Rambling Notes

Bad Journalism

2010-11-30T13:08:00.003-05:00

The problem with going into the major I have is that I now analyze and observe everything and make some type of critique about it. Today I read an article titled, "Family: New Jersey Man Serving 7 Years for Guns He Owned Legally."

If you read through the article, it never actually says he's serving 7 years for gun possession. He's serving 7 years on "weapons charges" and "having 'large capacity' magazines and hollow-point bullets." This journalist obviously is an advocate of not having gun control laws that he's willing to put his own twist on the story and making it seem that he's serving a sentence for something he's doing legally. He did do something illegally and it's those things that he's serving for.

I'm sure the journalist is also looking for a headline that puts things in such an extreme light that people will actually read it. If it had read "Family: New Jersey Man Serving 7 Years for Illegal Possession of 'Large Capacity' Magazines and Hollow-point Bullets," nobody would have batted an eye outside of the NRA.

Another concern I have involves the irrelevance of the judges ruling in another case that the circumstances border on absurd. How in the world does a police officer sticking his penis in five calves' mouths matter? All you are doing by mentioning this is trying to demean those who attempt to uphold the law by police and judges in your attempt to give credance to your view that law is bad in this case.

Then there's the information that he didn't provide, such as how the police were able to search his vehicle. Did they have a warrant or did he give them permission to search it? If she called 911 after he left, and the police traced the call, they would have stopped by the mother's house, not the son driving to wherever he was going. There's too much incomplete information to make an informed guess on what actually happened and how it should be interpreted.

I do wish journalism would be more objective and complete and allow individuals to come up with their own interpretation of the events that happen rather than just trying to feed us their view.

Money

2010-04-08T10:26:00.002-04:00

I don't understand how single people can have a full-time job and manage to have absolutely no money left over for anything else or emergency situations.

Pets

2010-02-22T17:35:00.002-05:00

As of late I've noticed a lot of the people that I tend to associate with have a tendency to talk a lot about their pets and animals in general. They'll talk all day about their pets and their personalities, quirks, general misbehavor with a general feeling of love towards them. I don't have too much of a problem with this. I'm not much of a pet person myself, and find them more impractical than anything else, but I won't begrudge anyone about their pets.

What does cause concern for me is that they use pets to replace meaningful relationships with human beings. Their general view of humanity is a cynical and bitter thing. They would much rather develop a relationship with a lesser species than those of their kind. Now I'm not saying all pet-lovers are like that, but it is sad to see pets take the place of what should be more important and more fulfilling.

Spending Less vs. Saving vs. Earning

2010-01-23T16:02:00.002-05:00

I've always had a problem with advertising saying you save money when you buy their product. Technically, you're spending less money since the money is already yours to use as you please. Well, today I saw something saying you earn money when you buy their product.

As if I didn't have a problem with it before...

Letter to sister

2009-12-21T14:18:00.005-05:00

Last week, one of the members of the ward mentioned me as being quirky. Well, yesterday I decided I would write my sister who's on a mission, and happened to be in quite the quirky mood as I wrote it. Read at your own risk.

Dear _________,

Due to less than subtle hints of immaterial content by a certain member of a notoriously conceited clan, your most humble, yet awesome older sibling, has consented to the implied demand. Yet why would this player of pianos, tooter of tubas, and musician of notes give way to this most preposterous demand? The reasons are as many as the thoughts of a certain bachelored brother who stands (perhaps slouches is a better term) between us in time, namely three.

As this dear brother writes his pretentious ponderings in pencil, he reminisces of an earlier occasion, in which the roles of said brother and sister are reversed. In fact, the reversed positions bear a striking resemblance; for each, it was a landmark in their lives, venturing out on their own, exiled from their previous lives by choice (or perhaps insanity.) All physical interaction with those whom they know and love or maybe hate is limited to the meager connection of written words. For it was for the brother and the sister the first Christmas holiday, when those yearning feelings for a familial touch are felt most keenly, and one checks daily for the red plastic flag signaling the hopeful arrival of an envelope containing expressions of love from those whom you know closest and most intimately. The said envelope arrives for one brother, and in anticipation opens it, starved because of the ascetic demands he has placed upon himself. Oh look, he thinks, they made a homemade card, how thoughtful. What a way to go! Instead of randomly selecting the first premade expression of love from the shelves of Hallmark cards, they went through all of the effort to create a card just for me.

He opens the card wondering what words of wisdom his wonderful womb-mates have written. To this day, even with the progression of time, he remembers every word of the prose produced by Pigeon. It read:

There are those who love you

for your talents and service;

There are those who love you

just for being you;

And then there is your family,

those who love you because they have to.

Merry Christmas.

Oh what shame! In place of what he expected to be words of encouragement and love is a forced recognition of shared blood. Just how cruel is this heathen sister towards her innocent brother?

Yet now the positions are reversed, and what should the brother do? Shall he follow the vile vixen's verbiage as a vindictive villain with revenge? Shall he write of the forced encumbrance and duty that comes from familial responsibilities? Could this be why he responds to his sister's request for hand-written letters?

Or does he take the high road? Irregardless of the ingratitude of insensitive individuals, does he respond with love unfeigned and brotherly kindness, thereby proving that his righteousness is greater than his sisters?

Yet neither of these reasons seem to feel right. Perhaps there is a third reason to match the third thought of the thick-headed one.

Was the sister truly forced to make a card for the lonesome brother? The brother forced to write the sister? The relationship is one which neither can manipulate. They will always be brother and sister. Any interaction through card or letter is icing on the cake solidifying that relationship even more, irregardless of the callousness of the contents. Attention is a good thing, right? Well okay, maybe the ant would like a little less attention from the boy with the magnifying glass, but in this case, attention seems a good thing. Even with statements of supposed forced love, the undercurrent seems to be that it's not forced, but more suppressed by the stoic nature of this particular family.

And so, Sister of Socialishness Nature, know that We of the Stoic Nature, love you not only by the forced relationship of our surname, but also for your talents and service, and for just being you, even though we will rarely say it. Enjoy the Christmas season and your birthday.

Love,

Bro.

Accidents

2009-12-10T20:48:00.003-05:00

In the two and a half years that I have been in Alabama, I have now been involved in four accidents. In contrast to this, my sister in Houston, who drives much more than I do, has been involved in zero.

Although if you break it down, two of those accidents didn't involve my car, but my bike, and one of the times it was my car, it was parked and somebody hit it. This fourth one was the only one that was two moving cars, and I was able to react fast enough that it only scraped paint on my vehicle and did just a little damage to the other driver's vehicle.

I've been lucky that none of these accidents have been all that serious or even needed a police report filled out for them. That being said, the only accident that I managed to get hurt was the only one that was my fault. Not only was I at fault, but I was riding a bike at the time. Now road rules for bikes are circumspect at best, as most cities have no clue what to do with bikes, and here is no different. You would think this would likely be the cause for the wreck, but no. I was in the road with the flow of traffic, was checking traffic behind me, and rear ended a car. Yes, I was going fast enough to rear end a car on my bike. Busted up my knee, but given a few weeks, if was fine.

To date, I've now been hit by or hit a car while biking five times. Less than half were my fault, and one involved a parked car. That would be the other accident that was my fault.

I must say, overall, I've been really lucky in most of the accidents I have, but I really would like to be involved in fewer accidents.

Polite dinner conversation

2009-11-02T14:45:00.002-05:00

At a dinner yesterday with the YSA, the topic of getting rid of mice came up. One of the girls had to deal with a mouse, and had caught it using a sticky pad, and needed to get rid of it. They decided to drown the creature. One individual thought this was a pretty inhumane way of killing it, and wondered what methods others would have chosen. All your normal methods of poison, drowning, traps, shovel, etc.

While this conversation was going on, I was reminiscing of my childhood when I had an older brother who needed to get rid of some mice. His methods were rather... inventive. In my usual laconic manner and general weirdness, I added my one word to the conversation...

"Microwave."

The varying looks of shock and disgust were a sight to behold. Not sure what they think of me, well, okay, I'm sure I know what they were thinking of me, but it was worth it to see their expressions. Wish I had a picture.

Positive reinforcement for negative behavior

2009-09-27T16:04:00.003-04:00

As I've moved around the past several years, inevitably, I'll play for primary. Right now I'm only doing it temporarily, as they wanted somebody decent playing for the primary program in October. (There's nobody called to it right now, so one poor unfortunate was playing the melody and that's it.) It seems that none of the primary children are ever taught how to behave, but today was even worse than usual.

The kids were acting up way more than usual today. Instead of trying to get them to behave during sharing time, they interupted the lesson to sing a "wiggle" song. Do you realize what you just taught them? You just taught them that if they act up in class, then they will be rewarded by being able to get up and move around to some song rather than participating in a lesson.

Football

2009-09-19T14:45:00.002-04:00

I don't mind football every now and again. But is there really a need to revolve everyday life around football to the detriment of other areas. Keeping the library open only four hours does nothing to help me with thesis research and studying for comprehensive exams. 13 minutes left...

Couldn't sleep

2009-08-20T13:28:00.002-04:00

I have this problem quite often and it's often very frustrating for me. Last night wasn't. I couldn't sleep largely because I was too excited. Now why in the world would I be excited? I get to start teaching students today. I'm glad I have found a profession I really enjoy.

Lie at a funeral

2009-08-15T13:00:00.002-04:00

I was playing for a funeral and having never met the guy who died, was wondering if all the good things they said about the guy were true. In thinking of my own funeral, I just want to make sure I live my life such that when they announce all the good things about me, it won't be a lie.

An Observation

2009-07-23T15:07:00.002-04:00

Usually I run around 7 or 8 in the morning, but for several weeks I've run at 6. For those hardcore morning people, there's so few people out that most of them will nod or say hello in passing. There's one sub-group of that group that has never aknowledged my presence. The girls in their 20s, (people with headphones on as well, but I can understand that). The old ladies out walking said hello, , the middle aged runners said hi, the landscaping crews avoiding the heat of the day say hi, most of the younger guys said hi, not one of the younger girls has ever even nodded.

Interesting the society we live in.

Thoughts on a home

2009-04-03T17:58:00.002-04:00

One of the more interesting observations by my sister as I was visiting family members over spring break I decided to make a note of it. Sometime in the afternoon or early evening, I eventually just crashed on the couch and fell asleep. Her four kids were down in the basement playing, until the call of brownies brought them up in all their chaos and glory. What did I do with this new and loud obtrusion in my solitude? I slept right through it. Now let's rewind one day when I was with another brother and his three kids. Same situation plays out. Again, I sleep straight through it all. Both of those naps were great naps. The chaos and noise level of kids doesn't bother me at all, in fact, I would almost make the supposition that it helps me relax and sleep (at least during the day.)

Having grown up with nine siblings, this is something I'm certainly used to dealing with. Things will be chaotic and noisy, and I'm sure there were many times when siblings and myself would hide out in our rooms just for a break from it all. But that is what a home is to me. I think that's what makes it such a comfortable environment for me to relax in. It is a home of love and learning and safety. A refuge from work, school, and anything else that is going on. I'm sure it takes effort to produce this type of environment, an effort that I would say is worth it. It's certainly not an environment I currently live in. An efficiency apartment by myself (and 12 or so instruments) doesn't really give me an environment that feels satisfying. Yes, I have most of the things I could want in there as far as matieralistic things go in there (obviously I don't want a lot, for those who have seen my place) but that is very miniscule compared to who I could share it with. Large families have always had there appeal to me. You can share stuff with way more than one person. You have more support from home with the more family members there are.

Anyway, just some musings I've had on families recently.

The woman is always right

2009-02-08T14:38:00.002-05:00

My brother has requested that I actually post on my blog. While it no longer serves any real purpose for me, I don't mind posting a couple of things every now and again. So here ya go, bro.

Several weeks ago, a group of us were playing a game called Loaded Questions. I won't explain how the game works, but one particular question that was asked was what should a guy never do is a relationship. As typical with me, I'm going to find some witty intelegent way of answering the question, so I turned the above statement on its head. My response to the question was that a guy should never say he's right when he is right. This statement got me thinking a little about this phrase, "The woman is always right." The more I think about it, the less I like the consequences of what the above statement means.

First, as I did above and turned it on its head to say that even when the guy it right, he shouldn't say that he is right. In other words, you're asking the guy in the relationship to lie to you. If you're asking the guy to lie to you, how does that foster any sort of trust in the relationship. You would think that with this intimate and personal of a relationship with somebody, you would want trust to be a core value of that relationship, and yet we undermine it unknowingly with a phrase like this one.

This phrase is hardly a phrase that sponsers communication as well. I'm sure one would look at this quote and asume that it's just talking about little things here and there. But once this pattern of lying about little things to keep the peace is established, when it comes around to important issues, what's to stop that pattern from continueing. How far will you continue to lie to keep the peace, instead of bringing up an issue that only will worsen as time continues.

Anyway, just some random thoughts.

Priesthood in Action

2008-09-28T22:44:00.003-04:00

This past weekend I was able to lend a hand with the cleanup efforts of the hurricanes that have passed through the Southern States. While you hear about the cleanup efforts and the involvement of the church in those efforts, it's a totally different perspective to actually participate in it.

Friday I gathered all the supplies I thought I would need. Food, bedding, tent, water, toiletries. I brought everything that I would need to be self-sufficient for a few days. I met up with the rest of the Priesthood from my ward, and we headed down to southern Louisianna. We arrived around 11 o clock at a large Baptist church that had been gutted and was being used as headquarters for this operation and set up tents, and crashed for the night.

We woke up in the morning, got ready, ate breakfast, and gathered for assignments and gathering supplies to help fix roofs, cut trees, and deliver goods to people. We had a total of 1,200 people present and ready to help. The most impressive part to me was how this all came to be organized.

Martin Luther King III called up the local bishop for help last Monday. The bishop in turn sends the call for help up through the lines of the Priesthood. The area authority of the Southern States is the main go-to guy with all the relief and cleanup. Elder Anderson calls up the Stake Presidents, who in turn call the Bishops and Branch Presidents, and arranges for the supplies to be in place for us to use. The Bishops and Branch Presidents call their Elder's Quorum Presidents and High Priest Group Leaders. They call the Priesthood members of their quorums and get the word out on when and where. 1,200 people answered this call. This was all arranged in less than a span of five days, excluding the one day a week when all are present at once on Sunday.

This is just amazing to me. The scary part is that this was a small effort compared to the immediate response after the hurricanes of a force of 7,500 Priesthood members. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints already has the infostructure in place to react to any disaster with an immediate response. These Priesthood members know exactly who they need to report to and who they need to tell to get things rolling quickly. Very few organizations in the world can produce this type of response in an organized fashion as the LDS church can. Perhaps even more spectacular is that this is in the South, where Mormons certainly are a minority, yet on a given weekend, we can produce 1,200 people in a town to help out with relief.

This is not to say we didn't have help. Many local churches helped out as well by providing us the information of those who needed help, facilities to camp and store supplies, and local knowledge in general to help us out.

Our bishop picked up our orders for the day. Again, the pattern is in place, and everybody is already divided into groups by virtue of the Priesthood and their wards. We grabbed an order that involved cutting down some of the more difficult trees to cut down. We have two people who are basically professionals at dropping difficult trees, and have it down to an art form. We had a little over 20 people from our ward. We headed to our first destination. It was a Baptist church that had some leaks in the roof, pretty steep. Here we met a local Catholic Priest who knew the area well, and was our guide on where to go. You can't really have 20+ people patching one roof, so we divided into a couple of groups. One to do roofing, and another to take care of trees. I was on roofing crew.

From the church, we headed to several more roofs that had leaks. We patched those up, nothing really too bad. Basically, we had some large tarps, cover the leaks as best as possible, then nail down boards to hold the tarps on. Not great for roofs, since the nails will create holes, but since all these roofs have to be replaced anyway, we're just doing a temporary fix for them. One place, they had a tree that needed to be removed, as it had fallen over. Fortunately, it wasn't on the house or in another akward spot. Although since my crew wasn't as chainsaw savy as the other crew, we did get it stuck, and needed the other group to help us out breifly. They finished up that job, as we went to grab lunch. The church we fixed, prepared a great lunch of red beans and rice and sausage for us. So finished that, then back out to get some more roofs. First on our list was an old gentleman who lived alonge, and had had two strokes. This roof was in pretty bad shape. We covered it all except for the carport. Not quite as steep, and at this point was starting to get a handle of walking decently on roofs. Headed off to do another roof. This one a little steeper, but only needed one large tarp. Little more comfortable on this roof, but had other buildings nearby to jump onto if you started sliding at all. Especially wearing tennis shoes. The lady said there was a second leak on the other side of the house, but all the shingles looked good. We deduced that the wind pushed it underneith the ledge and it got in that way. We were running low on slats of wood to nail the tarps down, so we were trying to be as conservative as possible with what we were laying down.

A lady on the street asked if we could come help her, since a tree had fallen on her house. We headed down to look at it. She had several large cedar trees in her yard. One had fallen onto the house. We originally thought to just pull it off, but didn't have any chains or ropes to pull, so we decided to cut it down as we could. We climbed up on the roof and removed all of the small limbs and debree from the roof. Spent quite a bit of time doing that. Found out that the tree had caught on a pipe. Had we tried pulling that tree down, we would have ripped a huge hole in the roof. We cut it down to that pipe and the tree fell the rest of the way on its own. We cut that whole tree apart and moved it all to the side of the road. Nice smell. A couple of the guys cut off some circular pieces of cedar for keepsakes. There's really a lot of good wood going to waste down there that'll probably just be trashed. I think we went and did another roof after that.

We left to join the other crew, as they had a huge job going on where they were at. Four large trees had fallen on one house. It was in bad shape. We got there in time to see them working on the last two largest trees. The back portion of the roof had caved in, and the diameter of one of those trees was the largest that our experienced tree cutting people had ever worked on. These pieces couldn't be moved by people, so we had to chain the pieces up to a truck and drag them out of there to the front. As he was cutting one of these large pieces down, it happened to land on a can of purple paint. That exploded and spewed paint all over one of the local members who was helping us. We finally got things more or less cleaned up in that area. If I remember right, that was the last of the work we were able to do on Saturday.

The Catholic Priest invited us to the Catholic Student Center to shower and watch the Alabama-Georgia game. So we went to grab clean clothes, headed over there, ate dinner, watched Alabama cream Georgia, and shower. We needed it. When you can smell yourself, you know it's bad. Headed back to camp after the game and crashed.

Up at 6:30 in the morning and ready for another day. Met at 7:00 for sacrament, with the local bishop conducting and Elder Anderson presiding. Most of us were in work clothes, only about 6 in white shirts and ties.

After the sacrament, headed out for tackle some more trees. The first place had about four large trees that needed to come down. We didn't need to transport the wood, so it was just cutting, that effectively eliminated most of us from doing anything. One part of our group went to do more roofing. The rest of us hung around till we were called on to hang on a rope to pull a tree down. Afterwards, headed to one more house. We only had an hour left and a large tree with plenty of branches, so I figured we needed to hurry as fast as possible, so I went into work mode rather quickly. One of the guys with a chainsaw in front on me cutting them, I'd grab it to make room and toss it over my shoulder. We're talking fairly large branches. I don't think everyone else apprieciated having large branches tossed at them, but they'll get over it. They more or less just made fun of me for it. One guy asking if I'd ever been part of a demo crew with as much damage as I was doing to this stuff ripping and yanking it all out and apart. Good thing they never handed me a chainsaw. Finished that yard and headed back to pack up camp and head home.

All in all a good experience. It's nice to see the Priesthood in action and fulfilling those responsibilities. Actually doing it has made me see what this side of the church is more about. Often, within our own wards we don't see all that does happen within the church.

Half Marathon

2007-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I ran my first half marathon. I also managed to make it in under 2 hours which I'm rather proud of. I had two brothers doing the full marathon and they managed to do rather well. One in 4:20, the other in 4:10.

It's an interesting environment among runners. The atmosphere was great, the weather was perfect. You had people running in random costumes, bands playing on the side of the road, others cheering you on throughout the course, officers attempting to direct traffic. There were 5346 people who finished the half and 1923 people finished the full.

So we all line up for the race according to what you think you're projected time would be. We gathered around the 3:55 pace-setter. The air horn goes off for the start of the race, and... we just sit there. Gotta love huge races. By the time we start the race the time is 5 minutes 30 seconds. They do have the shoe chips to record your personal time. Even then, you can't run the pace you want as crowded as it is. So it's still shuffling along till there's enough room to maneuver.

My brothers and I all started off together, and stayed together for the first bit of the race. Just in front of us was the Elvis impersonator running in full costume. I'm sure he had to be frying by the time he finished. He did stop for a little while and danced in front of the gentleman singing some of Elvis' music at about mile 2.5. My brothers and I were still together at this point to. Once we hit mile 3, I decided to fore go any water and pulled ahead from my other two brothers. I don't think I got too far ahead of them. At the 10K mark my time ended up being 53:40. Crushed my previous 10K time of an hour two minutes. My brothers were 11 seconds behind my at that point. In between 7 and 8 they caught up to me and we ran a mile or so together. I hit my wall at mile 9.5. I just couldn't get my legs muscles to respond as well. My next two miles were pretty brutal. Slight uphill and couldn't muscle my way through it. My pace significantly dropped at that point. About mile 12, it started a slight decline, so I was able to pick up the pace and finish with a time of 1:57:40. My brothers were about two minutes ahead of me at that point, and had yet another 13 miles to finish. I'm not quite up to that yet. I'll do a couple more halfs before I try a full. Overall, I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to some more.

Just a couple of things learned about races:
1. I need to learn how to run and drink water from a cup at the same time. Most of the water sloshed down the front of my shirt. Not a great idea for the first day of December. I finally gave up trying to drink and run and would walk a short distance while drinking.
2. Luckily, I took my brother's advice and just wore shorts and T-shirt to run in. Had I worn my long-sleeved jacket, I would have been miserable. So good thing I didn't experience that lesson. Even after I finished my run, I was in short and T-shirt for the next 2 hours and the weather didn't bother me.
3. Do not wear socks with holes in them. Most of my socks have worn out and I really need to purchase some new ones. As I removed my sock I found a huge, and I'm talking largest I've ever had in my life, blister on the big toe of my left foot. I look at my sock and find a hole in it just as large as the blister. 13 miles of a shoe rubbing against your toe is not smart.
4. Beer is available for runners after they finish.
5. Those who finish first look worse off than those who finished later. As I watched all the marathon runners come in, quite a few under 3.5 hours had their faces contorted in pain, people helping them walk in. One guy I know would have dropped had somebody not been there to support him. Those runners later on looked tired but not so completely dead or in pain as those earlier.
6. Runners are friendly people. Quite a few would thank the police officers directing traffic during the race as they passed by.
7. Most people talk the first 3 miles. This drops significantly afterwards. The thing I didn't get were those on mile 13 still carrying on a conversation. If you can do that, you should have running a quicker pace.

All in all, fun stuff. But for now, I don't think I'll run till next year.

Goodbye House (and home)

2007-10-15T21:58:00.000-04:00

I don't write often enough, but I will post things every now and again. The biggest news being that we sold our house. My parents have owned this house for around 28 years. I spent all of my youth there. I've used home as a place for recuperation and relaxation when college life gets stressful, and now it's gone. Yes there is some emotional attachment to this house and all the memories there. In reality, I don't think I'll ever head back to that area again, which is sad. There is nothing left there for me. My dad and brother still live in that area, but are not centrally located with the rest of my family members. All of the possessions that I had at home are now with me or thrown out. The house is going to have some of the same furniture, but the walls and curtains will be different, and the basement is going to be carpetted, so it won't feel like home, even though we have a standing invitation by the family we sold it to, to drop by any time we like.

The thing I dislike most about this is that I have no place I can call home anymore. The closest will probably be my sister's house, since I have used her place as a rufuge when I needed it as well. My efficiancy apartment is not home, nor will it ever be, or any place I live on my own. At least I do have part of home with me. I was able to take the piano with me, which will be well used, as long as the neighbors don't mind. But my house and home are now gone. Sad day.

Destruction through too much

2007-09-02T22:40:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm now into the second week of graduate school. While I am doing this I am also working as much as possible. Last week I worked 39 hours plus studying, reports, school, church activities. This really doesn't bother me. In fact, I'm enjoying myself a lot. I love being so far behind schedule I don't have a chance to think. I love being what most people would call stressed out. I jokingly thought to myself before school started that if ever I went a week going from 8 in the morning to two in the morning with no breaks, then I consider myself having enough on my plate.

Already my schedule has filled up fast. classes from 9 to 12, work from 1-6, library to study till I actually finish or the place closes(1 A.M.) On top of that I have church callings, institute Tuesday nights, meetings Thursday night, and whatever else happens to crop up. Saturdays I work the full day, and unfortunately, I can't study at the library because they close for football games.

As I do all this, a part of me really wonders if this is detrimental to my health. I've gotten to the point where I dislike wasting time on things that don't matter, regardless of whether I enjoy them or not. Of course my time wasted has severely dropped since school started, but it still bugs me, because I think, I could be doing this or that right now which is much more constructive. I mean, if I took all the time that I spend playing games over the summer, I could have learned quite a bit of German, which I need to do. I get too frustrated at myself for the what-ifs as of late. Will I continue to push myself harder and harder to eliminate unconstructive time, regardless of how small a block of time that may be? There were a couple of days last week, I actually started getting lightheaded from eliminating lunch and dinner, and pushing myself till 11:00 or later. Part of me just wants to test my body and push it to the limits and beyond just to see what will happen. This is probably destructive, yet I'm still curious and enjoying my days too much right now, and I don't think I'm pushing the destruction of my body quite yet. I'm actually annoyed at Labor Day because the library is closed and I can't work that day, so I've got to find more creative ways to get done what I need to get done.

First week in a new place

2007-05-30T13:06:00.000-04:00

Moving is always an interesting experience. Since my mom has died, it's made it an even more interesting experience. My mom would make sure I would have everything prepared before actually moving to a new place, and that makes it not near as fun as what I ended up doing.

To tell the truth I did try as least a little to get things set up in Alabama. I was able to find out who the bishop from 2004 was and contact him. He gave me some information of a member who was renting apartments. So I figured this would be pretty easy. I called him up and never could get anybody to answer. This happened for several days. Figuring that I would have someplace at least to sleep by Monday night, I set a job interview for Tuesday morning in Alabama. Well, it was Monday day, and I still hadn't gotten ahold of that guy, so I decided I'd try to find his work number online. I googled his named, found the company he worked for, looked up the company's website and phone number and gave him a call. I asked for him, and the reply I got was that he would be on vacation another week and there was no way to reach him. So I called the original contact I had and never got through. Not looking good. I was moving to Alabama, leaving on Monday, had no contacts, and a job interview.

Well, left Monday night at 9:00 P.M. I figured that I'd take my time driving there and just pull over and sleep when I needed to. About 2:30 A.M. I finally pulled over and fell asleep. I woke up a couple hours later and found that there were two cars on each side of me who did the same thing. Got up and drove the rest of the way. Drove to where my interview was going to be, found the place with a little difficulty. Why in the world would they have two different street signs posted for one street. I read the wrong street sign and passed it a couple of times before I realized it was the right one. Now that I knew where it was, I went ahead and found the church, because I figured that'd be as good a place as any to crash and sleep in my car. Did the interview that morning, basically just the initial meeting, nothing too much more than that, and said to come back on Friday.

Now time to do apartment searching. Went to a grocery store, picked up an apartment guide, headed to the library to research in the newspaper and use the computer for more resources. Spent most of the day calling from a pay phone trying to set up times to see apartments. Set up a couple appointments, and then a couple of callbacks, but they were all for the next day. Figured I would be spending the night in my car again, and it had been a couple of days since I had the chance to shower. Had to look in a phone book at the library and found where the YMCA was. Still had my membership there, even though it was for a MN YMCA, I still figured I could at least get in. So I got in, worked on my shoulder a little bit, then finally showered. Got back into my car and headed over to the church parking lot for yet another night of sleeping awkwardly across the front seat with the hand break stuck in my back.

On Wednesday morning, the family history center opened. I was still asleep in my car. I slept from 9 to 9, but that was a very interrupted sleep. I was so excited to actually see somebody at the church and make contact and hopefully find a place to crash for at least a day or two. Well, they just see some random car from Kentucky, packed completely full of stuff, with a random bald guy pop out all excited to introduce himself. At this point sleeping in a car for a couple of days and not having a place to call home was pretty grating. Well they let me use the phone in the church to make phone calls so I didn't have to use a payphone. Made my calls and started attending appointments. The first appointment didn't even show, scratch that one off, next one was a callback to check if they had something available, third one was for holes in the wall very close to campus. Cheap holes in the wall. The last one was a callback to a man that was renting part of a house, and was the one I really wanted, but he wouldn't have it ready till the first of the month, so my only prospect was the hole in the wall. Not too excited about that, but it's better than sleeping in a car.

That night showed up at the church. Talked to the bishop for a couple of seconds. He asked if I needed anything, and me being the stubborn and independent person that I am said no. We were the last two to leave the parking lot, so I went to my vehicle, drove off, and after the bishop had left, returned to the parking lot for yet another night of attempting to sleep on seat belts and the hand brake. Not particularly fun.

Woke up and filled out the application for the hole in the wall and got the paperwork into their office and the first months rent paid. I am now the proud renter of a hole close by campus, which hadn't even had the floors cleaned, at least everything else was. It was messy enough that I threw everything into a corner, laid out my air mattress that I've been using as a bed for the past year, and that was it.

Friday, I showed up for my second interview, which they ran me through a couple of repairs, just to see how I did with it. Finished those up and then I took off to New Orleans to help finish some houses with the priesthood. It's amazing how many houses down there still haven't been restored and moved into. A ton were still empty. Well, helped finish two houses, mainly trim and doors, counter tops, bathroom fixtures, etc. Arrived back home on Sunday night.

Monday, had to go buy and broom, dustpan, and vacuum, and spent the entire day cleaning everything in the apartment. Finally, I had things situated to a somewhat livable environment.

So in one week, I was homeless three nights, spent one night in my apartment, then slept in a church two nights, and one more night in my apartment. Personally, I don't care too much for sleeping in my car, and hopefully, I won't have that problem again. Not fun, but definitely a different experience.

Someday, someday

2007-05-02T17:22:00.000-04:00

Obviously I haven't written in a while. That's the problem with having no computer with internet in my apartment. I attempt to sleep during the night and since that usually doesn't happen, I've got something or other running through my mind that I would like to write about, but without a computer at home, it doesn't happen, and by the next day, I'm usually busy with something else or forget about it. At this moment I have nothing on my mind, so this is just an update saying I'm alive(if anybody actually still checks this site out.)

Time well spent, but at the wrong time

2007-02-28T18:04:00.000-05:00

I was expecting to take two tests this weekend over music history and theory as entrance exams into masters programs. I planned on my talent for theory to do well on that exam, and spent 25+ hours studying music history. Come to find out that I'm not taking the history exam this weekend, but at a future date. That means that I should have been studying theory for 25+ instead of history, and then rocked the exam. Oh well, when I do take a history exam, at least I'll be ready.

Piano lessons

2007-02-08T18:23:00.000-05:00

I finally am teaching at least one person piano lessons. Granted that's not a lot of success. But I'll take it for the time being. One of the things I've always enjoyed about music was being able to motivate and excite others about music. When this kid started taking lessons from me, he was probably just as motivated as much as any other kid. We've only had two and a half lessons, and this kid is really excited about playing the piano. It's enjoyable to see some fruits from your efforts. Now if I can just keep him that excited and continuing to learn what he can and enjoy music consistently, I will be very happy. He actually came to his last lesson with all of his music memorized, I may have to give him more stuff to learn. We shall see.

Snow

2007-01-22T19:21:00.000-05:00

Now that I've lived in an environment where snow is the norm, I've learned a few things.

Driving on snow in the North isn't near as bad as snow in the South(when it actually does snow.) Our joke in Kentucky was that if you spit on the road and it freezes, they close down everything. If there is a slight dusting, they do close down all the schools. I'm beginning to understand why, now that I live in Minnesota. Snow up here has friction. It's easy to drive on snow up here. It's cold enough that snow doesn't melt into a slick surface. It stays fairly gritty and dry. It does not do that in Kentucky. If it snows, it's going to be wet snow and slick. Much less friction is present. Especially if you've got a little bit of freezing rain in there as well. Just the thought for the day(or the way my blog is going, for the month.)

Uh oh...

2007-01-07T06:29:00.000-05:00

It's 6:30 Sunday morning. I haven't packed, haven't done grad school applications, haven't gone to bed yet, plan on hitting church, driving back 12 hours to Minnesota and make it for 8 A.M. classes on Monday. Somewhere I'm going to need sleep in there so I don't crash on the way up. If I leave after taking a nap after church, that'll put me at about 4 or 5, which means I'll be getting into Minnesota at about 5 A.M. in the morning, in time for a three hour nap before class. Wow, I'm starting this semester off great. Even worse than last semester when I went up to Minnesota and didn't have a place to live for the first week and a half. At least then I was prepared.

Humbled

2007-01-01T05:04:00.000-05:00

The past week my family has done a folk dance school. I ended up taking Extraordinary Contras, Beginning English Country Dancing, Advanced Dance Band, and Longsword Dancing. All in all, it was a very fun week.

We had the advance dance band start off with a waltz and then a jig. I played keyboards for them. It went alright as far as that goes, nothing fancy. It's been eight years since I've done improv keyboard, and that was in rock bands, jazz bands, and show choir, not folk.

Well they had the New Year's Eve Dance, which lasted till about 12:30 and then a party at somebody's house who happens to have a fairly large dance floor in their house. I arrived somewhere after 1:00. They had somebody playing piano for them for the first couple of songs. I was sitting there talking about music education and preschoolers to a preschool teacher and giving her ideas for some structured games involving music or songs that preschoolers could do. They suddenly called out to see if any piano players were in the house. Since this isn't a style I'm familiar with, I reluctantly held up my hand and said that I'd be able to play, just slap the chords in front of my and I'll do it.

So a few minutes later I frantically searching through three songs they gave me to play for the first dance. Okay..., managed to hack out the chords in the appropriate rhythms, but nothing to fancy. Just straight chords.

The next one was a little better. The caller wanted Turkey in the Straw. Very basic chord structures, no problem. Gaining a little confidence and goofing off a little more as we begin it. After a while, and everyone's still dancing, the fiddler gets bored and calls out B - D major. I barely caught the D major part and starting hacking out chords in d major.

At first I thought they wanted the same song, just in a different key. Well, a few measures later, I realized that they were no longer playing anything relating to Turkey in the Straw. I was the only rhythm player at the time, no guitar, no bass, no drums. It was all me, and I don't even know what song we're playing. I just know it's the B part, which I don't have, and it's in D major, and the chords for what was previously played do not work.

Time to put the aural theory skills to the test. I get to listen to a melody which I've never heard before, figure out the chord structure on the fly and play in a style that I'm unfamiliar with. All the melody and harmony players either knew the piece or have the chops to play the song in whatever key he had just called. So here I am clunking out random chords in an effort to make it somewhat okay. It's still sounding pretty awful and my ear couldn't pull the chords out and make it possible for me to play them. I finally call out to find out what in the world I'm supposed to be playing. Well, come to find out that the harmonic progression pretty much changes every beat, and the guy calling out chord changes to me is telling me right on the beat, which doesn't help when it changes the next beat, so if anything, I was playing the right chord on the wrong beat. After the wind player who was trying to help me realized that this wasn't working, he quickly pulled out the music for me to follow. This helped tremendously, but I still had issues with my hands positions wanting to play more in G than in D, that didn't help my A7's at all, among other things. At least through the whole dance I was able to keep the rhythm going for the most part.

Finally the piece ended and the original piano player returned for the next song and just tore the piano up playing compared to whatever I was doing on the keyboard. While nobody but me and the other musicians noticed this(from a musician's point of view), it was still a pretty humiliating experience, but perhaps throwing me straight into the fire is the best way for me to learn and eventually play in more bands, and hopefully with more ease than that.

Time for bed. Blah.

The Curse of the tuba player

2006-12-23T16:08:00.000-05:00

I've been feeling very music majorish the past several days, and was talking with other students in my class about your typical stuff. I was mentioning the fact that I had a theory teacher who showed us the overtone series and was able to hold a pitch and position his mouth in such a way that he could get whatever note from the overtone series he wanted. He had started with the fundamental then went up and down, then pointed to which number in the overtone series he was singing.

I was over at a friend's house and when we were discussing it, he pulled out Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, and guest soloist, who sang in that type of fasion. He would drone one note and then arrange his mouth in ways to get the overtones out and did a melody over his drone that way.

In these two experiences, I've finally found a weakness in my aural theory skills. It is almost impossible for me to hear the overtones. After about a minute of listening, I could finally tune in on it and once I found it, I could stick with it through the end of the song, yet when another was played, I couldn't find the overtones at all, although it was a shorter passage.

I blame it on the tuba. I've played and focussed so much on the fundamental sound and getting the best results that I can with the fundamental that I've ignored everything else in the overtone series. While I usually joke around about how I can't sing the melody of the national anthem because the bass part is so ingrained into my head, but with concentration I can. But this goes even farther. I absolutely could not identify anything in the overtone series for over a minute, and that's just completely wrong for me. Looks like I'm going to have to focus on this at some point and learn how to hear the overtones to some degree of satisfaction.

GRE

2006-12-12T18:08:00.000-05:00

So I take the GRE this Saturday. Fun, fun, fun.

The thing that annoys me most is the fact that the entire math section is really an English section in disguise. This does not bode well for me.

Someday, I'll actually write something more substanstial. After I'm through with the GRE, applying for grad schools, study for graduate entrance exams for music programs. This will probably be sometime in March.

It's about time

2006-12-07T13:26:00.000-05:00

So this morning things were basically in the negatives as far as whether goes and it probably won't get about 20. It's about time to invest in gloves and a hat.

Results not typical

2006-11-21T17:21:00.000-05:00

I rarely, if ever, pay attention to ads on television. There was some ad on there for a new diet drug, and the experience this person had with the drug. I noticed in the bottom of the screen, the words in a clearish-white color, "Results not typical." I was humored.

Righting Wrongs and Wronging Rights

2006-11-13T16:53:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, our pragram went on a two day tour to see how instruments were made and all of the processes involved with it. I arrived early on the day, placed my bag in a seat, then actually felt like being social and outside as well, so I talked to some people outside of the bus while waiting till the last second to leave.

I got on the bus and noticed that my bag had been moved. One of the girls in our group decided she wanted her own seat, recognized that that was my bag, and we're close enough as friends that she put my bag in some other seat, and spread out to make sure no one would sit with her, so she could have those two seats on the tour bus to herself.

I didn't know who's bag sitting next to mine where the girl had put it, but I wasn't going to have that, you don't just start throwing people's things around just because you want your way, when rightfully, it shouldn't be yours. So in a manner very uncharistic of me, I told her that, no she can't just move my stuff on a whim, and moved her stuff into the compartment above and sat down right next to her.

The gentleman whose seat my bag was carelessly thrown into then entered on the bus and sat down. This guy is easily the social misfit of the group. Most of the time he seems like he's starved for attention and will follow you around at exceptionally close distances, and most people will probably consider him to be a very creepy guy with no social grace. He would have enjoyed having somebody to talk to for the trip, and in all honesty, I wouldn't have minded. There are some people in the program who are absolutely disrespectful to him, which is sad. Admittedly, I've had those thoughts before, but I try not to voice them. But there was a chance for me to sit down and chat with him, and just let him enjoy the time, instead of just staring out the window or elsewhere.

Instead I chose the option to right a wrong, and wronged a right that I had an oppurtunity to do. Usually I'm in the position and nature where I'll do something right giving the oppurtunity, but I won't correct the wrongs that happen around me or to me. So it's interesting for me to be on the side of righting wrongs and wronging rights, instead of righting rights and wronging wrongs. Now if I could just make sure I could right everything, but I'm only human.

Religious Discussions

2006-11-06T16:45:00.000-05:00

Religious discussions with people of other faiths are always fun. One of the reasons is that they find all sorts of interesting questions that you never really ask yourself. I was working on projects with somebody else from my program for several hours and we were able to talk about different religions and our own beliefs. Well she had bought this pamphlet that explained different religions and wanted to know exactly how accurate it was.

Obviously it wasn't all that accurate(like we believe the Holy Spirit in made of liquidy moisture), and the stuff they did get right obviously consisted of all the meat and none of the milk. So this makes things interesting in trying to explain about my beliefs to her when she getting on the hard stuff and nothing to back it up. Naturally this led to the phenomenon that we called Kolobing in our mission. It's always annoying when people share nothing of the fundamentals and all of the deep stuff, because then you have to show people how to understand it all. Yet here I find myself doing the same thing I didn't like others doing. Oh well.

Anyway, back to a couple of her questions. I had explained briefly about ward and branches, and how you have singles ward and branches nicknamed meatmarkets. I had also discussed a little bit about the spirit world. Later on, we were talking about how families are eternal and the relationship between husband and wife. Well, she asked what about people who haven't gotten married in this life. In answer to her own question she said spirit world meatmarkets. I will now forever use that whenever that question comes up, whether it's right or not.

Another part of our discussions, I had mentioned that we believe that God has a physically body, to which she asked where does God live. It's interesting the simpleness of some questions and how difficult the answers can be at times. It was a lot of fun.

While most of the discussion was probably somewhat on overload, unclear, no order, etc., the thing I hope I left her with was that I know that I'm following God's plan for me, and I have that surety of knowing what I need to know through the Spirit by prayer and study, and that she can do the same thing for herself. That this is something that I'm doing because I know it's what I should be doing and it isn't just the tradition of my parents that I'm following in or the dental plan(according to one convert I know would jokingly say was the reason he joined the LDS church). If I showed her that, I feel that that would take precedence over my blunders of going Kolobing.

Roommates, roommates, and roommates

2006-11-01T13:16:00.000-05:00

So it's now the first of the month and the rent is due. My roommate started out with twice as much money as I had, and squandered all of his money in half the time on guns, booze, and expensive food. So I called the manager yesterday, and even if I pay my half, I still get penalized because it's not paid in full. I will not cover for my roommate on the basis that I will never ever see that money again. This creates problems.

There's one guy moving out of our apartment complex and his roommate would need a roommate and I could possibly move in with him, since he's at least responsible and will pay his half of the bills. I can't move out of my apartment unless roomie moves out to get the security deposit back. Not sure what roomie plans yet, but really he has no reason for being here since he dropped out of school within two weeks and has no job. But I don't think his parents will ever be willing to bail him out.

So if I pay my half, and eventually we get evicted because of roomie, I see nothing of my security deposit, if I move out, I don't get any security deposit, roomie will eventually get evicted, and I still don't get back my security deposit. At this point, I'm half tempted on not even paying my part of rent, get us both evicted, then move in with the guy who's going to be out of a roommate soon.

Fun, fun, fun.

Frustration

2006-10-23T14:13:00.000-04:00

Grr...

To Be a Kid Again

2006-10-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, I needed to head over to the church to get some things ready for choir practice on Sunday. I knew there was a Relief Society things going on for about four or five hours and that I would be able to get in. I get there, and find that two guys in our ward are babysitting 10 kids for five hours. So I decided to pitch in and help.

The weather happened to be really good that day, and a lot of the kids were getting bored being stuck in the same room for hours on end. So we had them outside, but without any structure they were all over the place and not confined to a single area. So we decided to start playing some games in the back lawn of the church grounds.

We were planning on starting by playing tag. The problem was that there was nothing that we could use for natural bases. We solved that by having me be one base, and another adult be the other base. We had played for a little bit and one of the kids needed to go to the bathroom. So the other guy left me alone with about 8 other kids. I had already anticipated something like this and came up with something that they could do.

All of the kids were under 10, so I told them all to line up, told them that all of them were it and that the first person to catch me won. Yes a little chaotic, and I'm sure there's a recipe for disaster somewhere in there, but we did it anyway. Of course I could easily outrun all of them for quite some time, so I would try to get within inches of being caught and get away from them. I'd also try to dodge right inbetween two kids as well. This was usually when they caught me.

After we had done this for several times, I had them all line up, said go, and watched them all come running for me. I waited for the last possible second to leap out of them way and take off, only to find that I ended up tripping over my own feet. Now, I usually have fairly good reflexes and tried to roll and jump up on my feet before I got caught. Well I'm halfway up before I'm hit by the first kid. Well, if all the kids see you on the ground, they know that the chances of them catching me are really quite good, so instead of stopping since the first kid got me, well tackled me is more like it, the rest of the kids saw it in their best interest to do the same.

So now I'm on the ground with eight kids piled on top of me, and the other adult walks around the corner of the church to find a group of kids dogpiled up and no adult in sight. I'm sure it was an interesting to watch as finally the kids got up, since they all certainly had tagged me at that point, to find me crushed under the weight of all those kids. And I loved every minute of it. I haven't gotten to do that in a while. In Kentucky, I would usually babysit my sister's kids and get some exposure to playing with kids, and since I haven't been able to do that in so long, it was fun and a nice change of pace. Ahhh... to be a kid again.

Unbalanced

2006-10-10T17:35:00.000-04:00

This once was a cause of concern for me almost three years ago. My obsession for music borders on the unhealthy at some points. It's not just the amount of time I spend with it. In fact that's not really my concern. My concern falls under my love for it. I go to some activity where I'm supposed to socialize, and I will do two things. I will discuss music with you, or I will find a piano or some place where I can enjoy music without having to be interacting with human beings. I do not talk to human beings just for that sake, I talk to them with the intent to discuss music. I made some decisions to try to curb the worst of my tendancies to do this.

Dating somebody has helped, granted, only when I liked the girl as much as music. There was one girl that I had dated for a couple of months, and finally I told her with as much finesse as I could that I would prefer to play music than do anything with her. This is true for just about anyone though. Very few people would enter into the catogory of me liking them more than music.

I find myself doing this all over again. Instead of talking to people, I prefer to go find pianos and play. Everyone who comes up and talks to me, automatically mentions something that refers to music, because that's the way I want it, and I never talk about anything else. One comment recently while I was playing for a wedding at the church was that if there wasn't any music for me to do at church, I would never show up. Okay, yes, that is an exageration. I would go regardless. I just wouldn't hang around the church to play piano since that's my access to a piano right now. I spend about 3 times the amount of time at church than I need to just for the use of the piano.

I send out two to three e-mails a week going over my daily life for my family to read. I recently received something from my aunt asking about my social and dating life because I never wrote about that. Well, I guess there is a reason I never wrote about it. It doesn't exsist because I would prefer to stay with my music from an emotional standpoint. From an intellectual and spiritual standpoint, I know that isn't something I should be doing, yet I do. Now I just need to decide what I'm going to do about it before it gets really bad.

I'm alive

2006-10-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

This is a quote that I've often used this past year. Many people often greet each other with something along the lines of "How's it going?" or other some such statement. Everyone has their replies that they use over and over. Mine is usually just, "Doing good" Okay, so not the best grammar out there, but it works. I was more concerned that in saying that, it wasn't really true. So I decided to incorporate another phrase into some type of answer. I now say, "I'm alive" People seem to find this phrase as rather depressing. Now I've never really seen it as a depressing statement, in fact, I really like this answer. It makes me enjoy the little things in life, such as not being dead.

Really, there are many cool things in that statement, "I'm alive" Number one, I can breathe air. You know, it's a really good thing to be able to breathe are. My lungs work, my heart pumps blood, my muscles work. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to not breathe anything, and then, after a short period of time, you won't feel anything at all.

I wouldn't like it if I couldn't feel anything at all. That's another reason I'm alive. I can actually feel things, whatever that would happen to be. "I'm alive" is a declaration that I'm alive, and I wouldn't have it any other way. So for all of you who think it's a very depressing thing to say, it's really not. I'm just thankful for all the little things in life.

Kawai Must Die

2006-09-22T16:34:00.000-04:00

There has been a growing plague amongst the LDS churches. This has particularly been happening in new building and some branches. It all started when I was in Vegas. There were many new churches being built. Every piano in the new building were just plain inferior. None of them sounded anything like what a piano should. They were muffled and weak sounding. The tone was terrible. The keys were stiff and it looked as if they were made from some cheap wood.

Now they are bringing in a new generation of pianos. I can do with inferior products, but this new generation has done nothing but completely piss me off. The electronic keyboard. I first encountered one of these several years ago at an institute meeting. There were several stakes included in this meeting, so to many of them it was a novelty. One of the institute instructors sat down, push a few buttons and was showing off how well he could play. "Hey look at me, I can play piano!" he says while some random hymn is playing through this keyboard as he pushes random keys that in no way resemble the hymn. Every single hymn is already programmed into the keyboard. But that's not all, guess what else it can do... You can program it to play the hymn while you play the beat on one note. Now anybody can play piano without ever learning how to play it. Even geeky looking institute teachers can sit down and show off to all their students how well they can play. It was the first time I saw this machine, so I didn't think too much of it.

The next time I run into one of these accursed machines was in a branch that I attended for two months. This keyboard had just replaced the organ that had been used in that chapel for quite some time. The organ was still working and was just sitting right outside the chapel. Unfortunately they had just given the old organ away to some happy person just a week before I got there, so the only thing I could do was sit here and drool for this organ that missed being in my possession by one week. Free, no less!

The 2nd counselor was doing double duty and playing organ, so they immediately made me the organist when I entered that branch. They had no grand piano to play on, so I was forced to learn the extent of that keyboard's uses. The first thing you'll notice is the fact that it has a whole seven sounds available. Two of them are piano, bright and mellow, and five are organ sounds. Who has ever heard of an organ having only five available sounds? As I look for other organic features on this keyboard, it has volume pedals and sustaining pedals. No where are there a pedal keyboard. It did have a bass coupler, but this is inadequate. That becomes a problem when you start doubling the tenor as well. The volume control on these are way too sensitive, and provides only direct sound. The speaker in this stupid box are facing straight ahead. This means that if you're too soft only the front row can hear you. If you are on the back row and hear the organ, this means the front row has become deaf. Luckily, I left this branch soon after, so I didn't have to deal with that piece of scrap wood(actually it's probably plastic).

Now I'm in Minnesota. The church building here is one year old. Guess what they have for their organ? The same Kawai keyboard had replaced what should have been an organ. One member of the bishopric is a competent enough musician to see the evils of this contraption. It is never used, and instead, everyone plays the cheap grand that's in the chapel.

But enough is enough. This is wrong on so many levels. I thought that the LDS church encourages us to expand our talents. Since when does bringing in these devices help in that process? Having keyboards that play all the hymns on them does not expand the talents of anybody present. I often have less experienced pianists play in situations that they are incomfortable in for the sake of learning and gaining performance abilities. Now this mass of parts gives them an easy copout, and allows them to sit back and do nothing to expand their talents, while our ears get accustomed to the mechanical playing of our favorite hymns. Way to contradict your teachings.

This isn't the only thing we are doing. We are killing the organist as we know it. None of these keyboards have the ability to function as an organ even though they are replacing them. Gone will be the days of accomplished organists, who can crawl along the keyboards expertly, play passages of music with their feet, and pull out all the stops. Can you imagine some incompetent organist in the Tabernacle, accompanying the Tabernacle choir, because they never had a chance to play real organs? That may be an exaggeration, but the organist is a dying profession. In talking with piano majors, the amount who play organ continues to dwindle, and very few play just organ.

Boo to Kawai for offering these glorified stereos at the lowest price to the LDS church. And boo to the LDS church for buying them and allowing this plague to spread through their churches.

Forgiveness

2006-09-16T14:05:00.000-04:00

I was planning on going mountain biking today, but with the rain last night, looks like I'll just write something instead.

Perhaps one of the oddest things that has happened to me in a while was yesterday. In a way, it is very sad that I would consider this odd. It really shouldn't be.

During class yesterday, the teacher was demonstrating how to get dents out of the bow of a trumpet bell using dent balls and a Roth tool. The first thing he had to do was find the right size of dent ball. I believe he was on his third try when I asked if it would be possible to use the micrometer and measure it precisely, then proceed with the proper dent ball, instead of having to eyeball which dent ball might work. He said that by the time you complete all the measurements you'd need, the diameter of the bell where the dent is, and the thickness of the materials used, he could have checked about three different sized dent balls. Anyway class went on, and I thought nothing of it.

Later, I was doing some finishing touches on some soldering jobs. I was having issues with one of the patches I was putting on and was questioning him on it. Before he started that he pulled me into another room to talk to me. I was a little confused, but agreed. He then apologized for the way he had acted, and asked for my forgiveness. I had to ask about what. He felt that when he had responded to my question that he had answered it in a demeaning tone and unprofessional manner. I told him it was no problem. That wasn't the answer he was looking for though. He wanted me to say yes, I forgive you, which I did.

It was a very interesting experience. I applaud the guy for doing what he did, and my respect for him has increased in that regards, and it's actually caused me to think a little bit about this subject.

What constitutes forgiveness? Rarely do we ever say the exact words, "Will you forgive me?" and "I forgive you." I can honestly say that I can only remember twice in my life when I've heard these words in actual use. Hearing them in church during a lesson or talk doesn't count. I have often apologized for my actions when the occasion has called for it, but I never actually asked for forgiveness. Do we automatically assume that it is implied when we apologize? Is it necessary to go to the length of pulling somebody into a different room and specifically ask for forgiveness? In a way it is much more direct and leaves no room for misunderstandings, while just saying, "I'm sorry," and "No big deal" at times seems more of belittling the situation than actually resolving the situation.

The problem with a more direct approach is that it leaves people open and in situations where they perhaps feel a little more uncomfortable. I will admit that I felt uncomfortable by the direct and open manner of this teacher in asking my forgiveness. Perhaps if we as a people took more of a direct approach, we would understand forgiveness and its application to the atonement a little better, and be more comfortable with that type of approach. Just some food for thought.

Dislike

2006-09-11T16:03:00.000-04:00

You know, while I generally have a dislike of people in masses, I tend to not mind people individually. There will be one every now and then that I may dislike some, but that either happens over time, or it's not all that much.

That changed all last week. From the first time this person was mentioned, I had an instant dislike of them. I hadn't even met them and I already didn't want to meet him. Just so you know, when I first heard of this person, there was nobody talking bad about him, it was just the person's name, and I took an instant dislike towards him.

I was in my room reading on Saturday, and I knew the individual was coming that day. I had my window open and I heard his voice, knew instantly who it was, and that dislike grew even more.

He came into the apartment and big surprise, I meet him and that dislike grows more. I went back into my room to finish the book I was reading while he was talking with my roommate. I couldn't even concentrate on reading because I couldn't stand the sound of his voice. Finally he left, and I felt absolutely releived.

I'm not exactly sure what brought on this unnatural hatred of this person, and in some way it might even be justified, but I won't go into why. It was just a weird experience that has never happened to me before and I thought that I would share it.

Applause of the Uneducated

2006-08-30T15:26:00.000-04:00

I'm recently learning (okay, yes that was redundent) a new (why not go for overkill here) piece of music on piano. It's a piece of music that's very familiar to all the members of my family, and most people who've played piano may have heard of it at some time or another. It's Rustles of Spring by Sinding. Now this piece may look fairly intimidating, but don't be fooled by the 32nd notes. It's not that difficult of a piece. It flows very well, the fingerings are fairly simple for the most part, and is very fun to play. Now it is a very difficult piece to master. I'm not sure how many people in the world can play seven against eight in a single beat equally. Or switch readily from 5 sixteenth notes a beat to 4 or 6 or back to 8 32nd notes. So it's easy to learn, very difficult to master.

I'm about three days into the piece, so it's still nowhere close to performance level. The thing is, people are so impressed by this piece. I was thinking about it and about the couple that's going to be living below me. He's a sax performance major, and his wife is percussion/piano performance major. I imagine this picture of her just cringing at my ability to butcher this piece of music, while everyone else would be amazed at the speed and ability of this impressive sounding piece. The difference of reaction in my mind is quite a large amount.

Even music majors can be quite ignorant of what a piece is suppossed to sound like though. There's only one individual at University of Kentucky that we can rely on to play all the tuba accompaniments, and play them well. I decided to learn the first movement of one of the hardest tuba accompaniments that we have. The tempo is about 132, and you play chords through the entire piece using 16th notes. Now add in changes of chord structures every two beats, and you have a bear of a piece. I spent several months hacking this piece out when I wasn't playing tuba, never getting even close to performance tempo.

I got the chance before I finished at UK to listen to him perform the accompaniment one last time. I listened as he started off okay, and then missed over half the notes through the rest of the piece. I was shocked. Here's a professional player who is suppossed to know his stuff missing half the notes. Now, don't get me wrong, he never missed a beat. In fact, he made up most of whatever he was playing, but I knew the exact notes and what he was suppossed to play. My opinion of him dropped immensely that night. He knows how to keep going and bs through just about anything, and never truly learns any of the more difficult pieces. If it wasn't for the actual soloist, I probably wouldn't have applauded. He may be a much better player than I am, but since I am now more educated on this piece than any present, even the other tuba players, I was the only person there in a musically literate audience to realize his errors, which were many.

I haven't reached any conclusions on my thoughts of this. Good, bad, or otherwise. A part of me expects that everyone should expect a certain quality that isn't being attained, while a part of me thinks that if that happens, everyone will be a critic. So for the time being, I'll bask in the applause of the uneducated, while making fun of myself in front of the educated. Yes, that will work for the time being.

Change

2006-08-28T16:30:00.000-04:00

I absolutely love change. I may have written about this subject previously, but if not, enjoy. Whenever something new happens in my life, good or bad, I usually tend to enjoy it. Case in point, finding a new place to sleep every night because there is no permanent place to stay. While it's not something I would want to do for an extended period of time, trying it for a few days isn't too much of a problem and is actually somewhat fun. I'm sure it would have worn on me pretty quick, but for the few days that I had to do that, it wasn't bad.

I finally found a more permanent place till I can move into my place on the first, and the great thing about it is that they have a piano in the room where I'm staying as well.

Although I never moved as a kid, I probably would have been the type of kid that would have loved the change and uncertainty associated with moving. I'll never know though, as my parents have lived in the same house for over 27 years.

I love changes in weather good or bad, in fact, I'm relieved that I've already seen rain up here. Okay, I may not be as keen on the storms or hale that passed just South of us, damaging many things, but maybe I would. I'm certain there's a little bit of morbid curiousity that makes me want to jump outside during a halestorm just to see what it feels like.

New program, new people, new places, new experiences, I just gotta say that I do love change.

In school and homeless

2006-08-23T13:31:00.000-04:00

So I'm now in the middle of my first day of classes. I have a place to live, but the problem is that it won't be available till the first of the month. So far I've contacted members of the ward, and some fellow classmates, and my roommate who has found a temporary home. So far no success. Hmmm... looks like I may be sleeping in a car tonight. No fun.

I am alive (to an extent)

2006-08-17T03:49:00.000-04:00

I didn't realize that it had been over a month since I last posted something. Things have been chaotic and at the same time fairly lazy as of late.

How does that work, well let me show you. Since I've never been in the same spot for longer than one week, there was absolutely no possible way for me to get a summer job. Well, in that time I started off with an exceptionally horrible sleep schedule. I spent four weeks finally forcing myself into a decent schedule. This was soon interupted by a trip to Minnesota to register for classes and take care of housing, etc. Well driving 14 hours through the night both ways was enough to destroy any type of decent sleep I was getting. Less than a week later, I took a trip for a family reunion out to Utah, and this continued to degrade any type of sleep patterns. I ended up flying home, while the rest of my family drove to visit more relatives before coming back to Kentucky.

So this meant I had just gotten off of two trips, and as always, you usually feel the need to take a vacation after you've taken one, so I figured that I would spend a couple of days just relaxing and playing video games, then start back and get the last few things ready for moving to Minnesota. Well, a couple of days turned into a week.

At the end of that week, it was probably the absolute worst I've ever looked. I ended up playing about 110 hours of games in one week in the most absolute disgusting display of my life.

My family had come home to find me passed out on the waterbed after only three hours of sleep at 1 P.M. I was so focussed on this game that I deprived my body of food, water, and sleep for about a week. I was ten pounds lighter, hadn't shaved for about 5 days, and I haven't gone that long in two and a half years. I was slightly jaundiced from where I was getting no fluids. I averaged less than five hours of sleep. I looked a mess. So when I say I'm alive, that meant my heart was beating and that was about the extent of that.

Luckily, I am out of that one week and back among the living and preparing things for school up in Minnesota. I am going with mixed feelings up there, but the one thing for sure is that I'm going to be really glad to get into the daily grind. I can't stand not being in the daily grind. I'm not a self-motivated person, so the daily grind is essential to my well-being. My mixed feelings come from this being the last option of the choices that closed up before me till this was the only option available to me. Well, here's to life and to entering back into the daily grind. Which will also probably mean I'll actually post more often as that seems to be the case during school. Till next time.

American conceitedness

2006-07-14T22:01:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it amazes me just how conceited in America we can be sometimes. Several weeks ago, I was reading an article in the Reader's Digest concerning how nice, polite, etc., we are to each other. They decided to do their little research thing in several foreign cities and New York. They ran three tests. One was to see if when one of their reporters dropped some papers and see if somebody would help pick them up. Another had to do with politeness of employees when ordering something from fast food, or such, can't remember. And the other had to do with holding the door open. The results didn't seem so surprising to me. They had New York first, followed by European-type cultures, South American, and then Asian cultures, with India coming in dead last. Yet from the three limited tests, they rated the countries of the world. Wow.

You know, I don't think they gave one consideration to the cultural bias of American culture compared to other cultures. Of course we're going to put a certain emphasis on one type of politeness, while a country across the world is going to base it on something totally different. I know my Mongolian companion thought that most Americans were pretty rude, when in reality it was the difference in culture and what they thought was important to do. He was really big on feeding people as a way to be polite. How many people here in America would go out of their way to provide a meal for somebody? Not many, that's for sure.

Honestly, I think the reporters just all wanted to visit foreign countries and bigger cities, and that's why they didn't mention the absurdity of the 'research'

But anyway, that was three weeks ago, but what brought it up today was the fact that I was doing some online research into piano method books. I ran across a dissertation that was talking about a Korean method book that about 70 percent of the country uses. It then points every weakness when compared with its American equivilant. But that didn't bother me too much, because I expected it to show it's strengths somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, I only had access to the first 25 pages. But the end of her statement about all of this is what really got me going.

Awe... shoot. I was just getting to the good part in my rant, and realized the girl doing the dissertation was from Korea. It sounded like an American completely bashing this Korean method book and telling them that they should do it the American way. Man, do I feel stupid. Well, she could be completely American anyway, but it still took the wind out of my sails. Oh well. Till next time.

Corruption of Handel

2006-06-23T09:46:00.000-04:00

I'm down at my sister's house right now, and she's teaching a piano lesson soon. One of her students bought a piano book of all Handel and she wanted me to go through it to find something in the book within the capabilities of the students. Most of it is far beyond her and so I went through all 160 pages of it and found about 4 pieces she could handel. One of them is from Suite No. 11. It's perhaps one of his most popular piano works. At least it's one I'm completely familiar with, or thought so anyway. It's Sarabande. I'm sure you'd recognize it, the thing is is that I've heard so many variations on it that I never have actually heard a correct version of it. This book seems to be the most reliable source so far that I have seen, and the only correct version I've seen of the piece. You've got the Sarabande, Variation 1, and Variation 2. Most often you'll here the Sarabande done, skip Variation 1, then Variation 2, followed by a repeat of variation 2 in octaves in the left hand. Most corrupted versions also have quite a few rhythmic changes to make it sound better in the center and also change the end of the piece to make it more playable and lose some of the awkardness in the rhythm.

This is annoying for me in several ways. Part of me enjoys the authenticity of the original pieces and knowing exactly what the composer wanted. Another part of me says that the rehashed version actually does sound better, but it's also the version I've grown up listening to and playing, making it more sedimental in nature, and that could be the reason that I like it better.

This makes me wish I had grown up playing the uncorrupted versions of all these pieces so then I could listen to arr. by other people and decide if I like it better or not. Too often I think things are picked apart way to much and the parts that people like are overplayed while the rest of the work is never played.

I recently had a chance to go through all of my mom's tapes and CD's and trash some and keep others. I found myself getting angry when peices would be hacked and shredded and only certain movements played. The composers intended these works to be played in one setting and really it needs to be to get the full effect. You should experience the full range of emotions the composer has prepared for you, not just your select interest. Case in point, half of the classical CD's were romatic moments in classical music. I don't mean from the romantic period, but all music that sounds romantic and that certain style are all on one CD. Please. The absolute worst one I found and I laughed quite a bit at it was something to the effect of "The Best Romantic Music by Bach" This is usually what I ran into, but there were also occassions where I would find works that would completely interest me, until I found out the decided to do the main theme for three minutes, and include nothing of a second theme, development, recap, key changes, nothing.

Okay, now that I got my thoughts out, it seems I'm more of a purist when it comes to my music than for the arrangements. I'm sure there are exceptions, but there are so many things I would like the original. I really, really, really wish I had a copy of this Bach Chaconne for solo violin in it's originality. It was an absolutely amazing piece. A modern violin doesn't do it justice. Granted, my professor's copy isn't available in any place and I doubt it will ever be. It was a live performance on authentic instruments, which he somehow managed to get ahold of. We studied that piece about half a semester. What makes it such an immense work were the restrictions Bach place on himself, and still managed to keep the piece interesting for 15 minutes. For those who don't know what a Chaconne is, its form is just a repeated chord progression. Add that to the fact that he wrote it for solo violin, which has its limits at chord structures anyway. It takes a bear of a player to play it as well. Wow, I've totally gone off tangent at this point, oh well. Just enjoy music and the full experience peoples.

What are they thinking...

2006-06-15T17:43:00.000-04:00

So looks like I'm heading to Minnesota for the fall. Although in preparing things for the fall, I didn't receive some documents to help me register for classes. So I called them up to figure out if they were sent or what do I need to do to register for classes. The response I got, "You have to register in person."

Say what!?! I'm halfway across the U.S. and you expect me to come for a single day to register for classes. I can't do this online or over the phone, it must be in person. It wouldn't be so bad if I could do this right before classes start, but tuition is due on August 1st. Right now I'm registered for 0 credit hours, so my tuition is $0. That means I have to go up there some random date in mid-July, then move up mid-August for school. Boo!!!

Storm

2006-05-31T17:10:00.000-04:00

Weather in Kentucky is always interesting. A couple of years ago we got an ice storm that destroyed quite a bit and kept University of Kentucky closed for three days. The only reason they opened the fourth day was so the basketball team could play their game that night.

Today, I'm sitting there reading a book and I hear thunder. Well, there goes my chances of biking anywhere, but I didn't hear any rain to go with the thunder. I look out my window, and nothing, sun is shining, a little bit of wind and a couple of clouds, and that's it. I go back to my reading, and I still hear thunder occassionally, but it's still a bright sunny day.

Next thing I know it's getting more and more intense and then knocks the power out. At this point, I figured there was some rain falling, or at least clouds that were dark. I look out the window and it's still a bright sunny day with some wind. Well the thunder came and went, and the electricity still hadn't come on, but since there's no rain I bike over to campus to use a computer, and I saw a few patches of water on the ground and that's it on my bike ride over. In talking with somebody I ran across from the singles branch, she said that she got rain, but looking up into the sky, it was nice, sun shine, and blue. Must have been a very insolated powerful storm then. But in all my years in Kentucky, I've never seen a storm like that one, just bizarre.

Morbidness and eating(not related)

2006-05-20T13:53:00.000-04:00

As I was traveling back to my home-town, I heard on the radio that a lady that worked at _______ was killed in an accident. Well, one of the members of the branch works there, so after I got back in town and went to institute on Thursday, I asked her about it. Well it ended up that a truck lost control and hit a wall of a parking garage on the second floor. It knocked the 2.5 ton panel loose and crushed a women walking beneath on the ground floor. She was telling me how traumatizing it was for two other employees who witnessed it and how they're going through therapy because they saw this panel fall and completely crush this woman and there was no space between the road and panel that the person could even fit. At this point, I'm trying hard not to burst out laughing. I'm getting visual images similar to Wiley Coyote being crushed by a rock during one of his many falls, then Wiley Coyote coming out as an accordion or piece of paper, or many of the other things that happen to him. So as she continues to talk about the incident, I'm trying harder and harder not to laugh, well in the end I didn't succeed, and burst out laughing. She must think I'm the weirdest person.

My roommate and I decided to fix a meal last night, and as he is the much better cook, I let him do most of the cooking while I helped out in various ways. This guy is from India, so any cooking he does is usually loaded with curry. We ended up fixing a curry sauce with sausage in it, and ate Indian bread with it. It was delicious. Admittedly very spicy. Actually, this meal was half as spicy as he usually makes things. He didn't add any chili powder for one thing. But anyway, that just means my taste buds aren't seared off in the first bite. I had eaten quite a bit of it, and you could really tell. At this point, I think I had used five napkins to wipe the sweat off my forehead. Anyway, he was telling me that he was surprised that he was as hungry as what he was. He was telling me about how at the hospital that he was finishing up his schooling at, they fixed a bunch of chocolate things, cake, pudding, regular chocolate, etc. He then states, "That chocolate was so rich it burned my tough." I just looked at him. There he is eating curry with me, without the least bit of burning sensation of what I'm feeling, while I'm sweating like a pig, and tells me that chocolate burned his tongue. Sheesh.

Happy Mother's Day

2006-05-14T00:05:00.000-04:00

Happy Mother's Day Mom. You will be missed. It just doesn't feel the same without you.

My Mom's Legacy

2006-05-07T09:48:00.000-04:00

Although this has been a while in coming, this is one of our mother's true legacies that my mom left behind, and that is our musical talent. These are the actual performances we did at my mom's funeral. Surprisingly, even with the tears and emotion, it's not too bad of quality.

Those were the Days

Be still my soul

If you could hie to Kolob

Fingertips.... Fingertips...

2006-05-04T10:07:00.000-04:00

On Easter weekend, my brother and I went down to my sister's. During that time, our bathroom flooded, not bad, we came back and most of the water was dried up. We just had wet rugs and things were a little dirtier than usual. Well, we didn't have time to really take care of it that night or the next day, so on Monday after Easter I went to work on it. I decided that I wanted to get it exceptionally clean. I figured I'd use a stronger cleanser than normal. I decided to use the liquid we use on the toilet bowl. Powerful stuff. Not my smartest idea ever. I tell you what, that tub looked like brand new after I was through with it, but my hands at that point were swollen and completely red. Then it hit me, I just sloshed around chemicals that are made to touch the body at all. I hurried to the sink and thoroughly washed my hands off, but the damage had been done. For the next week, my hands peeled off layers of skin, and in general weren't too happy with me. To this day, you can't really tell that it happened when my hands are dry. The weird part is that once I run my hands under water, certain parts of my fingertips suck in the water and are paler than the surrounding skin. It looks as if you had just soaked your hands for an hour in water instead of just introducing them to water. Let's just hope that that's all that it is.

Teenage Angst

2006-05-01T11:00:00.000-04:00

My brother keeps on stating how he loves to hate everything, which I proceeded to make fun of him for being the type of teenager that bases their life on it. As I was thinking on this last night, I was trying to find the appeal in this whole attitude of hating everything. Then it hit me, it's easy. It's easier to hate than to love. It's easier to blame everyone else for your mistakes and hate them for it than to take responsibility for yourself. It's easier to be a weak individual and not work to improve you life and say you love hating life. It just seems so shallow to me, and absolutely no depth to the type of person who says they love to hate. I pity all of you like that.

Justification on why I'm not going to teach

2006-04-20T21:26:00.000-04:00

This has been on my mind a lot as of late, unfortunately. I've decided I no longer want to try to teach music education. The problem for me is that I irrationally see it more as a failure than as a decision that I made not to pursue teaching as a career.

Many of my posts have lamented the fact that people are fairly ignorant of music in many ways. It is not up to par with other subjects, and isn't given the necessary amount of time in public schools to be of any worth. While I want to somehow be an advocate for music education, I felt that teaching would be the start of that process. I would teach for several years, figure out how things are best done in the classroom, and see what I could do to help improve that process. Further down the road, I would stop teaching and find a means to implement what I could find out about music education, and see what needs to happens to create a musically literate society.

There are several things along this line of thought that I didn't anticipate that caused problems. The first is that in my mind, it's all about the music and nothing about the people. One of my posts, or maybe it was a conversation I had with someone once, anyway, I had mentioned that I thought I would make a decent teacher because I valued the subject that I taught. Many, particularly elementary school teachers define their reason for teaching as "I love kids." It usually never has to do with the subject being taught. There has never seemed to me to be as much focus on their love of the subject they're teaching. I had figured that focus and intensity that I had of music to allow me to teach better than others could. This perhaps has actually hampered me in ways, though, as I think about it.

Take the long-term subbing job that I had started. Most classes were fairly decent. I was teaching 2 band classes and 3 general music classes. The band classes are fine, they weren't too bad. The sixth grade are still fresh from elementary school, and still are fairly enthused about trying things and learning. I did have some fun with that class. The eighth grade were okay, at least they're more mature than seventh graders. This class was absolutely awful. I won't go into too many details. But to tell how it relates to the above, things the first day started off okay, of course. The problem was that when they act up and get out of hand, and blatantly try to get away with stuff, I see it more as a personal affront, not of myself, but to music. I cared so much more about the music, that it frustrated me to see them with their disrespectful attitudes and the whole look at me attitude. This caused me to become quite antagonistic of them. This is where the part where all the people who teach because of, "I love kids" could handle the situation better than I did. To be frank, of course I don't love them, that isn't me. I'm wanting you to learn music because I feel it's important, I don't actually care about you. This line of thought isn't conducive to teaching. Their apathy towards everything in general and lack of human civility frustrated me to no end, more than most people because of my focus on wanting them to know music so much. Essentially, I care too much about music that it frustrates me, and not enough for the kids which is as equal frustrating.

One other weakness is that I never really wanted to be the one doing the teaching, I just wanted to make it so that they everyone knew about music. I saw teaching as a means of learning what to do to help create a music literate society, not as what I wanted to do. Perhaps my thinking and goals are just way too idealistic for my own good.

One other problem is that I like to take time to think things through completely and thoroughly. The classroom situation makes way of thinking impossible, I take two seconds and kids are gone. I've lost them. Many times during my student teaching, this is what caused many of the classroom management issues I had.

So would it have been possible for me to work through these weaknesses and still teach? I'm not sure, but the amount of stress on my mind that it has put on me has been much more immense than at any other time of my life.

So after much thought and much prayer, because frankly, I don't need to be trying to make any decisions without the Lord right now, I've decided to take up a career as an instrument repair technician. I'm still providing services within music, it is a much needed service, and my mind is mechanical enough that I can figure it out with ease. I also have always enjoyed most instruments and tended to care more about them than I ever did the students, so hopefully next week, I'll find out for sure about my interview to start work in this type of career. Stay tuned...

Just a couple random blurbs

2006-04-16T23:54:00.000-04:00

Since it is Easter weekend and everything at church is about that subject, priesthood could have been fun had the teacher allowed it. One person was commenting on the infinite nature of the atonement, and which point somebody said, "Well, it doesn't cover the sons of perdition, so it isn't infinite." At which point the teacher shouted, "No! We aren't going there!" It was highly amusing.

Also got to see family this weekend. I was talking with one brother who had gone on a cruise with his wife for his birthday. They ended up staying halfway at a friend of a friend's place. They had a couple of kids. Well, my brother gets along pretty well with kids, but he's used to our neices and nephews. There is an extreme difference between kids in my family and other kids. We play much rougher. It's still all play, we just take way more abuse, and still enjoy it. We pick up kids, throw them, hogtie them, bounce them around, and they love it. Well, my brother tried it with the kids of the family they were staying with. He had both of them crying with-in half an hour. How? Well the boy didn't take kindly to having his eyelids turned inside-out, and the girl was doing flips off my brother and landed too hard on her feet.

Failure

2006-04-14T17:36:00.000-04:00

Very few times in my life have I had any types of major failures. My mission I would consider to be my first major failure. I still haven't forgiven myself for my doings on my mission. In this year so far, I would consider myself to have 3 more major failures, all of my doing. You can imagine how this makes me feel, and it has nothing to do with being a pleasant feeling.

Stagnant

2006-04-02T22:54:00.000-04:00

This word sums up how I currently feel. Ever since the end of that long-term subbing job, this is the exact word that I’ve felt ever since. I just haven’t felt very much direction in my life as of late. Since I’ve decided a career change is in order, and I’m in that transition stage, I felt as if life has stopped. Don’t worry, I’m still planning on something in music, just not teaching. I’m still doing some subbing occasionally, but it is incredibly rough on me. The thought of failure at anything is about the toughest thing for me to handle, and usually stresses me out even more. I’ve been so stressed with this, that my jaw has started to have problems again.

The other reason I feel this way is because I’m just not that busy otherwise. I’m used to staying at school, learning, practicing, going to classes, etc. Now I do occasional subbing jobs, visit my sister, and look a little bit of what I’m going to do in the future. The problem with that is that it’s just so draining to try to be self-motivated and having no external factors come into play. It’s like being jobless over the summer, which unfortunately has happened quite a bit for me.

I’m hoping that will change this Wednesday. I’ve got an unofficial interview with a gentleman in the profession that I’m currently looking into. Basically discuss what my options can be over the next little while. Hopefully I can end this stagnant part of my life and find the direction I need to go with this.

What is love?

2006-03-24T13:08:00.000-05:00

Through my own thought processes at institute last night, this subject came up in my head. Love of God, to be more accurate. They were discussing the subject of the sacrament. One of the quotes given during that said, "true soul acknowledge of its deep spiritual significance." We discussed the by soul we mean body and spirit. We discussed the shortcomings that don't allow us to fully partake of the sacrament. For some reason, my thoughts started to center on my love of God. It seemed to me that if I could love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, then I would be able to fully partake of the sacrament.

So I got to thinking what is love of God? Does it have to be emotional level? Spiritual? Perhaps even an intellectual level? I ask this because I tend to find myself less emotionally involved in God than in other ways. I'm not sure why. I can talk of the atonement and of all that Jesus Christ did for us, and understand it intelectually to some degree, feel some spiritual significance to it, but emotional disconnected from those events. You think with something of such magnitude, you would feel something of an emotion. Yet that never seems to be the case with me. At times, yes, I do feel emotion towards these thoughts, but as far as a constant emotional feeling of love, no.

There was a point in my life about two years ago that I really tried to understand what love of God felt like. I made it a goal to pray every night for that and to feel of God's love. As with most goals I set, they tend to fail, but on those nights when I did truly set out to fulfill this goal, I did feel of God's love, but couldn't seem to get that feeling to remain with me always. Yet again, I felt some emotional investment into loving God, but spuradically.

As I compare this with, say, my love of music. I know I am emotionally invested, intellectually invested, perhaps not spiritually. But I can truly say I love music without question where I can't say that about God. So now I try to focus of what the differences are.

One of those differences is time. As I think on it though, few people spend more time on God than they do with their careers. Maybe it's the approach that matters. As I've gone through my studies in college, I never really acknowledged God as part of my studies. We are asked to pray always, yet going through my college career, I never did that. Doing things with God in mind seems to be one of the things that I can do to make sure I spend as much time with God as I am my career. Come to think of it though, for the past two weeks I have been doing that, granted more on the fear that if I don't truly rely on God in all of my decision making at this point, life will be even less happy than what it is.

I guess along the same lines, one of those differences is reliance. I never allowed myself to rely on God, where there were times I would rely on music. This created my emotional investment to music moreso than God. Again the past two weeks have been different though. Although admittedly, even with this change, it will still take time to make that change permanent and actually emotionally invest in the Lord. Sometimes I feel the Lord allowed everything I rely on to be taken away so I have to rely on Him.

So who knows? Maybe with the changes I have made these past couple of weeks with help me to understand what love of God is and to help me to truly say that I love God, where I don't think I can fully say that right now. We'll see.

Ahh... life

2006-03-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

I have so many thoughts running through my head that I have no clue where to begin. Perhaps one of the many things on my mind a lot as of late. My girlfriend and I broke up. She broke up with me last Sunday, and I didn't offer any type of response for or against us breaking up. I had known at the time that it was the right thing to do and I'm glad she could see that better than I could. Yet those feelings still exist on both sides. I told her that night that I needed time to think and I'll give her a call when I'm ready. Unfortunately, I take a long time to think and it will probably be May before I'll contact her.

Between this, my last post, and more things going wrong, it was time to visit 'home'. With my mom dead, home is no longer home, so 'home' is now my sister's place. I spent one week pondering the events of my life, not just socially, but religeously, physically, educationally, everything. With everything not working right, it did lead to one very good thing happening. For the first time in a long time, I RELIED on God. I had nothing else I could turn to. While it's sad to say that I have to be compelled to rely on God, it is still very worthwhile. One of my first scripture study sessions in all of this was peace. I have acheived a little bit of that, actually more than I had thought that I could.

My sister's house is on the outskirts of a small town, so we're surrounded by woods and trails. Between trail-running and longer hikes, it gave my oppurtunities to think and pray and settle matters in my mind. I stopped on three different peaks to ponder the mysteries of my life and try to come to terms with it. In ways I feel that now that I've graduated college, my real education begins. Which reminds me, I finally received my graduation certificate in the mail last week. In some ways I feel it is worthless at this point, but we'll see.

My sister and I were talking at one point, and I stated how surprised I was that the girl I was dating didn't get asked on dates more often before I had asked her out. She mentioned that she had certain quirks. Well I figured it helps to point out peoples' quirks to pull them off of the pedistal of perfection that they are on when you date somebody. We couldn't ever exactly place what it was, and our speculations only confirmed that her quirks and my quirks complement each other. Well that totally backfired. Knowing that we needed to break up doesn't make this any easier. I'm just glad that as of late, I have some peace of mind and found a direction in life that I feel I can follow and that I chose with the Lord's help.

So here's hoping to better times...

Luck, I have luck, all of it bad

2006-02-08T11:54:00.000-05:00

This can sum up how things have been since I graduated. So where to start. Let's start with before Christmas. The plan was to do some subbing before I moved in the school district I was in, then move and do a long-term subbing position I had found in a different school district. Well, I got my papers into the school district before Christmas. I would supposedly start January 3rd doing some subbing. Well they didn't get my papers processed till after I had moved. So there went two weeks of working. As I was looking for a place to live, in an area I've never been to, all I could find was a 1 bedroom for $400 with a six-month lease, more than twice as much as what I was currently paying, but I was looking more for experience in subbing with the long-term subbing position than what I would be getting before I moved, so I figured I'd take the hit. I got myself set up, called the electric company, and because I basically haven't established any credit at all, I had to also pay a $240 security deposit on it as well. I finally got myself pretty much set up, the only thing I didn't have was a phone. That was okay for the time being because I had the long-term subbing position and they weren't going to have to call me for anything, so I was waiting on the phone because I was trying to convince my dad to get a cell-phone plan for the family and I could just pay him for an extra phone. My dad considers cell phones a luxury and one that he could afford to be without, but it took him forever before he made that decision.

In the meantime, I had started my long term subbing position. Well, after a week and a half things didn't work out at all, and I wasn't doing the long-term subbing position anymore. Without the consistency of subbing everyday, there was no way I could afford where I was living at without something everyday, and besides that, they couldn't call me to do any subbing jobs because I don't have a phone, and I decided that I'll just look what subbing jobs they have online, since they do have that option... which apparently they don't use, because each time I've checked it, no positions have been available. Great, so now I'm without any temporary money source and I need to get a phone, so I finally decide to just get a cell phone on my own.

As I'm looking online, I decided to finally check my credit history since we're allowed to check that for free once a year. I did that, thinking I basically had established no credit. I got a credit card as a freshman, but basically threw it away when I was approved for it. It had that in there, and no balance on it. Okay good. The next two things were hospital bills, from my mission. There were two doctors that said not to worry about paying the bills and that it would be free of charge. Well, apparently they weren't, and instead of telling us, they sent them to a collections agency. Surprised that they had never even located me, I looked to see what address they had for me. It's only an address I lived at 7 years ago. So when I did try to get a credit card, I was refused a couple of years ago, I assume because of that. Great. Anyway, that's why I have to pay security deposits of every little stupid thing. Never mind that I've made payments to phone, water, electric, and rent faithfully for the past 3 years.

So I find out I'm ten dollars short to get a cell phone, because of the security deposit. So I call up my dad to see if he could help me out with that. It took a couple of days before he was able to get it into my account, and I finally ordered a cell phone. At this point, I've been looking for another job, but it's kind of hard for anybody to keep in contact if you don't have a phone or some means of communication, so I was anxiously awaiting to get my phone.

I get an envelope in the mail telling me that because of my credit, they can't give me a cell phone and the plan I asked for even with the security deposit.

This was yesterday. So I'm at wits end with what I should do. I'm incapable of getting any type of subbing position where I'm at. I can't really look for a job without them having the means to contact me. I'm in an apartment where I'm paying twice as much as I was originally that I signed a six-month lease on. I was only able to work six days, while I should have been working for a month at this point. My credit won't allow me to even establish credit. Yep, great year so far.

Update

2005-12-22T17:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I didn't get to the rest of my mission story like I planned, but I had more important priorities and like Leibniz, the computer broke down in our apartment, so my time is much more limited on computer.

I have finally graduated, and I have a longterm subbing job at a middle school set up for the spring, since the teacher is going to have a baby very soon. I'm taking the Praxis, moving, and getting my application to the school system, and hopefully having a chance to talk to the teacher and find out her plans and procedures. In addition to this, I've finally decided what to make my girlfriend for Christmas, and that will take several days. I'm going to live in 5 different places over the next 2 weeks. Gotta love transitions. Busy but good.

Oh, and come January I'll actually be making money (comparitively speaking).

Mission - Chapter 1

2005-11-20T19:44:00.000-05:00

Today marks the three year mark of me being off my mission, so I’m going to post my mission story in sections over the next 11 days(hopefully, I lost my draft for 3 of them). I'll write a chapter per companion. I think that'll be 11 chapters. So first off the MTC.

The MTC was a whole different bear compared to the MTC. I'll go ahead and give you a run-down of the district. First you have me, Elder Naive. Heading into the MTC, I was thinking, this is it, everyone hear are missionaries going out to do the Lord's work, and I'm going to do everything possible to continue that work to the best of my abilities. I'm out for the right reasons, I've prepared for this, and I’m going to be as obedient as possible while doing the Lord’s work.

My companion, Elder Normal. Pretty normal guy, really, that's all I can really say about him. We got along well, but we didn't really have anything in common, so our conversations were fairly limited, but just normal. Always slept through morning study.

Our companionship in the same room, we'll start with Elder Laid-Back. I never got to know this guy really well. Easy to get along with, but not really sure his reasons for a mission or how he did on his mission, considering he went to a different mission.

His companion, Elder Five-year. He had dated a girl for five years and she wouldn't marry him unless he served a mission. From what I could tell, that was his only reason for being there; at least that's what his attitude showed.

The other room for our district was insanity all the way around. Elder Serious. He was a recent convert and was able to serve a mission at age 27. Very serious minded, but also, very socially awkward. A really terrible match to his companion...

Elder Jokey. He was always joking around and never took anything all that serious. Most people enjoyed being around him and he liked to be the center of attention.

The last companionship was Elder Psycho and Elder Crazy. Elder Psycho was exactly that. Also, quite socially inept and all over the place. His companion, Elder Crazy wasn't near as crazy, and got along well with everyone. He usually hung out with Elder Jokey and made jokes all the time.

We had sisters in our district as well, but I didn't get to know them very well, not like some of the other Elder's in our group.

So anyway, we get there and first thing first is meeting the Branch President and going through interviews. Well, as I already mentioned my naivety, and my over-optimism going into the MTC, they put me as the district leader, which in reality was pretty funny, because I didn't become a senior companion until 4 months from coming home.

MTC was pretty typical for the most part, and I'll only highlight a couple of parts. We happened to be in the MTC the same time that General Conference was going on. My sleeping habits being the way they are, I hadn't been able to stay awake through one of them yet, and wasn't too concerned with the fact, and just talked about it casually with the other people in the district till one sister from our district decided to chew me out for sleeping through it. Kind of surprised me.

Nobody had ever told me what to do during a 2 hour district meeting. Luckily, I only had one of those to run. So I decide to help everyone memorize the first discussion for lack of anything better to think of. Elder Five-year wouldn't participate; he felt it wasn't necessary to memorize the discussions, or to do anything else for that matter. Sometime during that, Elder Psycho was called out of the district meeting. Given the nature of Elder Psycho, we thought that he had done something bad, as he was prone to do that. He came back in tears. So here I am, in the MTC for one week, and running my first district meeting, and something traumatic has happened to one of the Elder's in my district and somehow, I'm supposed to take care of this. I just continue with things as they are, and tried to think of what to do. Eventually he burst out and tells us all that his younger brother had just died, but he had made the decision to stay out in the field. At that point, there wasn't any reason to continue district meeting, and we went to our rooms, where Elder Crazy and I gave him a blessing. This is perhaps one of the closest bonding experiences of our district. Unfortunately, things like that usually only happen when there's a crisis.

As it's getting close to the end, things start to unravel a little bit. The close quarters start to grate on the companionships. Mainly between Elder Serious and Jokey, and Elder Psycho and Crazy. Elder Jokey always had his jokes, which unfortunately tended to be cutting and making fun of Elder Serious and Psycho, and Elder Crazy and Normal would fuel his tendency, and let's face it, Elder Serious and Psycho made themselves pretty easy targets. Both were just so socially awkward that it made for some pretty bad times.

This isn't to say it was totally bad. I remember once when Elder Serious was sick, and couldn't leave the room, so one Elder would usually stay behind. I stayed with him a few times and had some good conversations with him, which he expressed his appreciation to me for talking to him. Elder Jokey and Serious just clashed too much to have any good conversations. I'm glad that that is a trait I seem to have. I can get along with anybody, no matter how different their personality may be, especially when it comes to one on one conversation with people.

Well, things got the worst during the last week. All the time during MTC, they talk about 'quiet dignity' and at that point, things were getting more rowdy and rambunctious. Anyway, during the last week, they have you doing door approaches to people who decide come volunteer to be investigators. So my companion and I knock on this one door, and a college-aged girl happens to be the 'investigator'. Afterwards Elder Normal goes and spreads to all the Elders in the district that there's a really hot girl in this room and they all need to see her. Personally, I didn't care so much for her. I never find girl labeled 'hot' to be attractive. Anyway, everybody in my district is waiting outside this door for this hot girl to walk out. I was pretty disgusted by their immaturity, but let them decide what they should do for themselves. Elder Serious, on the other hand, was very offended that these guys are supposed to be Elders of Israel and here they are goggling after this girl. He talked to his companion, Elder Jokey, about it, which basically gave his companion more fodder for his jokes that always put people down. When Elder Serious approached me about, I told him basically to try to talk to him in a move loving tone, than the condescending tone that he had used the first time. He immediately followed my advice, which surprised me, and my respect for this socially backward guy rose quite a bit. For somebody to accept somebody else's suggestion so readily and to use it. He was certainly trying and making an effort to do the right things. Of course his companion would have none of it, held on to the fact that he's better than his companion and made fun of him even more out of his presence. I almost unloaded on this guy at moment when I heard him. I could barely contain my rage at that point. Instead of enlightening Elder Jokey, like I should have, course he may not have even respected my words either, I went to the AP and explained the situation, and came and had a little meeting about loving your companion or some weak message that didn't get the point across. I think this was the precursor to the rest of my mission, showing that instead of addressing the problems that needed addressing, I let them slide so as to avoid conflict.

That about sums up my MTC experience, still naive, still have the Spirit, and glad to be going to the mission field. We said goodbye to Elders Laidback, Five-year, and Normal, and our sisters, as they went to a different mission, and Elders Serious, Jokey, Psycho, and Crazy came with me to Vegas.

To Mom

2005-10-25T00:42:00.000-04:00

July 4th, 2005, my family met like any other family. Most of us happened to be present. Our mom decided to sit us down for a couple of family announcements, one good and one bad. I can't remember if the good was first or not. But the first was that my sister was pregnant with her fourth child. After the normal hubbub, mom said now for the bad news, which one of my brothers immediately piped up and said, "What's on the will?" or something to that effect. Being the exceptionally morbid family that we are, of course we all laughed and were still having a good time. Our mom made the announcement that she had cancer. She explained a little bit about how it was going, which at that point, she said it was just three little spots in the liver, and they were going to cut in, remove it, end of story. Pretty much just informative, and a little bit of joking around about it. Even my mother was laughing about it. She was making jokes about how relieved she was when she found out she had cancer and that death might be a little sooner than she thought, and her first thought was, "Yes! I'm not going to have to take care of the 28 years worth of stuff in our house." At that point no one was upset, and things were going well. Although I know my sister who was pregnant was probably the first to cry. She blamed it on her pregnancy.

Well they cut in and removed the cancer from her liver, but they found out that instead of starting in her liver, it was actually from her common bile duct. Basically where all of our waste goes through. That was a little bit more serious. They can't remove the common bile duct, or replace it, and the only option with common bile duct really is chemo. Well, my two oldest internet savvy sisters went to work to find out the information. Now, if you know my family you could almost guess which one looked up which path. My sister most like me in personality, and pretty optimistic person, looked up different cures, and alternate medication and researched in that area. The other sister looked up mortality rates for common bile duct cancer. It was quite humorous, the quirks in our family. Anyway, if you don't know the mortality rates for common bile duct cancer, 90% die within a year, and 100% with five. We still didn't worry about it too much at that point. Some did more than others, but most of us are very independent people with minimal contact among family. While we care a great deal, we don't show that by the normal means. There are some siblings that even if I haven't seen them in 20 years, I would go up, say hello, probably wouldn't hug them or be excited. We'd have a great chat and enjoy one another's company, then go back to our lives.

I think I told my girlfriend soon after about what was happening, and that I'm not as concerned about my mom dieing as much as I'm worried about her suffering through the last part of her life. That would bother me more than anything. Well mom seemed to do alright. Her perspective on life had changed slightly and things were going well for her. She didn't seem to be in too much pain, she still accomplished all the things that she normally does, and functioned as normally as anyone else would.

My mom is a big-time worrier. That's probably what gave her cancer in the first place. Anyway, she loves to have things prepared and taken care of well in advance. Do you know what else this includes? Preparing all of her stuff around the house and getting things ready for her funeral. It was just so funny to see her in her element even with everything going on. I remember her talking about when she was the Relief Society President and she would have to go into people's houses after they die and help get everything organized and taken care of, and she didn't want anyone to go through that hassle with her, so she did it all herself. I love her quirks. She sends daily e-mails through to all of us, and I love reading them, because they are so typical and fit so perfectly.

We went on a trip to Nauvoo later in July. It was my mom, dad, bandjam and me. We had a great time going through Nauvoo for a day and a half and seeing the pageant there. I had meant to write a blog on several aspects of the trip, but never got around to it. My mother at this point wasn't eating very well and was really sick to her stomach for much of the trip. She was also turning yellow. Apparently with the cancer being in her common bile duct, her waste wasn't getting through and she was becoming jaundiced. This trip was special for me. Not for the trip itself, but the people I was with. My mom and dad aren't the most affectionate couple, and what I mean by that is that they never really show affection in any situations. So whenever I saw my dad helping my mom out, or just them sharing a laugh together, it meant a lot to me.

We got home off the trip and I had to go back to Lexington. Mom's jaundiced appearance was getting worse, and a couple of lady's in the relief society forced her to go to a medical center up in Ohio to take care of her. She still had access to internet and would write her daily e-mails. This was the first moment that I think my mom cried about what was going on. She had looked in the mirror and seen just how yellow she was. Well, they were able to put a stint into my mom and that allowed her to get rid of the waste inside her body.

While in Lexington, a couple of guys from church found out that my mom had cancer. These guys grew up in my home-ward with me. At this point, we really don't feel terrible or bad about the situation. One in particular is very good at sympathy and empathy. The only problem is that if a person doesn't need comforting and somebody's trying to comfort them, it makes them REALLY uncomfortable. They come up to me and say, "I'm really sorry to hear about your mother." To which I want reply, "Whatever" because I'm really not feeling all that bad, and life is good. They usually just made me feel guilty because I wasn't feeling bad. I know a couple of siblings who felt this way. At this point it wasn't a concern.

Sometime during mid-August, I was really praying for the welfare of my mom. I just didn't want her to suffer and be able to live her life. As I was praying, I was really comforted that she is in good hands. That night, I received the daily e-mail from mom. That was yet another very special day for me. It was a second confirmation to me that mom is being taken care of. In that e-mail my mom had talked about what a great day she had had, and how all of these little things going on were wonderful blessings to her at that time. I tend not to save my mom's e-mails as I'm sure they're all on our computer at home, but this one will always be in my inbox and will not be deleted.

Well, school ended up starting and life continued as normal. I would occasionally make morbid jokes about what's going on. One in particular I thought was funny, just because nobody but my girlfriend and I knew what was going on. We were at a reception for a girl in the branch, and we were looking through the photos of the couple. There was one picture that was a little different from the norm. It had the newly-weds in the middle, and the parents on each side and a little behind. All three couples were kissing their spouses. The branch president was making some remark about it. To which I piped up, "Gee, that'll never happen at my wedding." Nobody but my girlfriend understood the reference. She was trying to hide a smile and glare at me at the same time.

Yet another family quirk for fun, although I wasn't involved in this one. My mom flew out to Utah to visit her sister, and my sister was there at BYU attending classes and whatnot. Well, her roommates just couldn't believe that my sister was close by my mom and only visited her for a lunch. My mom told my sister that she had better things to do, like do her homework and prepare for all of her classes. Once a mom, always a mom.

I decided to visit mom a couple of weeks ago, and that would be about the time that I was a little more serious about what was going on. We get home and the first thing I notice is that mom has lost a lot of weight. There was hardly anything left to her, weight wise and unfortunately, energy wise. The first night we got home, I looked through a scrapbook that she had prepared for her funeral. It was the first twenty-five years of her life. She talked of everything that happened throughout her life and all of the pictures up until she was married. She lamented the fact that nobody would be there to explain all of the pictures to everyone. I'm glad that I had the chance to go through it with her that weekend.

It was scary to see my mom throughout that weekend. She looked and felt awful the entire weekend. It didn't look like she would make it through to Christmas like she was hoping. There were three times in particular that I saw my mom that weekend, hunched over and holding her stomach, not moving in so much pain, that I was very close to crying, my eyes teared over, but I didn't let it go. My mom still remained as active as she could. She gave my dad and me a haircut, helped us raid the food storage to take some food back with us. She played the role of mother, while in the last stages of cancer.

That Sunday, I felt impressed to attend the single's branch right after my home ward. That meant a fast drive and packing up stuff rather quickly. My mom had left church earlier that day because she wasn't feeling well at all. I suspected to go home and say goodbye there right after church. Well, she came back to church to play organ and piano for the choir for the Christmas cantata for this year. I didn't cross paths with her at church as I was on my way home to pack everything up as quick as I could. I was already running incredibly late, but I knew I had to say goodbye to my mother. I went back to the church to say goodbye, and I passed her going the other way, so after turning around and following her all the way back home, I gave her a hug goodbye and left.

Monday, we got an e-mail from my dad. Part of it was the daily e-mail from mom, and the other part was dad saying mom was in the hospital. For my dad to send an e-mail meant that it was serious. You'd never see him e-mail otherwise.

Tuesday night, I entered the sleep disorder clinic, where they kept me all night, and all day the next day, unfortunately requiring me to miss a day of student teaching during a week in which I really needed to be in the classroom teaching. That night, I read an e-mail telling me that family was starting to go in. My brother and sister who live in Kentucky, my brother up in Michigan, sister in Utah, and sister in California were all on their way in, or in preparation to come in. I read it, called my teachers that I'm working with to let them know that it's possible that I have to go straight home, and said that I would let them know, once I knew more information. I was trying to wait as late as possible to get the most accurate information when I called home. Around 7:30 P.M., my sister beat me to it, and told mom's condition. I thought quite a bit about what I should do. It's my solo week with K-2nd and I've got to be there, otherwise I would be missing three days in a row. I finally decided that I needed to go home. My brother and I packed up, made arrangements with teachers, work, etc, and took off for home. We arrived at the hospital at 11:30 P.M. All of our siblings were there, but one who was driving for a business trip up to Utah, and had to turn his car and drive to Kentucky.

We walked into the room where my mom was being kept. There was a room for company to stay with a couch, chairs, and TV, and a divided area for the hospital bed where my mother was sleeping in. We talked and joked a little bit as a family. Many of the siblings had been sitting with mom and were ready to call it a night. So all of the siblings headed off a couple at a time for home. Pretty soon it was bandjam, my brother who lives with me, me, and my dad. I'm on one side on mom while bandjam is on the other side.

My mother was just given an extremely powerful pain pill and was sleeping. They had tried morphine on Monday, but it slowed her breathing to eight times a minute, so they gave her something a little less powerful. She had been sleeping when I had entered the room. Her skin had become jaundiced again because the cancer had grown over the stint that kept her draining fluids. Well she couldn't drain any of the waste flowing through her body, and her skin had turned extremely yellow. Occasionally my mom would awake. These were the most painful moments to watch. She would attempt to lift her arms to try to hold where she's in extreme pain. She was too weak to really lift her arms. She would try to straighten her head and couldn't lift her head. She would groan in pain even with a massive amount of medication in her. She would whisper incomprehensible phrases and we would listen, hoping to get something coherent. We wanted to ease her pain in whatever way we could, yet were helpless on the sidelines, unable to provide her with anything but the support that we were there. That was the hardest part of all, sitting there, watching her in such pain, and not a thing you can do. Some point during that time, I couldn't take it anymore. I made an excuse to go get some books from the vehicle. I made it to the vehicle and started crying. It was so hard to see mom suffer. I composed myself, cleaned up, grabbed my books and went back up to start the night watch over my mom. I grabbed my hymnbook and sang several hymns to our mother in the hopes that she could hear and comprehend at least our singing and provide some comfort. While I never cried, my voice was certainly unsteady, bandjam was doing alright, but she had gotten her tears out earlier. We talked about life and things in general till about 2:30 in the morning. My dad woke up and took over the watch from there. Bandjam and I found places to crash in the room. It was a fitful sleep as I would wake up and look over to see my mom still there in a painful and fitful sleep. Dad stayed up with her from that point of the night till the morning. Bandjam and I woke around 6:00 in the morning on Thursday and kept watch over her for a little longer, each in our own thoughts. At this point, mom was in such pain that she was actually crying, as unconnected as her thoughts were, she was still crying and in an amazing amount of pain. My father made the decision to give her the morphine for the last hours of her life.

All of the siblings that went home started trickling in during the morning. I relinquished my post at mom's side and fell back asleep till about 11. I stayed for half an hour, and made the decision to go home, shower, eat, then came back. We made the drive and went straight to the hospital, kept the night watch and still hadn't been home. I went home with two other siblings and talked a little bit to one of the in-laws who was just about to leave. I then took a shower. Just as a got out of the shower, bandjam handed the phone to me. It was my brother from Michigan, telling me that mom had just died and we needed to get down there. She died shortly before noon. I hardly dried off, put on some pants, and ran out half naked with a shirt and shoes in hand. My brother already had the vehicle started, so I jumped in and starting dressing the rest of the way. We arrived at the hospital, and joined the family as the nurses were taking care of the body and removing the needles and other devices from my mom. We were waiting in a small chapel inside the hospital, each left to their own thoughts or sobbing in the arms of another family member.

At that point, I was more relieved that mom had passed away. Death to me at that point was a sweet release for my mother, who had been in an unbearable pain for the past week. My two older sisters went on a walk outside to comfort each other. My oldest brother was tending to his kids as his wife was helping prepare the body with the nurses. My brother still in Kentucky that doesn't live with me was with his wife. His eyes were red-rimmed at that point, but his tears seemed spent when we arrived. My youngest sister, still at home and the closest child to mom, was crying into the arms of bandjam. My brother living with me, myself, and my dad stood, lost in our own thoughts of the event that just took place. My brother from Texas, unfortunately, was still about five hours away having driven across the country.

They came and got us, and told us we could enter the room where my mom lay. Mom's body was a frail frame of the women she had been in life. It didn't look like her. Her chest still, never to take another breathe, her mouth hung open, eyes closed. You almost expect her to start breathing as it just doesn't seem real. It still at times doesn't seem real.

It took a while to get everyone gathered as we all had scattered to places more private. We met, talked a little bit. Each person shared something of mom, we sang a hymn, had a prayer, said our goodbyes, and left to go home as the body was taken care of.

We all came home and started making preparations for the funeral. Word spread with amazing speed. Almost every call we made already knew that my mom died. Food came from all over. The ward, neighbors, my dad's work, the band parents, all showed up to show their support. The priesthood brethren came and mowed the yard and cleaned up outside, as it needed doing. More showed up later to do the same thing, not realizing that it had already been done. I understand now why people give so much food to the families of those who just passed away. I wouldn't have eaten otherwise. The whole incident left me devoid of feeling hunger. I felt obligated to eat with the amount of food coming into our house, just to keep it from being wasted. Otherwise, I wouldn't feel the need to actually fix something and eat it. The night and morning before mom died proved that. I had eaten three grapes in a 24-hour period and really wasn't inclined to eat more.

That night we finally had all nine kids in. That was the first time in over 5 years that all siblings were together. We got a picture taken with everyone and everyone ate a variety of food. I head back to Lexington that night with one of my brother's and his wife. They hadn't brought any clothes and had work in the morning. I had a seminar to attend, and some teaching to do.

Earlier on Thursday, I had called up my girlfriend to meet me after institute, although I arrived an hour after institute was over. She was there waiting for me. My brother dropped me off with her, and she and I drove to my apartment. We fixed a small meal for her, I was still full, talked for a little while, and then I bawled. I think I cried in her arms for a good half hour. She then asked if I wanted to talk about it, I hadn't even said a word about it at that point. I told her in detail, everything that had transpired. I managed not to break down again, but I certainly had tears running down my cheeks. She eventually had to leave to get back so she could attend her classes tomorrow.

Friday, I got up, attended a seminar for student teachers about becoming a new teacher and everything involved with that. I drove over to renew my license, then headed about an hour early to the middle school I teach at. I more or less helped out, I just needed to be doing something. I got home and checked a couple of things on the internet, ate, and couldn't decide what to do. I couldn't handle being in my apartment, and my girlfriend was trying to get all of her homework completed so that she could go with me back home for the viewing and funeral and be my emotional support for the weekend. I called a couple of guys in the branch who knew my mom and the situation, and hung out with them, just so I could have some company and be doing something. I couldn't stand being alone in my apartment.

My girlfriend and I took off for my home on Saturday, and spent a day with all of my brothers and sisters. One had to leave, so that left us with eight siblings of nine. Mostly just a day to visit and spend time enjoying each other's company.

The viewing was Sunday night. We had lived in the area for 28 years. It was amazing to me the turnout at this funeral. I didn't count exactly how many had shown up, but the place was packed for the entire three hours. I actually went out and socialized with many of those who had come from all over. I was pretty terrible about introducing my girlfriend to everyone. People kept on trying to guess who she was. I was amusing to watch. She was called my wife, my brother's wife, my fiancé, etc. It was fun. Of course people were bursting to know what it was, and then telling me that I should marry her. We aren't quite to that point. I'm so glad she came and was being so supportive for me.

The funeral was today at 11 A.M. It was a wonderful service. The only time tears welled up in my eyes was when the coffin was closed and the realization hit that this was the last time in this life that I would see my mom. One of my mom's friends over the past eight years gave the eulogy. She did a great job showing mom in the light that she was, from the good, to the bad, to the funny, and the ugly. My sister read the obituary, and actually made it through. We sang two special numbers and played one duet at the funeral as family members. We got them recorded to keep as a memory of this time. We took mom out to the graveyard where mom would take us on walks and there dedicated the grave and left her to be buried. We went back for the luncheon at the church, then my girlfriend and I left to come back to Lexington. She spent some time with me here, then took off for home. She's been a great support throughout everything, and even missed Monday classes to attend the funeral for me. She's been wonderful.

This is written for my mom. She wrote daily e-mails with such detail about everything going on in life. Although my mom would include more detail than what I've included, I've written this for myself to keep, and for my mom. I love her, and her unending sacrifice to all of us kids.

Obituary of Ann 1944-2005

Ann, of Flatwoods, Kentucky passed away peacefully on October 20, 2005 after courageously facing cancer.

Ann was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on July 6th, 1944 to John and Emily. Sister to John, Robert, and Linda. Ann married James for time and eternity in the Salt Lake City Temple on August 25, 1967. In 1968, she graduated from Brigham Young University with a Masters Degree in Botany. The family moved to Kentucky in 1978. Ann is the beloved mother of 9 children, and grandmother to 14. Ann will be missed for her many talents and the blessings she provided to those whose lives she touched. She loved music and played piano and organ for recreation and for the benefit of others. A piano teacher, her musical legacy spans generations. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, her concern and love for others was shown in many hours of selfless service. Ann was a wonderful teacher, mother, and friend who loved historical places and travel. She proudly displayed her collection of key chains from the many places she visited around the world.

Ann was preceded in death by her mother in December of 2001. She is survived by her father John of Orem, Utah; her husband Jim of Flatwoods, Kentucky; brothers Johnny of Orem, Utah and Robert of Mesa, AZ; sister Linda of Orem, Utah; her children Joanna, Robert, David, Debra, Darin, Christopher, Jamie, Jonathan, and Tamra; 14 grandchildren and one unborn grandchild.

Friends may pay their respects Sunday evening, October 23rd at Carman Funeral home from 6 to 9 pm.

Funeral services will be held Monday, October 24th, 2005, 11 am at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints located at 1001 Kenwood Dr. Russell, KY.
She will be laid to rest in Bellefonte Memorial Gardens, where she loved to walk.

Yet more on FHE

2005-10-17T23:14:00.000-04:00

I don't have a lot of time to write, but I wanted to get this in before I went to bed, so I'm probably not even going to proof-read this for those that care. Sorry

So tonight at FHE, and actually for the past two months, things have gone rather well with the lessons. They're well-prepared and thought out. They're doing a wonderful balance between spiritual and fun activities. I'm impressed at how well of a job they're doing.

It just so happens that the same girl is in charge of it. She has done an exceptional job in getting things taken care the past couple of months, where before she did an absolutely terrible job and I've written plenty of rants on her and FHE. The BIG downside to this is that absolutely no one comes to FHE any more. We had a total of 6 singles there, and one couple from the Branch Presidency. It's really sad, as I've thought about. The FHE coordinator finally got her act together, and nobody's willing to give her any more chances at doing something constructive for FHE. It actually really pisses me off, when I know there should easily be over 30 people attending FHE.

I guess I really feel sorry for the girl. She's finally putting the time and energy required to fulfill the calling, and everybody else has given up on her and all of her efforts at trying to bring things together are for nothing. She doesn't really get to see any fruits of her labors.

The thing that really gets me down about this is what myself and one of the other singles had to do that night. The girl normally in charge of FHE wasn't there, and somebody on the committee was running it, and was pleading with us about what we can do to get more people attending FHE. The brutal honesty of it is that the girl in charge needs to be replaced. Not because she's failing at her calling as much as people won't support her in her calling anymore. We didn't feel comfortable telling everybody there that, but we talked specifically to the Branch Presidency member there afterwards and told him what exactly needs to be done to get everyone back out to FHE. Can the girl and put somebody else in.

Wow, do I feel hateful of myself right now. I can't really say that that is supporting her in her calling, and to me, the higher road seems to be telling the entire branch what's up and what their responsibility is, which I am half-tempted to do. At this point, it's not the fault of the girl anymore as it is the fault of the entire branch that this girl finally gets on track only to be taken out of the calling because of the stubberness of all of those in the branch. It's really sad. I feel like reaming the entire branch, but it's not my place to do such a thing, unless I'm specifically told by the branch presidency to do so. That was actually one thing they brought up and joked about with us, but I don't think they would ever do that, unfortunately. Chastisement isn't nessicarily a bad thing in certain situations. Oh well. I just hope that girl doesn't take it too hard to find all her efforts are useless.

Caution Advised

2005-10-10T01:17:00.000-04:00

So it's been quite a while since I've written anything on my blog, and that has several reasons behind it. The first is that I'm just way too busy, the second is that since I'm student teaching and that requires me to obey certain laws and when I become a teacher, I'd have to act in a certain professional manner. Which means I couldn't bash on something that I dislike a school system doing, or whatever a certain teacher, principal, etc. did. I decided not to divulge too much information starting now. On the other side, I don't have the time to write very much.

Now that isn't to say that student teaching is going bad or anything, it's going well. I have my bad days and good days, but overall I'm enjoying the experience and learning a ton as far as application to the classroom.

But teaching or saying that I'm too busy isn't my purpose right now. It's some venting, frustration, amusement, and satisfaction all rolled into one. More venting and frustration.

Lately, I've been quite frustrated with my brother's habit of putting content on the computer that I could care less to have on the computer. Especially when my girlfriend and I run across it. After cleaning the contents off the computer for about the third time, I decided to delete the program with which he was using to download it all. It was obviously done so that he would notice and get the picture that I do not want that stuff in my apartment and would like to maintain some semblance of a home as it should be.

The next day, I decided to play an online game, and it just so happens that Jon had spent the last three months on this game, and basically it was his life outside of the little bit he did with school and work. He probably had put 300+ hours into this game easily. Well, running low on sleep and common sense, I made it possible for the account to get hacked, and they basically went through and cleaned all of his characters out completely. Took all of his supplies, killed his characters and made them lose levels, etc. Whoops. Well, that wasn't good after I already was directly involved in one of his addictions, then I destroy his three months work with another addiction. He probably thinks I did that on purpose too, and in reality I did feel guilty about it, but it was something I felt he deserved. Too many times has he neglected any type of responsibility in place of a meaningless game. Too bad I can't get the kids to stop ordering pizza and fast food. Pizza about once every two days and fast food I suspect everyday. I tried buying a decent amount of food from the grocery store, yet he wasn't even phased by it. We had 20 pizza boxes stacked by Friday, and I think I had two or three pieces of it. When I specially told him that my girlfriend was coming over, he finally threw them out.

So now the amusing part. The next day, my brother put a password on the computer and wouldn't allow me on. Big surprise after what I did. To be fair, a couple of days later he put an option so someone can log on as a guest and have access to a few things. Most of the files are still available. You can't delete anything unless it's on the desktop, and you can't alter even a word document unless it's brought to desktop. I was just amused by all of this. Since I've become so busy, I don't have too much time to spend on the computer anyway, so it doesn't effect me much. It was annoying there for a while when I couldn't access my 20 pages of reflection notes on student teaching, not to mention I couldn't write up my lesson plans for a couple of days. That's some things I definitely need. It does provide other problems like not loading BlueBeta properly, pictures not downloading, programs opening wrong, etc.

The unfortunate part is that he didn't get the message at all(note I'm not surprised at all). The next time I see even a remote amount of crap on the computer, THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY. I will not tolerate it. The kid has so much more potential then what he shows. Why must he allow it go to waist and lead a fairly purposeless life compared to what I know he can accomplish? I try not to say anything, because I know if I say anything, I'll blow up in a bigger proportion than would ever be wanted, yet at this point he is forcing my hand. At some point I will say something and it will escalate, at this point it seems inevitable, and it will be totally wrong and harmful. Gee, you think I should take some preventive measures?

The other problem is I see his failure in life as my failure to help him as an older brother. Most of my frustration stems from, "What could I have done more?" And there's a lot I could have done better. Why can't I just be perfect seems to be the main thought that has run through my head for the past month. I wish I understood the atonement better than I do. It would make life so much easier.

Go figure

2005-09-18T20:37:00.000-04:00

It's sad how half the branch find me more entertaining than the speaker. All I have to do to accomplish that is fall asleep.

In violation of home teaching

2005-08-30T20:47:00.000-04:00

Today, my home teaching companion and I set up our last home teaching appointment for the month. The rest we took care of at the beginning of the month. We couldn't get this particular person because they had just returned from Utah. Well, the home teachers of her roommate decided to show up at the same time, so we had four home teachers for two sisters in our branch. Normally, this shouldn't be a problem. We had a prayer, went over the lesson, then asked how things were going. At that point things started to digress. The part about this is that you have the most sarcastic guy, the second most sarcastic guy, myself(who appreciates sarcasm more than most), my comp(weird in general, but cool), and the two sisters who apprieciate humor that involves bashing.

The conversation started off with bashing jobs, then relatives, FHE, people in the branch and their quirks. We went off pretty hard-core on everybody in the singles branch. We were having a riot, just feeding off of each other. Then after bashing all that we really shouldn't be bashing, we left with a prayer. Before saying the prayer they were commenting how we really should pray for forgiveness for as much as we're hammering and talking incredibly bad about all these people. So during the prayer, and trying to keep my ever optimistic view, instead of saying that, I say, "Thank you for the oppurtunity we have to fellowship with one another," at which point they all try to hide the mirth present.

It was perhaps the most fun and least amount of spirituality I've ever had during home teaching. I was talking with one of the guys afterwards and told him how terrible that was, to which he replied, "Yeah, we totally violated their home." I would agree.

Hey, at least this Sunday, we're getting bingo cards for testimony meeting. They will include travel log, the friend testimony, the crier, the joker, the flirt from podium, false doctrine as center square, the lesson giver, etc. Instead of shouting bingo when you win, you stand up to go bear your testimony, then sit back down.

So what do you do during home teaching?

The First Two Weeks

2005-08-28T11:34:00.000-04:00

I just finished my first two weeks of student teaching. Officially it's only been 3 days of student teaching since that is when UK starts. The local school district starts a week and a half before UK. I felt it was necessary to go to the first weeks because that's when all classroom management procedures are started and the expectations of the students are set. If I had rolled in a couple weeks later for student teaching I wouldn't have had the chance to observe and take notes of exactly how this works out. While they may teach us about classroom management in school classes, there is no application involved, so I've never felt comfortable in that area.

The other advantage I have is to see the classroom management of two different teachers at different levels. My teacher at the elementary level is quite good at setting it up her way, but at times it seems like she spends more time on classroom management than on teaching. I'm curious if this is the norm through the entire semester or if it's just establishing everything in the beginning in a very organized manner, and once the children have them down, then teaching can begin.

I went to a CHAMP training for the elementary school, and so they use those guidelines in all the classrooms. This helps keeps things somewhat consistent between classrooms. CHAMP is basically five guidelines that are established in the classroom. Conversation, help, activity, movement, and participation. Can you talk, and if so, who? How do you ask for help? What should be accomplished during this activity? What movement is allowed (bathroom, drink, getting something in the room, etc)? What does participation look like and doesn't look like?

The other aspect that needs to be covered in what do you do when a child breaks one of the rules. Most of the time, it just seems to be forgetfulness at this point. So she usually reminds them by focusing on people who are doing the right thing and praising them for it and the other students realize what they are supposed to be doing and get to it.

If it gets to the point of distraction, then there is time out. So then you have to ask yourself, what is the difference between just needing a reminder and a need to be in time out? There have been a few times when I felt she sent a kid in time out unjustified, and times I felt it was appropriate. I don't like the way she runs her time out. To me, it feels too inconsistent. I can understand why though. She's trying to teach a class and can't monitor exactly how long a child remains in time out. It also matters how they spend time out. She has structured the time out so that a kid is supposed to sit cross-legged with hands in lap in a certain spot. They must do this in order to join the rest of the class. The problem is how long. I've seen kids sit from a minute to the entire class time. I've seen some kids be completely obedient and not make a sound, but may not have their hands in the lap, and therefore aren't able to join the class. Usually in cases like these, I talk to the child and try to get them to obey it completely and tell them if they do that, the teacher will allow them back into the group. With one quite unruly kid, I finally got him to do this, and he did it successfully for over two minutes without the teacher noticing him, at which point he got sick of it and was saying that he did it but the teacher never noticed and that he should be allowed to join the class. I would almost think that with time out you would need to have a certain time limit. I would focus more on the time than the way the time is spent, although if their timeout was still a distraction, it would increase the time. This seems to be one way I have found inconsistency in a classroom can cause confusion in a child and they don't quite understand the expectations if they aren't set.

The next step is safe. If a child is so disobedient and refuses to obey any type of instruction or can cause such problems that safety is an issue, they get sent to safe. Basically a room with nothing in it but desks. There have been downsides to this in the past and probably will be more this year. Last year, safe was going to the office where you helped out the secretary. This meant using the copier and run other errands which the kids thought were cool, so this caused them to act out so they could go to safe. This year they have a room specifically for safe, but the teacher seems to be more buddy-buddy with the students. I say this because of something that happened Friday. One student was acting up, so the teacher said go to timeout. Instead of going to time-out he walked right out of the classroom and headed straight to safe. The teacher had me follow the student out to take him to safe, but he was already there by the time I caught up with him. The safe teacher wasn't in, so we went to search for him. Once they met, the safe teacher reprimanded him and talked with him, but in such a way that the student more enjoyed the attention he was getting, even though it was negative attention supposedly. Well, I headed back to the classroom to join the rest of the class and left the student with the safe teacher. He joined the class before it was over and was pretty well-behaved for the rest of the class. To me, it seemed like he didn't need to misbehave because he already had a visit with the safe teacher like he wanted, and now that he visited him, he could actually go to school. Students really shouldn't want to go to safe. Later that same day we saw the teacher with two students in safe, but instead of being in safe they were having fun in the gym. That'll help motivate the students to act up if it means they have a chance to go play. So this was safe at the intermediate school (3rd through 5th). At the K-2nd, we had one student go to safe, he chattered all the way into class, jumped up and down the steps, and refused to go to time out and continued to act up. We got the safe teacher to come get him, but I don't know how effective it is at K-2nd yet. I haven't seen what goes on, but no fun hopefully.

One other issue that has been interesting to see how to deal is the ESL kids. We have quite a few, and you get quite a few different reactions between all of them. Unfortunately there is only one regular teacher who knows some Spanish in Kindergarten. So her class ended up with two ESL students, which seems to be the most. One doesn't know any English and you can tell. He tries to be involved and mimics what is going on. The other knows English, but he tries to play the Spanish card. He ignores what's going on in class and won't participate because he thinks he doesn't have to since he 'only speaks Spanish'. He pretends that he doesn't understand and just sits there, when that's not the case. I remember in one of our classes we did a game based on this idea. Basically we got in groups and were given a few incomplete rules to play a card game. We played it and whoever won moved to the next table and the loser moved to the previous table. When this happened, you were thrown into a new card game. Once we got there, no communication of any type was allowed, and you had to basically figure out how to play. The reactions we got in the class were quite varied for college students I had thought. A couple of people decided to take advantage of not knowing the rules, and played by his own rules so that he could have his own way and win. Most just got frustrated because they couldn't figure out the rules. Some of them would make a minute attempt to follow the game and others just gave up. Surprisingly, I was the only conformist. I loved the challenge of having to figure everything out on the spot. I usually knew the rules better than the people who made up their card game did by the time we finished the game. I guess you really don't get a lot of people who try to follow somebody else’s set of rules, instead they usually take advantage, give up, play ignorance, etc. That's unfortunate. I can't really think of a way to get them to be involved as much as they should be. I know the teacher makes an effort to get these students involved and tries to have other students help them learn the words since those are important as well when learning music and songs.

I only have one class in the middle school. It's the intermediate band class. I'm not sure exactly how I would set up rules in this type of situation. The rules are set, but oftentimes there seems to be no consequences in many of the situations I see. Time out doesn't seem to be an appropriate punishment for a middle school setting, but I'm not sure how you would enforce rules. Most of the time, whenever I see what I call 'band director mode' it tends to be yelling at kids to be quiet and once they are quiet, continue on with the instruction and playing. This seems way too often the norm and not effective. I'm not sure what I would consider effective for myself and that is definitely an area I'm going to have to explore as I student teach, because I see myself falling into this 'band director mode' way too easily. It still seems too early to find out exactly how the class is set up since I only have one hour with this teacher at the middle school level. I'll figure it all out soon, and exactly how things are run. The one advantage of having sixth grade is that they are all new and slightly shy and quiet at this point, so it isn't as much of an issue.

Some venting on teaching

2005-08-11T20:53:00.000-04:00

Today I went to institute, and because of there being so many new people, he had everyone stand up and introduce themselves and a little about themselves. I mentioned my student teaching. He asked where at and I told him. To this he replied, "Good luck, I'm sure you'll have many stories to tell me." This really quite shocked me. This guy is an exceptionally good teacher and has high expectations for his classroom. He generally tends not to think condescendingly of people or anything of that nature. For him to pass that type of judgment on a school as a teacher surprised me greatly. The schools I'm teaching at are over 80% African American. He moved in the area last year, and he has 3 or 4 kids, so I'm sure he looked at all the local school to see what was the best for his children. So he probably saw in general what type of school it is. It still just surprises me that he would pass that type of judgment upon a school.

One more item on venting about a teacher that I've vented on about four or five times on my blog already. Maybe I should give him a name since I talk about him so much on here. Apparently I'm not approved to student teach quite yet. Don't worry, it'll happen. It's just the thing that I have to do in order to student teach is about the stupidest requirement I've ever been given in a class that has no relevancy to the class. In my music education class, one of the requirements at the beginning of the class was to sign up for CMENC. That was it. Now ask me if we ever used any material from CMENC in the classroom. Not a single time. Tell me, would it have benefited me any last year to join CMENC. No. Last year I was too busy to do anything meaningful by joining CMENC. It would have been a waste of time and money for me. So I opted not to sign up for it because it wasn't needed at all. Well, this teacher must have his way in all things, and basically will not give me the grade in the class until I sign up for something completely irrevelant for the class. I must have all other requirements complete before I student teach(which he is also in charge of), so this is what must be done.
Now this isn't to say that MENC itself would be worthless, because it isn't. I do see the value in joining it, and I fully mean to this year and afterwards when I'm actually teaching. But as a college student on a tight budget taking 19 credit hours, yeah right. This guy is so completely stubborn and terrible as a teacher of teachers. He needs to go back and be a band director. From what I hear, he was actually good at that. (One more semester of him... I can make it...)

The Way of the T-shirt is no more

2005-08-10T11:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was perhaps the second day in my life that I've done serious clothes shopping, which for me means about an hour or more of shopping. Next week I start my student teaching. My wardrobe consisted of jeans and free T-shirts, one pair of khakis that fits tightly, a couple of nicer shirts, then masses of Sunday clothes left from my mission that I wouldn't use in a school setting. Obviously, I had no choice but to get some new clothes for my student teaching, and well, for the rest of my career.

So I now have to venture into a field that I know absolutely nothing about. Great. I called up This Girl for advice, but she didn't know too much about guys clothing. She said she could do girls clothing, but not guys. So I call up my sister for help, and she's even taught before, so she would know better than most what would be appropriate and not.

I basically had no clue. I had a few ideas of what I wanted but not really. Mostly is was my sister picking out the clothes and me trying them on. Although there was a good deal of me making fun of shirts that I don't think I could pull off. There's was also my thought of I could be the eccentric music teacher and wear something pretty garish. Then there were times I couldn't remember what shirts go with what pants. I can't say that I've ever had that problem before. You really don't have to worry about that with jeans and a T-shirt. Some of you may disagree with that statement though, but at least all of my T-shirts are white with some 5K race, marching band, blood donating, or UK logo on it. We're about to finish at the first store and I ask about socks. We head over to the socks, and you know what, they have different colors. Did you know that? I figured I just needed some more black socks, but I guess that they're are other colors than white and black. We didn't pick any up at that store, but did walk out of that one with some shirts and pants. We went to another store to find some khakis as the one we were at didn't have any that worked for me, and picked up another shirt. This place didn't have colored socks at it, so we had to go to yet another store for that. At least I was fine on belts, or so I think. One black and one reddish-brown belt. So nothing there. We didn't have time for shoes, but I've got one pair that'll work and who knows what else I'm supposed to do with that.

Suffice it to say that the way of the T-shirt is no more, I'm sad to say. I guess I'll have to sacrifice my ease of not caring what I wear to something that takes slightly more effort. I guess not a bad thing, just one more step to the real world.

My Senior Recital

2005-07-26T01:49:00.000-04:00

For those who care, here's my senior recital. I'll refrain from writing what I think about it and write down my massive amounts of critisms, including the recording quality. If you want a recommendation, I would say the Penderecki. It doesn't have piano, and the piano player wasn't the easiest to work with. Enjoy.

Hindemith Sonate Mvt. 1

Hindemith Sonate Mvt. 2

Hindemith Sonate Mvt. 3

Penderecki

Horovitz Tuba Concerto Mvt. 1

Horovitz Tuba Concerto Mvt. 2

Horovitz Tuba Concerto Mvt. 3

Music for music's sake

2005-07-08T10:16:00.000-04:00

Last night, I couldn't sleep, and so my mind thought about many different subjects last night. My thoughts went back to a girl I was talking to during the Orff class who just had finished an interview. She said that the interview went quite well, except for the last part. There were three people in the interview. A teacher, an involved parent, and the principal. The principal decided to ask about a scenario that was basically along the lines of what do you do with a student with bad math scores that doesn't want to do music. The girl gave her answer and the principal didn't like that answer and told her what she thought her answer should have been. Do you know what that answer was? You tell the student that if they do music your math scores will improve.

*Trueblat steps up on soapbox*

Come again?!? I find so many things wrong with this statement I don't know where to start. My first reaction being, so basically, you're telling me and the student that music is only important because it improves you're math skills. Gee, that's the reason I went through four years of college, practicing 3 hours a day, and learning everything I can about teaching music, so I can improve a kid's math scores?

Sorry, music is it's own subject, and should be treated as such. It should receive an equal amount of time as other subjects. To me, it's just as important to learn music as it is math and science. Teaching music for the sole purpose of supposedly improving scores in other areas is degrading to music and beyond that, is a farce. The correlation may be there, but there are other factors that are involved in that.

Sometimes I get sick of the way music has to be defended, providing all these petty little excuses about why we need to have music in our schools. We shouldn't need to use them. Do we provide reasons anymore about why we do math or science in our schools? No. We do them for math's or science's sake, not some lame petty excuse. Music should be the same way.

*steps off soapbox*

PDQ Mahler

2005-06-28T23:48:00.000-04:00

In our Orff methods class today, we decided to play with pennies. How, you might ask. Somebody conducts using the penny, while everyone follows what the penny does with their voice by saying the word "penny". So if you held the penny high, we said it with a high pitch, low was low. Bouncing it fast repeatedly, you say it repeatedly. We found many different methods to conduct using a penny. The teacher then turns us loose to create our own song, using a penny. We were allowed ten minutes to plan the song and use whatever creative tools we felt necessary. My group used Pacabel's Cannon mixed with urban rap. Quite unique, but the real gem was the group that went before us.

Their group consisted of about nine people. They walked in like it was a serious performing choir group. Once up they started off with the guy with a deep rich voice on the first beat of every measure doing "Penny". Each person continued to be added with their own parts. They layered about eight different parts with varying words, rhythms, pitches, etc. Then they developed it even more, and changed parts, creating such complex layering. The climax was the girl who was belting out something is a high operatic voice, just making it full out power across all levels. It was absolutely magnificent. They even got a standing ovation from a couple of the other students. I so wish I had a recording.

And I'm sorry, very few people will understand the title of this. But as the class was discussing the performance afterwards, this term so aptly fit the discussion. We had a good laugh about it, but hardly anyone here will understand it *sigh*

Thing that pisses me off

2005-06-24T16:54:00.000-04:00

So I get home from my workshop today, and I find out my brother has actually cleaned a little bit. Do you want to know what he cleans? He cleans my scriptures and journal, which I happened to leave out this morning. Does he clean the dishes that I can't do, or take out the trash, which I also can't do? Maybe the bathroom, which I've tried to wipe down once in a while, and wasn't cleaned once during my entire month home while having surgery? No, he cleans up anything that is remotely related to church and puts it out of his sight. Give me a freaking break. Even a family picture which I decided to put in our living room. After several attempts at keeping it in the living room and my brother throwing it back in my room, he decides to 'lose' a nice family picture with eight of nine siblings, which is a very rare occurrence. It's also a recent picture. He's also thrown out some of my church CD's which I had to retrieve from the trash.

Come on brother, you haven't been to church in a year and a half now. Seeing church stuff around really shouldn't bother you that much. Get over your freakin guilt every time you see some church related thing. Geez. Get a life.

They're not laughing with you...

2005-06-19T20:13:00.000-04:00

So I'm now back in Lexington and have a decent internet connection and the keyboard is just the right height for me to be able to type with both hands. So let the writing continue, and an amusing incident from church.

Two years ago, I ended up dating a girl from my branch for a couple of months. When we broke up, one of my reasons was basically that I needed to spend more time on school(read music). In the most blunt form, I was basically saying I would prefer to play music than date you. It really wasn't a bad break-up at all. I'm sure neither of us lost any sleep.

This Sunday, I was talking to her sister, who I hadn't really talked to in quite a while. So when I first went up and said hi, she mercilessly laid into me and was making fun of me and my tuba. I didn't mind that too much. It just got me thinking, I wonder what they talked about right after we broke up. I'm sure that they're the type that would just lay into somebody and make fun of them, and let's face it, I gave them about the biggest opening for them to make fun of me, which I'm sure they did. I know I've done that with my roommate from my freshman year. Whenever a girl would do something stupid that one of us were dating, we ripped them(and girls in general) up one side and down another. It's quite fun.

So, I'm just glad that they probably had a few laughs at my expense. Granted, not everyone can say that, but I usually follow the quote my sister sent to me...

"Those who laugh at themselves never cease to be amused"

And if I hold myself to that most of the time, I'm sure I can let other people be amused as well.

Just letting you all know...

2005-06-19T07:17:00.000-04:00

I love music.

Update

2005-06-09T20:51:00.000-04:00

Since some people may be curious as to what’s currently going on and wondering about my lack of interaction as of late, I’ll take a little bit of time to update everyone on life. First off, being at home with a dial-up connection is not my idea of fun, and I end up tying up the phone line. Second, I finally had the shoulder surgery done. Typing one-handed is also not my idea of fun. It may be up to a month before I can actually use my arm to type. Hopefully less. Completely severed tendons do take some time to heal, and then never completely.

On a bright note, I do get to see This Girl this weekend. Since our birthdays are within five days of each, we decided to celebrate in-between our birthdays.

On a humorous note, my family completely forgot about my birthday, to the point that when I was talking to This Girl on the phone that evening, she had to remind me that it was my birthday.

On a happy note, I’ll have the bandages off on Monday, and I can actually shower without trying to keep bandages dry.

On a depressing note, I actually took pain pills twice, whereas my last surgery, I didn’t take any. I hate medicine. Despise it. I like to feel in control of my body all times, and feel that I should be able to overcome pain as well.

On a sad note, I’m bored out of my mind. Can’t drive, play, run. Heck, last night was the first night I was able to sleep in a real bed. It hurt a little bit when I woke up, but not as much as I thought it would. All I do is sleep and read, and play an occasional computer game that only requires one hand. Not what I’m used to.

So there’s an update on the life of Trueblat. Hope you enjoyed, and maybe I’ll write somewhat more often once I get back to Lexington in a week or two and have DSL.

Dispair

2005-05-22T22:30:00.000-04:00

I don't know what it is about today, but I've had a totally pessimistic view of life. Through church I was thinking of all the times that I've set my goals, and failed, set them and failed. This continuous cycle of trying and failing through a variety of things that I do to try to improve myself. I thought of how much each of us is resistent to change. Perhaps most people can change for the better without this constant companion of failure. Somehow, I just don't see all that many people trying hard to change.

Today in priesthood they were talking about the whatever the subject was. It was about being nice, but that's really not all that relavent to what I'm talking about. It's more the idea that they bring up a subject that they need to work on, and hey, let's face it, all of us need to work on every aspect of the gospel, because I doubt we're perfect in any of it. So they bring up whatever subject, we learn about it, finish the lesson, and there you have it. We may say, "That was a good lesson" or "Yes, I need to do better at that" or what-not, but how many of us truly take it to heart? Do we go home that day, and find a way to consciously apply that into our lives, day after day? I seriously doubt very few of us do. I felt just... stagnant. No push to change and pattern my life after Christ.

Then again, I think I'm just being pessismistic. I think it comes from finishing school, and unable to really put structure into my life. I do terrible without structure in my life, and I don't seem to be able to set it myself. So this is pretty much based off my mounting frustrations of life and my inability to change myself to improve, and applying it to the rest of the world. Sorry world, hopefully your better than my view for you.

Not really interested?!?

2005-05-17T10:36:00.000-04:00

I'm increasingly becoming frustrated with the man who is in charge of my student teaching. It doesn't help that I've lost all respect for him through the last two years I've had to take his class, and now he owns me for the entire next semester. So the way we set up student teaching is to divide it between a general music elementary class and a middle school band class. So I was able to set the elementary school class up pretty easily. The lady in charge of general music recommended one specific person and we set it up. This man didn't give any type of direction or give me any ideas about where to set up a middle school. With all the credit hours I was taking and everything that was going on, I never got to explore my options in that area. It also didn't help because I am fairly ignorant about the teachers in the area and what would be best. In this area, he would know better than I would, but he did nothing to help this search. So I sent him an e-mail recently concerning what was going on. Here's his response...

"The problem is, most potential supervising teachers in the instrumental area don't want a student teacher who is not really interested in that area. So, let me
know what you want me to do. You can't have your cake and eat it to."

Did I ever say that I wasn't interested in the area?!? This man is just clueless about me. I've written many posts on the subject and my thoughts on the subject, and how restrictive I beleive those programs are, but I never did say that I was not interested. I'm concerned about all levels within music programs. I want to find the best means possible for me to learn and improve music as a whole. For me, this starts at the elementary level. There may come a time that I understand what I need to at that level to move on and figure out the workings of middle school programs. Is it entirely possible for me to teach middle school band with the same passion that I have right now about general music. Of course. Just because I'm focussing on one aspect more than others doesn't mean I'm disinterested in that subject.

So he's taking my inconclusion of the subject thinking I'm disinterested in it, as opposed to my lack of knowledge who to do my student teaching under since he offered absolutely no guidance for it.

Marching band serves a purpose

2005-05-15T08:32:00.000-04:00

If there is one thing that almost any marching band member can do as far as a dance, it is the waltz. The hours spent learning how to keep your upper body from moving as you are while playing an instrument transfers quite well. We've already developed that framework more than any other group of people, well, except for maybe dancers. My sister and I were talking about the waltz in particular, which in and of itself is pretty sad, considering our history of dancing. But people who had danced with my sister were surprised that her 5'2/5'3 frame could take an exceptionally large first step without any difficulty at all, and without any of the bounce that you would expect to see from somebody of her small stature. I've only recently picked up dancing. Mainly because This Girl got me interested in it, and it could be a great tool for the classroom as well. The best dance I do is the waltz, there isn't even a contest with other types. I've got the rhythm down for any type of dance. That part is obviously the easiest for me. I'm fairly well-balanced which helps with learning the steps, and six years of soccer and eight years of marching band helps with that as well. So the next part is learning everything outside of the basic steps. The waltz seems to be the most structured of any of the types of dances and therefor the easiest one for me to pick up. My problem is that I know the basic steps and that's it. This Girl really can't teach me the guys part and I really don't have a chance to learn it. All that has to be done is show it to me, and I'll pick it up pretty quickly. After a couple of tries, I usually get this down, but I tend to forget them rather quickly. So hopefully I'll learn sometime. Bandjam better bring something with her to teach me when she comes home this summer. That would be fun, and I'll see if I can take you out contra dancing. I went English Country Line Dancing yesterday. I don't know if we'll be able to do that either when you come. I'd also really like to learn how to polka. That looks fun. This Girl is afraid to try it with me, because she doesn't really know it. The steps look pretty easy though. My mom was mentioning that my dad loved to do that. That would be fun to watch, but I don't think he's done it since his college days. Oh well.

We finally got snow the second time of the year

2005-04-24T07:59:00.000-04:00

So we wake up for church this morning, and it is snowing. This is after wearing shorts and T-shirts for the past two weeks. Sad, sad, sad.

Dies Irae

2005-04-16T09:33:00.000-04:00

Last night I was able to see the Verdi Requiem(my brother says I didn't see the Verdi Requiem, but that's a subject for another time, and actually being discussed on BB). I didn't have a program because they ran out, but I'm pretty sure the section I'm talking about is the Dies Irae. This movement is usually the most favorite of any requiem masses. You probably even recognize most of the Dies Irae sections without realizing it. I went to this concert with Weasel(non-music major) and he actually recognized that section from cartoons and movies and what-not. I didn't recognize it myself, but I could definitely see it being used. A great example of Dies Irae being used is in X-Men 2. The scene where Nightcrawler makes an assassination attempt. That music is from Mozart's Requiem, although the orchestration has been expanded to include more instruments.

The rest of the Verdi Requiem was alright. There were some really good parts, but there were parts that seem ill-fitted to a requiem, and parts that just didn't seem all the great. I also still have problems listening to 4 operatic singers acapella, and trying to actually hear something other than an octave-wide vibrato. I must admit that I also fell asleep through more than I care to admit. Oh well. It has its moments and they were quite good.

As a side note, I've already had 3 of my fliers taken down. Two for the content on them and one on accident. How sad is that. I would expect them to be taken down at BYU, but here?

Warning: Don't Try This Without Sleep

2005-04-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

I found out something you really shouldn't do on half an hour of sleep. You should not create fliers to hang up about your senior recital. I printed off a basic page with the information, then I needed to find something to one-up the last senior tuba recital, who incorporated a lot of pictures and edited tubas into them, so Chewbacca's holding a tuba, you get the idea.

Well, I decided I would draw and write all of my pictures/comments as a five year old. To accomplish this I misspelled words, got letters backward, and drew all pictures and words left-handed. Too bad I can't show you them, but I'll at least give you a decription.

1. (picture of Godzilla crushing cars/people, etc) "I want to be Godzilla when I grow up"

2. (picture of sheep with sousaphone) "Don't oppress sheep. They can play tuba too."

3. (picture of an unsuccessfull tuba snake)

#3 is a marching band tradition where after the halftime show, the tuba players follow the leader at a full sprint no matter where they go. Let's just say we've had people fall before.

4. (picture of me holding my left arm completely disconnected from my socket) "If you see me like this, don't worry, I would actually be doing quite well."

5. (picture of my family, drawn as stick figures) "This is my daddy, and my mommy, and brother, and brother, and brother, and brother, and sister, and sister, and sister, and sister, and ME!"

I don't think #5 would be as funny out West, but it's so different here, that they get a kick out of it.

6. (picture of me falling off my bike by hitting a rock on a steep incline) "I love biking. This is me on a ski slope."

7. "Never play with your sister's hair and a remote-control car at the same time. You won't get you car back for a really long time."

and my personal favorite, and I've even gotten laughs from professors

8. "My mommy told me it's not nice to put mice in the microwave"

lol

2005-04-12T00:28:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how many of you play any type of multiplayer online games. I've happen to play on a couple of them, and I currently play one a little more than I should. The thing that drive me nuts though, is the abuse of the title of this entry. The ocasional lol isn't that bad, but lately any time I play, lol seems to be used more as a period than as an expression. I know I use this phrase, but I only use it when I actually do laugh, otherwise I just don't respond. I think it's the funniest thing when people actually finish whatever they're with the phrase lol, lol. I know it's a little harder to read into how people actually feel when just reading their words, but still, lol. I also guess it doesn't help that the major population for these games are probably middle school and high school boys, lol. Oh well, there's my mini pet peave for procrastination time, lol. Is it getting annoying yet, lol. I guess I could go into a lot more of the idiosyncrasies of the gaming world as well, but this one seems to bother me the most.

Out of boredom...

2005-04-07T02:18:00.000-04:00

1. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (Name of first [same gender] pet + Street you grew up on):Brownie Potter

2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME: (Name of your favorite snack food + Grandfather's first name): None Grandpa

3. YOUR FASHION DESIGNER NAME: (First word you see to your left + Favorite restaurant): Start Ramsy

4. "FLY GIRL" NAME (a la J. Lo): (First Initial + First Two or Three Letters of your Last Name): T. Bla

5. ICON NAME: (Something Sweet Within Sight + Any Liquid in Kitchen): Caremel Cool-Aid

6. DETECTIVE NAME: (Favorite Baby Animal + Where You Went to High School): Cat Russel

7. ROCK STAR NAME: (Favorite Candy + Last Name Of Favorite Musician): Krackel Giants

Okay, so most of mine are names of girls, but interesting. For one, I like my second pet's name better. Paddy Paws Potter. And my real name works well for number 4. Perhaps I should finally try to sleep.

Sleep

2005-04-07T01:40:00.000-04:00

I despise my ability, or inability, for that matter, to sleep. I just don't get how I can never truly get on a regular sleeping schedule to save my life. It's a constant struggle to attempt to correct. Since I still haven't corrected the time on my blog, it's 2 A.M. right now. I've got an 8:00 A.M. class, with homework due, but I can't do it because I need the music library computers to complete the assignment on. I don't think I've ever really covered this subject on my blog, so I guess now's a good time to write about it. I put a couple of comments on the 100 hour board about it once. Somebody about a year and a half ago wrote something about having to go to class with lines on his face from his pillow or what-not. He was lamenting this fact. I posted under a different name, I don't remember which, that he should consider himself lucky. I wish and wish that that is all I have to deal with. I fall asleep easily during the day, and can't sleep during the night. Some of it was probably self-imposed from bad habits early on, but you'd think I could break them. I slept a lot through high school days, I think averaging 2 to 3 hours a day during school. I've slept in every possible position, had every type of prank pulled, so many drawings, marks, drool, etc. I've fallen asleep at the wheel about 8 times. Once for half an hour, and one time I wrecked. After that wreck, I'm much more careful about pulling over and sleeping no matter what the situation may be.

So now, it's college and I try to adhere to some type of schedule, yet my schedule is always ruled by my sleep or lack of it. I can't maintain any degree of consistency for longer than a week, if even that. No matter how hard I try to stay awake through classes, it won't ever happen. I can show you some very illegable notes of my attempts to stay awake through class, and just end up falling asleep and drawing lines across my papers as I sleep. Last night, I got eight and a half hours of sleep, the longest period of sleep I've had in at least two weeks. I still ended up dozing off without being able to control it at all. It was only 20 minutes. Now I sit here, completely awake at 2 A.M. I've fallen asleep while practicing before. Actually physically blowing a note into my tuba, and falling asleep. Monday, while helping out with an afterschool program, I sat down, and dropped while kids are running all around me. Just sometime I wish I could stay awake through the day, and sleep well during the night. When I actually start teaching, that's going to be interesting. Will I be able to go a full day of teaching for weeks on end, without suddenly dropping off right in front of kids.

I know my brother's been diagnosed with some type of sleeping disorder, and I'm probably just as bad. I don't know if I'm worse or he's worse. Our vehicles did have matching gaurdrail marks from where we both fell asleep at the wheel on highways. Who knows? Maybe a lot more people deal with this than I realize, but it is annoying.

Friends

2005-04-05T14:15:00.000-04:00

This Girl and I were talking about friendship and what it is exactly. I'm always amazed at the amount of friends that she has, and then I think, oh... wait, that how normal people are. We didn't have too much of a chance to discuss this particular topic in detail. Really, though, our definitions are very different. I've mentioned before that I have two people who I consider best friends. This Girl is more than a friend and will eventually become a best friend the way things are currently going. As I thought about who I would consider a friend, there aren't a lot. As much time as I spend with the tuba-euph studio, I consider most of them acquaintances. Two, I may even consider as friends, in fact, in most people's definition, they would be, I think. At church, mainly one guy I would consider a friend, and even though I rarely talk to him any more, I would still consider him a friend. There are people from high school days that I might consider as friends, again, people I never really talk to or even attempt to keep in contact with. So what is the definition of a friend, at least for me? First off, it has to be somebody I really like. This rules out more than I would care to admit. I have a very easy-going personality and I can get along with everyone. People generally tend to like me and have a high opinion of me, yet I still tend to keep it all on the surface, I'm not quite sure why. Even if I think they're really cool and fun to be with, they may not be a person I really like. Time spent has nothing to do with being a friend, as evidenced by my association with the tuba-euph students and everyone from church, and the people I consider friends are life-long people I know for the most part, and in some cases, haven't talked to in years. You know, I'm just not really sure what I consider a friend to be, hense why I never label people as friends, I just don't have any type of definition for it. Considering this is the first time I really thought about it.

Another topic I wanted to think about briefly was women being intimidating. I have never met any member of the opposite sex that was intimidating. Now, I have very good reasons for this. This Girl made the comment that most guys find her very intimidating, to which I just laughed. Some people consider Duchess to be intimidating, yet when I met her, I didn't see that, of course, it wasn't in editor mode or some situation like that. I very much doubt that any female can intimidate me. For anyone who knows Bandjam, my sister, that is all I would have to say for people to understand why. And I think she would agree with me, wouldn't you Bandjam :) You know I love you. Really, though, I wouldn't be able to describe why she would just scare the living daylights out of most guys, but take my word for it. She would. You know, come to think of it, my mom would too. It just makes me laugh though when I think about this subject or see something posted about it.

A really funny April fool's joke

2005-04-02T09:40:00.000-05:00

So I get an interesting e-mail from this girl. I'll just post it straight for you...

I just wanted to let you know that today is April 1st. Which requires for me to play at least one April Fools joke. And i'm doing it using my LJ, which since you don't read isn't really a big deal. However, i thought I should give you fair notice that 1.I am using you in my April fools joke

and 2. If my brother goes to talk to you/beat you up/etc... just remind him today is april 1st and he can't believe me.

I'll explain the rest to you later.

Of course, reading this, I HAD to go to her live journal site and see what she had written. So it starts off with this post early in the morning of April 1rst(my name has been changed, she calls me by my real name on her lj, which is actually probably keeping me more anonymous than Trueblat would.

WOW!!! Trueblat is the best thing ever....
I had such a great time hanging out with Trueblat last night. Things are going so well. I have never met anyone like him. I just...don't know how to put into words how excited I am!!! I mean, this definitely goes beyond in-like. :) Oh my goodness!

Oh...gosh. I heard this song on the radio and it made me think of Trueblat and I. I just had to post the lyrics...
"No One Needs To Know"

Am I dreamin' or stupid?
I think I've been hit by Cupid
But no one needs to know right now
I met a tall, dark and handsome man
And I've been busy makin' big plans
But no one needs to know right now

I got my heart set, my feet wet
And he don't even know it yet
But no one needs to know right now

I'll tell him someday some way somehow
But I'm gonna keep it a secret for now

I want bells to ring, a choir to sing
The white dress the guests the cake the car the whold darn thing
But no one needs to know right now

I'll tell him someday some way somehow
But I'm gonna keep it a secret for now

We'll have a little girl a little boy
A little Benji we call Leroy
But no one needs to know right now

And I'm not lonely anymore at night
And he don't know only only he can make it right

And I'm not lonely anymore at night
And he don't know only only he can make it right

I'm not dreamin' or stupid
But boy have I been hit by Cupid
But no one needs to know right now

No one needs to know right now...

In a comment made, one of her friends told her that she should make it private entry, so certain people won't read it. Later on in the day, she posted this...

Um...never mind??
So...um. I don't know how to say this--i'm so confused. I mean...well. yuck.

Kymberly was right. I shoudl ahve kept that last post friends-only.

Trueblat read it. and he was kind enough to call me (at least he didn't send an e-mail). Apparently all that information and excitement posted on line--when he read it--it scared him. (HE PROMISED HE WASN"T GONIG TO READ MY LJ!!!!!) I guess it was a little too much--girliness? craziness? looking forward to the future? (What is wrong with looking forward to the future?). I don't understand. but he basically cut it off. He said I was going too fast and--I can't believe he said this--he said that what I posted was too psychotic. anyhow, my eagerness scared him and he broke up with me.

He said we can still be friends. which is nice.

but i'm soo embarressed. I'm so hurt. I mean--i was finally really getting excited and thrilled and...now this.

i don't think i can go to church tomorrow. In fact...i think i'm going to quit going to church in lexington. Richmond has a family ward I can attend. I'll make friends there. I just can't face going to singles ward with Trueblat. seeing him will hurt so much. And everyone in singles will know too.

I can't believe i did this. I'm going to go eat chocolate ice cream and cry now.

and I hope he reads this. and i hope he knows how hurt I am. I hope he feels guilty.

I can't tell you how hard I was laughing when I read this. All of her friends were offering all kinds of support and one of them called me a loser for supposedly doing that. Anyway, she decided to make one last post, which she actually wrote while on my computer.

Great Idea!!
So, I was taking this picture Starla had taken of me and Trueblat to Walmart to get it printed out so I could burn it. While I was at Walmart I ran into Samej, a guy I knew in High School who really had a crush on me. Anyhow, I was telling Samej about how upset I was--and then I had an idea. Samej used to be in the military. He wasn't bad at it either. And I know, from experience, that he's a pretty good stalker.

Anyhow, so i talked to him and he agreed to shoot Trueblat. In exchange, he kind of hinted that I should date him for a month. He's actually a pretty good guy--awesome at playing magic. And we never did get a chance to really date. So--he told me I could think about it. And so I got my pictures to go burn--I was going to ask your guyses advice. But I told him I'd call him tommorrow.

I'm pretty sure i"m going to say yes. What do you guys think? I mean, he doesn't have to shoot him in the heart--it could just be in the toe like in the movie "Guarding Tess"? Anyhow. I think i'm going to have him do it.

That'll serve him.

She did this one, so people would know that it was an April fools joke, yet some of them still didn't quite get it, and thought This Girl was being a little extreem. She finally put her final post up after she got home...

It's so good to know I have such good support for my friends. I think I went a little over the top, actually--i would say I went A TON over the top for me. But you guys still gave me the support and love I would need. And thank you so much. You guys are really great friends, and from it I learned that I do have a great support system.

You guys are really great, and so its with pride at my prowness, but sadness for any hurt or abuse of your caring I may have caused you, that I wish you all to have had a

WONDERFUL APRIL FOOLS DAY.

Please disregard any posts from April 1st.

So there you have it. One in which I wasn't directly involved in, but it certainly made my day. I didn't actually do anything myself for April Fools Day. I ended up being way to busy to really see that it was April Fools Day.

Stuff

2005-03-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

Wow, I seem to be writing less and less. I think in a way, my blog has served its purpose and I don't feel the need to write everything down. Maybe it's because I have someone to share everything with, who knows. The only reason I'm writing now is because I am in need of a break and have two hours till class. Really, I should be studying for my test in European History, but I studied yesterday. Also today, I had my pre-recital hearing in front of a few professors, a exposition to write in the style of Bach, my test later on. I was able to get all of this ready and include three hours of observations for a class, put my mock website as a teacher up on the web. I don't know if I'll link it or not, as it does include my real name. Possibly when I make revisions to it. I've still got 26 hours of observations to do in the next three weeks, all the paperwork for my senior recital done, which is also three weeks, taxes to take care of, etc. After three weeks, I will be free, and my schedule will be so incredibly light compared to what has become the norm, even though there will be several weeks left in school.

On another random note, Kentucky sucks whenever it comes to overtime games. Our girls lost this week in double overtime as well as our guys. I'm not sure if you remember a question I posted on the Board a year and a half ago, of our football team losing after 5 or 7 overtime periods. It was tied as the longest game in football history. It'd be nice to actually have won some of those.

Procrastination 2

2005-03-21T17:54:00.000-05:00

Wow, over a week and I haven't written anything on my blog, or really looked at anyone else's except for the past couple of days. Although, I did pay attention more to BB. You know, I've written one post on procrastination, and now I get to write a second on, and it's unlikely to be the last. First off, it's nice having fast internet connection again. That's probably a bad thing as well.

So last week was spring break, and my chance to catch up on everything. The problem I have is that if my life isn't structured in some form or another, nothing really gets done. So I've got several big projects due right after spring break. Project number 1... I start at 9:30 the day before. Total length - 4 pages. The problem with this four pages is that I couldn't really get focused on what I needed to do. So it took me until 4 in the morning to finish it. Granted I had my brother read over my introduction and say what he thought. Well, he didn't like any of my wording, and would spend 10 minutes on each word, trying to find something better. After two hours of him going through just half a page, I told him I needed to get back to real work. While it was very unproductive, I must admit it was a lot of fun hacking it up and making fun of it, replacing it with words that were even worse or the same level of ugliness, then continueing on. So anyway, I was talking to some classmates and mine seems to be the smallest paper at a measly four pages. The next I heard was six, and one girl got hers up to 20 pages. This is for the same dictator that I so despise, probably why I didn't care about it too much.

Tonight, I get to read more of a book that I started over spring break, then write a report on it. I've done less than half the reading, so it will be interesting. And what do I do, I sit here and blog. I also waited until today to work up my last page of music for my senior recital. My last lesson is tommorrow before my pre-recital hearing. Let's not forget the assignments that I'm not doing for tomorrow. I've also got to arrange my tuba-euph quartets on Wednesday, and create another composition for my theory class. I move from procrastination to procrastination, for the remainder of my days. Here's to college life.

We finally got snow

2005-03-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

It's almost mid-March, and we finally got some snow, not too much, but it was enough to make a snow-man. Although This Girl and I decided it was a little too late to make a snow-man. If we had been a little more awake than what we were at 3 A.M. in the morning, we very well would have made one. It was tempting enough as it is. Is wasn't too cold, it was very bright outside for 3 in the morning.

I also took This Girl to her first concert last night. Well, she's been to others before, but that's high-school orchestra, etc. So I took her to an LPO concert, where they played a violin concerto(Mozart), a horn concertino by an individual I never heard of and couldn't tell you the name, and the reason I came, Mahler's "Titan" Symphony. Only my favorite symphony of all time. It was pretty good, except I thought the fourth movement was a little weak compared to the rest of them, which was sad because it had my favorite parts there. And then during the climax of the 1rst movement, I started coughing, and was concentrating so hard on not coughing, that I couldn't enjoy it.

This Girl and I had a discussion about that afterwards. I didn't realize how much I expect out of an audience during a performance. Not only do I abhor cell phones, watches, people coming in during the middle of a piece, but I hate it when people cough, and believe it is their duty to hold it in as much as possible. This Girl felt my views were a little extreme, which granted, after my coughing bout, yeah... It really annoyed me that I couldn't keep from coughing, because normally I can keep myself from coughing even when I need to. She finds my practice just absolutely bizarre. I don't even think other music majors would feel the way I do. Actually, I remember one LPO concert where they handed out free cough drops, but that's still not as bad as my view. I just think people can usually control their body better than what they do. Oh well.

I just wish there had been more people there. With a UK basketball game going on the same night, it wasn't near as full as it usually is, and this is Mahler. Oh well. It was a fun night, I was able to take This Girl to a concert, talk to her for quite a while afterwards, and see the most snow we've had all year. Not a bad start for Spring Break. (This means I probably won't be checking anything on the internet for a week, bad 56K modem, bad.)

Old ladies playing games

2005-03-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

I completely forgot to write about this, and it still deserves a place on my blog even though it was last week. I went an Orff Workshop this weekend. For those who wouldn't know what that means, it's basically a method of teaching children general music. We focused mainly on different types of games to promote movement while singing. So basically, for four hours we played a bunch of games that involved singing.

The funniest part of this was the game that was similar to duck-duck-goose. You can't imagine the sight I saw when two ladies, whose combined age is over 100, chase each other around this circle with grim determination on their faces that they're going to win.

It was a fun four hours, but I must admit to myself that I wouldn't consider this the best possible means to teach kids. I can't really go into too much at this point about the Orff method because I don't know how much is involved with its entirity. This summer, after I take the Level 1 Orff workshop, then I can begin to find strong and weak points about this method, and how I plan to use it. Fun, yes, but I don't see it to be too intellectually stimulating for kids. I would think that there would be more of a balance, even for elementary school. We'll find out just how involved it is afterwards I guess. This was just one element of Orff anyway.

Stupidity

2005-03-08T11:03:00.001-05:00

Man, could I be any more stupid. I'm trying to get my student teaching together, which unfortunately for me, is under the same teacher who likes his tyrannical rule of the classroom. Basically this guy owns me for this semester and next. So in trying to complete everything I need to, plus all the extra, which would have included some overlapping. In fact, he origonally stated that it would count, and now the contradictory bastard is going back on his freakin' word. Everytime I talk to this guy, I continue to lose more and more respect for him. Of course, being the person who avoids any confrontation at all, I just let it all slide. It's a different story when I get back to my office, and start wailing on the really hard work table with my fist that never healed fully from when I pounded the floor when I dislocated my shoulder. So now I've got one knuckle that's three times the size it should be. I've got my lesson today, and I'm really too pissed off at the moment to warm-up, so I must blog. This is what I get for being stupid.

Now onto a subject that my sister said I should blog about because she thought it was funny. Speaking of my sister, she did mention she met a couple of board members recently. Anyway, on to the blogging. I'd completely forgotten that women actually think about all the different aspects of dating, while I(and most other guys) tend to think it's dating or it isn't. So it was a complete surprise for me when This Girl asks, "What are we?" Ahhh... yes... the dtr, as you call it out there. I was just totally clueless by what she even meant. I just know that we're dating, I'm enjoying it, and I'm getting to know her even better. I never really developed any thoughts beyond that as far as describing what we are, while she had thought about that aspect. Wow, I almost feel like any classic situation where the guys really don't think about it, while all the girls get together and discuss in great detail every little thing that happens. The whole thing was just so typical. At least now, I've got a better understanding of what's going on in girl terms. Although I'm probably touching the tip of the iceberg on this one.

Topics for today include...

2005-03-04T15:26:00.000-05:00

Contra dancing - Contrary to my belief, it has nothing to do with the Nintendo game. That was a cool game. I could beat the game over and over again and continue to gain lives as it got harder. That aside, the best way to explain contra dancing according to This Girl is a mix between a ho-down and an English Country Dance. It's danced in lines and a caller calls out the moves. It's a lot more popular here than it would be out west. This Girl actually found a place when she did a summer at BYU, but it was too far away for her to attend.

Thinking before speaking - I rarely discuss things over with people. If a group of people are discussing a particular subject, I'm always the most quiet of the group. Why, you ask. I always have to make sure my answer is exactly 100% correct in any discussion before I will make my opinion known. I have to look at it from every angle possible before I want to make my thoughts known. When they finally finish discussing that and are on a different topic, I'm finishing up my thoughts on my perfect answer. Today was a great example. My American education class discusses many controversial issues, and in the processing of discussing, I said my perfect response before the topic had switched to which no one could base any negative input on it. This is typically how I run my life. This is why math come so easy for me, and English is so much harder for me. Math has a clean cut answer, while English has many more aspects and interpretations involved for me to think through, so I usually never get it in time. My dad tends to be the same way, actually a lot worse, while my mom in quicker to state her view. So at least I'm somewhere inbetween. My blog on the other hand tends to be my views completed or not.

This Girl - We were talking about puzzles while we were doing one last week and she mentioned the last time she worked on a puzzle. Come to find out when she mentioned that, I realized that I was there to working on it right beside her. That was over Christmas. We then started talking about the times we've run into each at church and other activities. We've both been in the same branch for over two years and we finally just started talking to each other. It's kindof sad in a way that we've never really talked to people at church, or gotten to know as many people as we should. You never know what would come of your life if you actually talk to people at church.

Ahhh... the weather

2005-03-01T11:50:00.000-05:00

The weather here is always absurd. Saturday, I drove down to a contra dance with the windows down while wearing a short sleeve shirt. Sunday was about the same. Monday was biking several miles through downpours. Today, I woke to a couple of inches of snow.

In other news, I'm completely exhausted and have gone beyond my limits, and have much further to go. I just crashed through an hour and a half class without so much as waking up. Hopefully Saturday I can relax. I've already got every day filled from 6:30 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. or later. Yuck.

So a few minutes later after writing about how I hopefully have Saturday to relax. Nope, I just found out all the requirements that teachers are making me do outside of class because they don't offer it normally. So instead of the 17 credit hours I'm currently taking, it unofficially is probably more around 23. So Saturday I get to do an Orff workshop all day. I've got an extra 10 hours of observations, on top of the 25 hours I haven't started yet. Several teaching gigs in Elementary schools that I've lined up personally for my own experience. Wow, I'm going to be lucky to make this semester.

Sunday

2005-02-27T18:20:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to post a couple of things about today, one is an event that inspired me, and the other pissed me off.

I guess I'll start off with the good. After hometeaching before church today, I went with my companion to his place where we cooked a breakfast. His hometeachers came over to hometeach. One of the individuals happens to be autistic. I've had a few short conversations with him, and his mannerisms are all fairly typical of an autistic individual. While hometeaching, his companion gave the lesson, then he looks at us straight in the eye, and bore one of the most powerful testimonies I've heard in a long while, portraying no traits of somebody with autism. I was in awe of this guy. I had never heard him teach or bear his testimony. I knew that he was able to serve a mission, but I never knew of his capabilities. It's very uplifting to see individuals overcome the trials that they have in this life.

Now the rant. For Sunday, I try to choose one hymn a week that is unfamiliar. I chose hymn 115. It's actually a very easy hymn, but one not often sung. So as I'm conducting, I hear only about two voices from the congregation loud and clear, and a number of others attempting to sing it, but lack the confidence to sing out. I see one individual not singing at all. It happens to be the girl who I posted about my FHE rant about. Now, normally I probably wouldn't mind if a person in the congregation doesn't sing, but this girl can sing, and sing well. But it's the same regular songs everyone knows. She doesn't even take the chance to learn a new hymn. Come on, peoples, I may have a critical ear, but at least take the effort to try to sing a basic hymn, instead of those few that you like. She pisses me off. She could easily use her voice to help others find the correct pitches. I'm an octave lower and away from the congregation. Girls would have a better time matching somebody in their own octave. So anyway, the girl next to her decides to share her hymnbook with the FHE girl, to which she STILL decides not to sing. Oh, she sang the rest of the hymns alright. Stupid people who don't make the effort to actually learn something and decide to live in their ignorance. Alright, that's enough of a rant.

Just to not end on a bad note, a guy in our ward is leaving on his mission. This individual isn't the most socially compotent and tends to be a little off. But this guy has made great strides to come back to church and to serve a mission as an older individual. I am always impressed by the power of his testimony and his love for the people. His ability to go out of his way to share the gospel and share it with anybody no matter how inconvenient the situation may be. I think that may go back to not being the most socially compotent, but he is still an inspiring individual to me. While I may not like the idea of farewells, open houses, or any social aspects relating to missionary work, I will head over there tonight to see him off, because I will sorely miss this individual and the example he has set.

Disconnected Thoughts

2005-02-25T17:36:00.000-05:00

So after institute last night, This Girl and I were sitting there talking... till they kicked us out of the church. We drove over to my apartment, listened to You're A Good Man Charlie Brown, while talking even more till a little after 1 in the morning. My brother sat there and played computer games and listening to us talk for over two hours. After This Girl left, I asked my brother, "Are you sick of us yet?"

To which he replied, "When wasn't I?" Good stuff.

It's interesting when I talk to this girl. Whenever I am talking to her, and she really wants to know how I feel about something, I tell her. But I'm not just telling her, I tell her, and find this passion there that I didn't know existed. Last week, she wanted to know my favorite books and why. If a family member asked that question, I would have routinely answered it is some basic way. But with her, it's deeper and more passionate. Feelings that I didn't know existed in me about these subjects other than music. She has this uncanny ability to draw it out of me. With everybody else, I am reserved, and keep with me the calm exterior that I've developed over the course of my life.

Today, I was riding with other tuba-euph students to a performance. On the way home, they wanted to listen to a CD. They checked with me first to make sure I wouldn't be offended in any way by it. I told them to go ahead and play it. I ended up really liking the group, which I think surprised them.

The view of most of the tuba-euph students have of me must be a weird one. I tend to be so reserved and quiet, coupled with the fact that I am LDS, that they consider me a lot more conservative than what I really am. The fact that they thought I would be offended with a CD that I ended up really liking is just one example. I do have my limits, yet they tend to not realize what and where they are, and for the most part stay well away from those limits. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I don't have anyone really trying to push those limits then.

Yet another disjointed thought to all of this madness. It's amazing how much I don't know about music. I understand the theory, the classical, and a lot of other categories, yet I don't know a lot of music. There are so many bands, songs, and genres out there that I don't have a clue about. I have a few favorite groups and outside of that, I know nothing of modern rock bands or musicals. Our institute director and This Girl carried on a conversation about all these musicals and who played in them, and how well they were done, and I had no clue what any of it was. It was easy for me to follow the conversation, but I couldn't contribute unless they played an example for me of what they were talking about.

I've run into many people who understand all these different rock bands and styles, influences, etc. I don't have a clue, and in these conversations, there are even parts I can't follow, surprisingly enough. A movie that has so many jokes that I would really like to know what they're talking about is High Fidelity. I see the jokes flying right over my head. I just am ignorant to modern rock music. While listening today to that CD with the tuba-euph students, there's just so many groups that I probably should know about. That's what I was thinking. The group, which I can't remember the name, was a progressive rock group. Something like Cabeen and Cambiata. I think that's their name. This is yet another untapped resource for music education, the modern stuff, that is. While they get enough of it, we could at least get them to think somewhat intelligently to what they're listening too. I'm sure there are also many songs in this category which have a decent message and correspond to what your trying to teach them. Granted, I wouldn't go to the point of School of Rock does, but still, it's not a bad idea to include that, since it would be something they are familiar with, and build a basis of knowledge off that.

I need to focus on words more. I'm such a focused instrumentalist that I tend to ignore many of the words. The hymnbook for instance. This Girl and I got on the subject of hymns and our favorite ones. Of course I have a hymnbook at my apartment, so I drag it out, and explain my favorite hymns, and why, which tended to be the harmonically complex hymns, and many aspects that dealt with music. When she shared hers, and really got into the words explaining why she liked them and the way they impacted her, it was amazing. I wish I could do that. It's very tough for me. I don't understand poetry, I get things totally wrong all the time.

I need to learn how to teach basic music terms. This was rather funny. When sharing my favorite hymns and why, I started off by saying, "I really like the start of this one because the harmonies that coincide with the pedal point..." I lost her at that point. Pedal point was easy to explain. 4-3 suspension took me about 10 minutes(I had no piano to reference to). Cadence took a while too. I wasn't going to try V of V. As a music major, these terms flow so naturally, that they've become the basic words that I use to explain more complex musical terms. I don't know how to simplify them anymore. Course it probably would have helped if I had set a foundation up, instead of going straight to the complex. At some point I mentioned formata, to which she replied, "Is that the one-eyed smiley?" It was really funny. I've forgotten that most people don't know these like I do. Out of curiosity, who remembers the term for "train tracks" or possibly "railroad ties"? I forgot the real term. That's what my band director always used, so I don't remember the real term.

Anyway, sorry about the random jumping from topic to topic with no real purpose. It's just what I've thought about today.

Just right

2005-02-22T23:12:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a few days now, but I've been quite busy. First off, my last several blog entries haven't reflected how I've really felt while I wrote those. I mean my last three have been bashing aspects of LDS life, which isn't at all remotely close to how I currently feel. Second off, I think I don't write this stuff up, because it is goo, and my family doesn't do that. So I've been avoiding it as much as possible. Otherwise I probably would have written these things up last week.

I'm in a really great mood. I have been for quite some time. It's actually really weird. These past several weeks everything has improved. There is not any area that hasn't vastly improved within me. It seems that I've always had to struggle an exceptional amount to improve. I would always screw up, pick up pieces and continue my uphill battle to try to improve all the different characteristics of my life. These past couple weeks have just been phonominal. I also mentioned this a week ago, and my feelings on it haven't changed. It feels so much easier, everything feels just right. I don't think there's a morning or night that I don't thank Heavenly Father many times for allowing things to be the way they are right now.

I can't seem to attribute this to anything in my life but This Girl. I started feeling this way about the same time I took her on our first date. She is such a wonderful person. I find myself wanting to do everything possible to make sure I remain a worthy individual for her. I feel like somebody is helping me fight the good fight and wants me to succeed. It's really odd, but there are two adjectives that I would describe our relationship to each other that I would never really would have considered. Those to words I would use are proper and right. Kindof weird ones to choose, but that's how I feel to describe it best.

I'm kindof surprised I feel this way so immediately and early on in a relationship. I still feel there is so much more potential with the way things are going. Okay enough of the goo, onto what we're doing just for keepsakes.

Last weekend we learned some basic swing dance and waltz steps during the Friday night activity. She's really into dancing, so she knows these things and is teaching me to the best of her ability. Saturday, after we had a ton of meetings, we stopped by my place and talked from 5:30 till 12:30. We also fixed us a nice meal. She even had me pull out some vegetables from the back of our cabinet to eat. It was really funny. Afterwards, I went to another friends house to play Halo 2. You know what? It wasn't nearly as fun as I remember it being. It guess interests change.

This weekend we're either going to go contra dancing again, or we'll be going to a play that a girl in the branch is in. I'm looking forward to it either way. So life is exceptionally good right now and I hope to keep it that way.

FHE rant

2005-02-21T15:30:00.000-05:00

I've got 20 minutes with nothing to do, and I'm waiting for a friend to get out of class so we can study, so I'm going to rant about FHE.

I guess this is because I have a different approach to FHE than what our current FHE coordinator has. Of the past five weeks, only one was gospel related. They didn't even bother to include a five minute spiritual thought. So we've done dodge ball(where I dislocated my shoulder), the next week was some physical activity I didn't attend, the next one was prophet night. I actually initiated this one a year and a half ago. Once a month we'll do a prophet night. We're going through the Old Testament right now. Last week was the dating game. Usually they act out Book of Mormon characters, but they didn't even bother doing that, just straight dating game, then sent the couple out with a gift certificate to a restaurant. This week, they're learning massage therapy from one in our branch. Perhaps it's just because I'm not very fond of touching other people, but that just seems wrong to me on so many levels. I'm not going to go. No, no, no.

Now, obviously, college FHE is different from a regular FHE. But there are certain parts that are included in that. Like a lesson. Is that such a hard concept? For some I guess it is. Granted, I never did focus on having any type of activity while I was on the committee, but I figured most people got together afterwards and had their own activities and could socialize during refreshments. FHE shouldn't be another Friday night activity. At least I don't think so.

Okay, my last rant on the subject. I'm sitting at the piano, ready to play whatever number she decides on a she runs her first FHE. In her exact words, "Whenever we did Family Home Evening as a family, we always sang 'Families can be Together Forever' every time, so that's what we're going to do." My mind reared it's ugly head wanting to scream in protest, but I am no longer on the committee because of time constraints. I can remember one meeting where we've sung something different since the end of what I considered FHE. There was one time she didn't even do a song. Course I think that's because I the week before I was sitting at the piano, and while she was bearing her testimony and about to cry, I was playing the piano without hitting keys and accidentally hit one, to which that just drove her testimony and the Spirit out the door. I think that time she was just getting me back for that. Oh well. Well, my friend is here and it's time to start studying.

To write or not

2005-02-18T14:10:00.000-05:00

At times I have been tempted to write up my entire mission. I'm still at odds with whether I would want to or not. For those who haven't noticed, I tend not to say anything good about missions because of my experiences in the mission field. I keep making references on my blog or comments on others, yet I've never put down what happened in it's entire uglyness. I told two people about everything that happened, and several others parts of my mission. I haven't written it down because it's an experience I'll never forget, no matter how much I want to. I don't know if writing it down would help or not. There's also the matter of those who would read it. While my mission was my mission and it certainly doesn't reflect the norm, but I wouldn't want somebody who hasn't gone on a mission to be influenced by my experiences. It may convince some to be better prepared to meet the onslaught of mission life, or it could flat out scare them. I just don't know...

Missionary Rant

2005-02-17T11:09:00.000-05:00

I don't have too long, but we'll see if I can make this up in time.

Can I tell you how much I abhore the commitment pattern. This has been brought to my attention with the large influx of return missionaries coming into the branch. One in particular just became my home teacher. So on Sunday, he comes up and is talking to me. Mentions that he's my home teacher, then it comes, "WILL YOU..." followed by the rest of whatever he had to say about having them come over. I absolutely hate that phrase, and missionaries use that phrase more than America follows fads, I swear.

I remember sitting in district meeting with DL's and ZL's, APE's and whoever else, we need to do this and that and so on, and then at the end, "WILL YOU..." They say it with the upmost importance, as if that will be the most important decision I'll ever make in my life. I'm mean, we've been taught the commitment pattern, we know what it is, and at least to me, I feel belittled and talked down to, whenever I hear that phrase. I just always have. I don't know if others feel that same way. They get it so engrained in their heads that this is the way it is done, and the most effective. It's almost like teaching the teacher. It doesn't work.

Maybe if they didn't emphasize the "will you" so much. But they always accent those two words, like they feel angels will come down and manifest that their use of "will you" will cause miricles to happen. Hello, you're asking if you can set up an appointment for home teaching. Not a problem. It's no big deal. Saying Will you, would, could, poop, pee, stupid, the, how, why, etc. isn't going to change what I'm going to say. It's not going to be some magnificent life changing decision if I say yes to having you come home teach me. I almost wanted to say no out of spite. For some reason, "will you" questions put me on a huge defensive front because I hate that phrase so much.

Now, used properly, I will say it can be effective. My institute teacher has used it once or twice in class. He saw areas that he considered to be problems and he felt could be improved upon. He felt it was serious enough that he felt prompted to discuss about it, once the Spirit is present and the question inspired he asked, "WILL YOU..." It was much more effective, and I will admit, my prideful attitude almost took hold of me in that certain situation, but I was able to quell that and recognize the importance of what was being asked.

I swear, return missionaries need to be sent to detraining before they come home. Some sense needs to be beaten into their heads. Alright enough ranting for today. I'm probably the only person who this would even bother. Oh well.