[0-4 sec | Quirky pizzicato string music]
A cozy living room. A fire roars as a dog stretches on the hearth. 

[4-9 sec]
Customer 1, a middle-aged black woman, sits in a wingback chair in the living room, as the viewer joins her in media res.
Customer 1: “I just think of choice… that feeling of ownership, like my health is truly in my hands.”

[9-16 sec]
Customer 2, a young white man, sits on a couch in front of his Funko Pop collection.
Customer 2: “I love the ‘Compare Plans’ tool. There are so many categories, I really make a day of it—it’s my Black Friday.”

[16-23 sec]
Customer 3, an older white man, stands around a kitchen table with his family.
Customer 3: “Well, we’ve always been a United family. My daddy had United, and I’ve had United my entire career.”

[23-33 sec]
Customer 2: “Open enrollment season is my favorite time of the year. I love sitting down and seeing what’s new in the health insurance space, whether it’s higher premiums or higher deductibles, higher copays or higher out-of-pocket maximums.”

[33-40 sec]
Customer 1: “There’s so much innovation coming out of our Nation’s Great Insurers, but I truly think United leads the pack. I couldn’t imagine ever switching.”

[40-55 sec | String music swells]
Customer 3: “Earlier in my career, I had less money, so I bought less insurance, but now, later in my career, I have more money, so I buy more insurance. And seeing that journey…”
He begins to cry as his son pats his shoulder. A line graph of Customer 3’s monthly take home pay over the past 40 years appears, revealing a gradual increase.
Customer 3: “...just reminds me of how far I’ve come.”

[55-60 sec | Strings reach a reflective coda as sleigh bells fade in]
A snowy New England town appears with the United logo overlaid in the corner.
ON SCREEN TEXT: From our family at United to yours… Wishing you a happy open enrollment season.

"You have to listen to this one," he said, shoving into my ear a headphone bud linked to his iriver mp3 player. "It's not like other songs. This one is, like, actually saying something."

"What's it saying?" I asked.

"Hm." He thought hard. "It's better to have something to run away from than to have nothing."

"Huh?" 

I didn't know what that meant, but I trusted the three and a half years of wisdom that my older brother had on me, and at eight years old, I could at least read along as he scrolled through songlyrics.net.

Bleeding thoughts
Cracking boulder
Don't fall over

"What is this?" I asked. It was a slow song, but the guitar riff in the background scratched an itch that I didn't know I had, so I kept listening.

Sing it louder,
Twist and shout

I recognized that phrase, twist and shout, because my teacher had once asked our class in shock how we didn't recognize some song from the 60s. Boomer

Nothing to run from
Is worse than something
And all your fears
Of nothing

Ah, there it was-- that sounded exactly like what my brother had said, though I still didn't know what it meant.

Concrete girl
Don't fall down
In this broken world
Around you

"Huh," I said, and I turned my attention back to killing slime monsters in Maplestory. I didn't understand what "Concrete Girl" was trying to say, and I didn't want to say anything stupid, so I stayed quiet.

And that was that.

But not really, because after that, I began to wonder what songs could mean-- you know, other than "I love you, my romantic true love," and "I love you, God." I'd heard those songs sung a million times. But the idea that someone could say something. . . original? unique? insightful? within the confines of a song fascinated me. So I started my "I'm so sick of love songs" phase before I turned ten.

I didn't listen to the radio growing up, but I was always on the hunt for more music. Not just anything, mind you-- not only were love songs beneath prepubescent Daniel, but the vast majority of contemporary music was also simply too inappropriate. Yeah, that didn't stop Blink-182 and Yellowcard from slipping into my music library, but it meant I was stuck on family-friendly Switchfoot for a decade.

So Jon Foreman taught me, and I listened, and I studied.

How many nights did I fall asleep to Oh! Gravity spinning in my boombox?

These songs taught me to articulate not just the rational ideas that we can put into words, but those human emotions that underlie every syllable. It's more than just our stars being unanimously tired; it's the desperation behind the plea-- that something out there might be strong enough to support us for just a semblance of stability. It's that strange guitar melody that doesn't really seem to go with the words, how it all builds with the percussion but then gives way to almost nothing each chorus, leaving behind only the words and the guitar again.

And when you draw the listener in with an intriguing sound, like the shifting time signatures and grungey guitars in "Dirty Second Hands", you have free rein to lay facts down, cryptic but clear, like a slap in the face hiding in plain sight. If we can't trust the American Dream, then what are we doing?

With an army of me
We invent our own enemies
Man versus machine
And the dirty second hands, the dirty second hands
In the land of the free
And the home of the remedy
The old clock is a thief
With dirty second hands, dirty second hands

And teenaged Daniel wonders for the first time in his life: 

What is productivity, why are we building, and who are we fighting?

--

I milled through a lot of (safe) rock music in my preteen years, wondering who else out there could blast out my eardrums with words that meant something.

Somehow I found Epik High.

Ironically, the first song was "Free Music", a freestyle-type song that features Tablo and guest MYK just having fun rapping and rhyming and saying things without saying much.

But that song blew my mind.

From the top, rewind
Wrote rhymes in my dad's attic
Rap addict since Illmatic and I'm still fanatic
Never stop but when I'm stopped
I jog my mind around the writer's block
Till it's out of breath and asthmatic
I've had it with the paperchase, need I mention?
The rap game is all show and lyrical descension
Pretension, obsession for physical possession
I'll pay for your CD, but pay no attention
Ascension, I'll never lie to get it
Fake people piss me off like diuretic
To die or live it, you know the choice is yours
Just make sure that the voice is yours

"Yes sir," I said, head bobbing like a maniac in the library.

And then I heard the rest of Map the Soul and I leapt, eyes closed, into the world of hip hop.

It's a lot harder to talk about Epik High lyrics because the most impactful moments are in Korean, and I can barely understand what's happening, much less talk about it. So we'll leave that for someone else.

Not every song has to mean so much. But it's fun to have more to dig into, isn't it?

--

If you didn't know, I released Graduation Mixtape on bandcamp back in January 2018.

If you're familiar with either Switchfoot or Epik High, you'll probably recognize a lot of the ideas and motifs I sing about. I love that movement of ideas, that process of stitching a canon together from different minds going "What a great way to think about that". 

I hope something in all this will inspire you to create something of your own. It's only human.

#music #personal #graduationmixtape

So you've found your way onto my website. Let's keep it simple-- this is my digital sandbox, where I'm messing around with self-hosting a bunch of different things. I'm here to try new things, learn, log my efforts, and ultimately create something that can face the public in some way. I want this to be worth visiting for our family and friends-- maybe not every day, or every week, but every once in a while, just to check in.

So what do we have here? You'll notice six buttons on the front page at carudan.net.

1) The first is audiobooks. I'm building my own audiobook/ebook library to share with friends and family through audiobookshelf, which allows you to listen, sync, and download anything I have to your own device. It's basically Amazon's Audible, except just for my library. The secret is you can ask me to get basically any book, and I'll probably be able to get my hands on it one way or another (i.e. at no cost to you (or me, probably)). In fact, I can automate it to hook up to your Goodreads "Want to Read" shelf so it just appears without talking to me at all. This last automation function is. . . still in testing, so please be patient with me :) Right now, the library is primarily Agatha Christie, fantasy, new Star Wars, and romance novels hahaha

2) The second is study solis. This is my self-hosted writing experiment, powered by Typemill, where I'm publishing the rough draft chapters of my book as I write them. Caroline knows I am terrible at making progress, so this is my way of trying to keep myself accountable. And I want to connect with anyone who's interested in my writing! The first novel is called a young-ish adult, new adult (maybe??) fantasy story called The Huntress, and I'm on chapter 7 of 52 right now. I'm posting raw, basically from my phone, pre beta. Once I finish my first draft, I'm going to ask people to beta read the whole book and give me thoughts on plot, characterization, and other broad strokes, and then we basically begin building towards the rewrites that will become the "final draft". Of course I'll listen to any feedback anyone has in the meantime, but right now I'm just trying to churn out words.

In other words, it's in an alpha state, so don't expect too much, but it's a fun time!

3) The third is the postboard, which is what we're on now. This is powered through Known, which has been really easy to work with. I'm intentionally siloing this postboard from my story "blog" because I want this one to be more social. This might seem ambitious, but I'm imagining a nano-network, composed of less than a few dozen people who are all interested in. . . I'm not sure. Being cool with us? HAHA. 

Look, it'll start off as my own little blog, where I chat about this and that, get things started. But I hope that eventually others will find value in sharing their own thoughts about whatever seems relevant. It's not about cultivating some clique of smart minds, but fostering a community during a time when it feels increasingly difficult to do so. At the end of the day, I want to hear from everyone.

So what am I (and eventually we) writing about? I have a lot of ideas to begin with: gardening (duh), native ecology (of course), cooking, music, games, pop culture, woodworking, housekeeping, crafts, writing, and Atlanta. I'm not exactly avoiding the "serious" stuff, like law and social policy, but I guess I don't see the value in writing about those things for me right now. But obviously there are those of you out there from whom I'm dying to read a 10k word rant about whatever.  But for now, I'm just trying to get the ball rolling. Hopefully I'll keep things neat and organized enough.

4) The fourth button is requests. This is the Ombi Request Hub, where you can ask me to acquire any television series or movie that's. . . not lost to time. If you don't understand the point of this, feel free to ask me!

5) The fifth is network. I honestly don't have the greatest idea for what this is going to look like-- obviously it's not set up yet. At the very least, I want a communal calendar where Caroline and I will be able to keep track of the garden. Or something like that? I'm really not sure yet. But basically, I want it to be a way for us to connect with our friends and families about our garden.

Once I get Nextcloud figured out, which shouldn't really be that bad, I'll have a better idea of what I should make this. Let's have it done by spring.

6) The sixth is the garden. Now that I think about it, this might be the same thing as the fifth. But maybe I'll just make it a mediaboard for the garden? I don't know!!! Maybe this is the blog for the garden anyway, so I don't need a separate site for the garden? But I do want to host a resource for the hyper-specific niche that we're learning about at home, in terms of building a natural landscape and sustaining wildlife. Basically, if Caroline and I can create a natural woodland and wildlife sanctuary in our backyard, I want to document and share what we learn with others who are interested. And I want to share the information without necessarily tying it back to Caroline and me (i.e. if it can generally be anonymous that'd be nice) so I'll probably share through Google Drive and call it a day. And maybe this button will simply be a link to the drive folder.

If you're wondering, the information I have so far amounts to-- my list of a few hundred plants that are worth considering as native specimen for the piedmont region, with plenty of details on their preferred conditions; a collection of plant guilds and combinations that might make sense, obviously still a huge work in progress; and a bunch of random thoughts on how to get started on a sustainable garden, i.e. water-wise, wildlife-supporting, and ecologically responsible. 

Anyway, it's all still a work in progress, but I hope this gives an idea of what's going on here. If you want to join this postboard, there are no real rules. Just speak your mind and work towards the "good". We'll figure out what that really is together.

#meta #website