Spending the teens in my 30’s: a Decade-in-Review

As the 2010’s comes to a close, I’ve been mulling around in my head a “decade-in-review” post for a while now, like I did in 2010. I’ve been putting it off for a bit, even posting some mostly unrelated stuff in the meantime. This is largely due to the fact that there are certain dominating events in my life, especially in the latter half of this past decade, that I’m still not super comfortable discussing on a public blog, though any true review of my life in the 2010’s would be incomplete without at least mentioning some of them. Still, I’m going to give it my best shot, and hopefully won’t step on any toes in the process. So with no further ado, let’s turn the ol’ clock back to the mythical, mystical year that began this decade:

2010

My final year of college was far overdue. I had been attending university classes in some form or another for the entirety of the 2000’s (barring two years off for my LDS mission) and, with an internship at a marketing co-op company in the winter and my final class in the spring (a Persuasive Writing class where I wrote this), I was finally done! I may have still been a bachelor, but I was also…a Bachelor!

2010 also saw Poison Ivy Mysteries begin to find its footing. Annelise had started the murder mystery company in 2009, and 2010 saw the writing and production of several new shows, including a sci-fi show, a saucy film noir show, and a medieval wizard show, though for her the year was defined by her pregnancy and delivery of her son Ian, who, sadly, was born premature and only lived for a few days.

After graduating from BYU in August 2010, I moved back home with my parents to prepare to seek a full-time career in the music industry. I was still working at the marketing co-op under Nate Drew, writing bits of commercial music for advertisements, trade show videos, and so on, in addition to working on my first album: a complement to my friend Johnathan’s ABC Monsters book he was working on. In early December I posted on my blog a bunch of the music I had written that year, which was quite fortuitous, because it turns out that those were the only surviving pieces of nearly everything I’d worked on that year. Over Christmas weekend, my workplace was broken into and somebody stole a bunch of music-related equipment in the building. All of Nate’s and my computers, keyboards, microphones, interfaces — all gone. The equipment could eventually be replaced, but all of the dozens of projects I had worked so hard on the entire year, including the ABC Monsters stuff, was irreplaceable. All I had left were the demo MP3 tracks of the ABC Monsters that I had sent to Johnathan and the stuff I had posted online in that post I linked to earlier.

It was devastating, and even now, ten years later, I don’t think I’ve still fully recovered from that blow. But we’ll get into the aftermath soon enough.

Oh, also I crashed my grandmother’s car into a wall and totaled it. She wasn’t in it, though, so it’s all good.