politics, so I know it’s not for everyone, but if you have a Netflix account it’s definitely a show that you should at least give a chance to!

Another show that returned recently was The Walking Dead. Now, for some reason I have been struggling to start watching the second half of this season. I only got through half of the first episode of the second part of the season. Honestly, I was bored by it. I just didn’t want to watch it anymore. It’s a shame because it’s a good show, but I just have no desire to watch it right now. I’m 4 episodes behind by now I think. I keep trying to figure out why I don’t want to watch it or why I was bored with it, but I don’t have an answer. I’m sure I’ll start watching it at some point, but right now I just have no desire at all.

Grey’s Anatomy returns this week. My friend and I have been wanting to quit this show for a while, but we still keep watching. At least I can look at Camilla Luddington (aka Jo aka Karev’s g/f) a lot. So pretty:

Also, and this is still super embarrassing, I’ve been watching The Bachelor this season. It’s such a ridiculous show. And the bachelor this season, Juan Pablo, is definitely not going to end up with any of these women, which is probably good for all of them because I’m pretty sure he’s not really there to find love or a step mom for his daughter. My favorite of the women left on her own which was pretty awesome. She knew it wasn’t a good way to find love and she just left. Thankfully this season is almost over!

Music

So I’ve been trying alternatives to Spotify lately. Most recently I’ve been trying out Beats Music. I’m in my first month of a 3-month free trial. After using it for a month, I gotta say that I really do like it. The app is really nice; definitely much nicer than Spotify’s. App design has never been Spotify’s strong suit. I love looking through their curated playlists and finding new things to listen to. It just has a lot of nice features that makes it good.

That’s not to say that Beats Music doesn’t have its problems. They don’t have a desktop application. You have to use their web player, which is nice enough I guess, but it’s missing a lot of features from the phone app. Also, having a desktop application like Spotify does just makes it easier to navigate. Obviously without a desktop app it doesn’t allow you to download music to your computer. If you happen to be without Internet for some reason, you can’t listen to anything from your computer. That’s a major bummer. Also, the phone app has been fairly buggy at times. It doesn’t always seem to download songs when requested, sometimes doesn’t play the next song, or it has connectivity issues. Obviously the service is only a month old and they have improved throughout the month, but it’s still annoying when you run into these issues. They also lack an iPad app, which sucks.

Honestly, even though Beats Music is good and improving, I do miss Spotify. Spotify just does such a good job with their service. I wish they would change some things like allowing you to have a profile picture without requiring Facebook (since I no longer have a Facebook), allowing you to have a Library so you don’t need to constantly make playlists for an album you like, and some other minor things I can’t think of right now. So, we’ll see. I still have Beats Music for another two months, so hopefully they’ll address a lot of their issues. But, as of now, if I had to pay for Beats or Spotify, I’d definitely go back to Spotify. Heck, I may go back to Spotify before these two months are over. But I’m trying to give Beats a fair chance, so we’ll see what happens.

Speaking of music, here are a few songs that I really like right now (and hopefully you can see the YouTube videos with the songs below):

1) One Minute More – Capital Cities

2) Happy – Pharrell

3) The Man – Aloe Blacc

4) Radioactive – Imagine Dragons feat. Kendrick Lamar

5) Team – Lorde

6) Ain’t It Fun – Paramore

I had a Spotify playlist with my ex where we would share a song with each other almost every day. Well, technically I still have the playlist, but we don’t share new songs anymore for obvious reasons. I do really miss doing that, though. I liked having someone to share songs with, and I actually got into a lot of new songs because of that. But, alas, I can’t do that anymore unfortunately. So now I’ll just have to add more songs that I like to this blog. And, not that anyone really reads this stuff, but if you have song suggestions you can add them to the comments or tweet them to me or something. I like listening to new things.

Final Things

I’m planning a small little Spring trip of sorts with a couple of my best friends. We have absolutely no idea where we’ll go, how far we’ll go, what we’ll do, or anything basically, but I’m still really looking forward to it! I’m guessing it’s going to be a road trip type of event. I just can’t wait for Spring to come and for everything to look nicer outside and, thus, giving us more options of things we could do! Whatever we end up doing, I’m just so looking forward to it!

Since I mentioned my ex above, I guess I can say that last week I got mad at myself because, maybe it was Thursday or Friday, but something triggered my feelings again and made me think about her all day. Not that she doesn’t still come to my mind almost every day, but I ended up thinking about her the whole day which hasn’t happened in a while. It sucks when you’re thinking that you’re finally doing better and finally getting over things, but then something triggers those feelings and you see that maybe you’re not as far along as you want to be. It also sucks because I know she’s been moved on from me for months and I bet she doesn’t think about me at all anymore. I’m reminded of a song by The Script called Breakeven where the premise of the song is that the heart doesn’t break evenly for both people involved; that one person can be having a harder time to get over things while the other person more easily moves on. Haha, such is life, I guess. One the plus side, even with that minor setback, I am still getting better about things.

Oh, and speaking of exes, I actually ran into another one a few weeks back. It’s always a little odd when we run into each other. It’s like we say hi and all, but we’re both definitely a little awkward. There’s no animosity there or anything. We don’t hate each other. And we have pleasant conversations. I guess it can be odd when we had been friends for so long and dated for so long and then we stopped dating and stopped being friends and then we see each other…it’s just always interesting to me, I guess. I don’t know if we could ever really be friends again, but I’m glad that we don’t hate each other or anything.

Actually, I’m glad I don’t hate any of my exes (though I have no clue if any of them hate me).

What else? Ah, I can say I don’t think I’ve ever applied for jobs at so many places at once in a short period of time in my life. I actually did have a job interview a couple weeks back, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t going anywhere. That’s too bad because it was such a nice place. But, that’s okay. I’ll find a new job at some point, hopefully soon. Seriously, though, job applications are so stressful. So so stressful! I think it’s probably why I’ve been feeling more “depressed” of late (I use quotes because I don’t want people to worry that I’m depressed like I have been in the past). But, I keep moving forward and I keep applying and eventually something will stick. I look forward to that day!

Well, I had way more to say than I originally thought. If you manage to get through this whole post I’m definitely impressed.