Here I Sit, No More!

Good lord... what a non-week.

I missed a post on Wednesday, not sure how that happened. Anyway, I pretty much have nothing to write. I feel like I should write. I need to write.

I should be at some stranger's house right now, but I ended up staying home from Regionals. The reasons for not going started mounting so I didn't go. Wednesday I completely lost my voice, I mean it dug a tunnel beneath the walls with a spoon and wasn't heard from again until yesterday evening. That was combined with an overall feeling of illness. Lesser reasons for staying home included not knowing the music, not really liking the director we were going to have, simply not wanting to go through the housing ordeal and spend so much time rehearsing again, and having to miss my guitar lesson as well as show up late to work on Saturday. So today and yesterday I simply slept in and goofed off. I'm not really feeling sick anymore, but I was going to be out of school today anyway and honestly... I just couldn't see the point in going in.

But this week has been overall pretty lame. I mean like I said, Sunday was amazing, but other than that, I made no new revelations, learned nothing, and spent most of my time doing diddly. Everyone has weeks like that, I think.

Tomorrow is guitar lesson and work. Sunday I meet with Khai.

The guitar is coming along, sort of. I haven't made as much progress as I wanted to this week. I can play three, maybe four chords automatically, the problem is it still takes me too long to find them, so I can't really play in time. The movements still feel awkward and unsure. Maybe this is all to be expected in your first week of playing, but I wanted to have the chords and changing between them down cold by tomorrow. I imagine the space between the progress I feel I should be making and the progress I actually am making is going to grow wider and wider as time goes on, probably because I simply expect too much out of myself, and also I have no standard to judge myself against. Is the rate I'm learning at normal?

My only real advantage in learning the guitar is the same with any instrument I might try to learn, which is that I have a pretty good idea of music, arranging, register, range, rhythm and sight-reading going in. I can focus solely on technique and getting the movements down, since basic musicianship is already innate. For instance, given the starting notes each string plays when open, I can pretty much figure out the fingering to any chord on my own. With just a little guitar theory and technique it won't be long until I'm making my own arrangements of songs (and my own songs, which I already do of course). The problem is always you don't know what you don't know, and I may be looking at a much steeper mountain to climb than I realize.

This next lesson will be very important. It's going to tell me a lot about myself as a guitar student and my teacher as a guitar teacher. Here's the progress I've made, now what's next? What can I do to help me improve beyond this point? I want to leave each week with a clear idea of how far I've come and what I'm supposed to be practicing. I have who knows how much to learn and only six months to learn it, I don't want there to be a single stagnant week where nothing is really accomplished.

I feel really stupid for not having started this whole process two years ago. It's not like I'd never wanted to learn the guitar until now. It's just now that I'm feeling motivated enough to do it.

Anyways, it's quite thankfully almost the last week in February, which means only March, then April, then May, and I'm out! of! here! Isn't it funny how regular and unchanging the passage of time is, yet certain periods of our life seem to stretch and shrink depending on how we spend them? The best times always pass the quickest, the worst stretch on for eternity. Not always, sometimes our best or most vivid memories make certain months seem a lot longer than others. But time is a very steady rhythm, a steady snare drum beat marching us towards our final destination. But the more time you spend thinking about that, the less time on earth you ultimately have for all the better, happier things.

I wanted to write about how all this week I felt like a big, unmoving blob in this chair, futilely picking away at those same damn chords every day, not going anywhere any which way. How I want to spend my time more wisely, spend less time doing nothing, make more music, feel less blah inside. This skipping of Regionals feels like a culmination of all of that. But I'm not going to write about it, I'm not going to dwell on it, because the more time I allot it, the longer it will take to move past it. This next week is going to bring new challenges and new opportunities and new songs, I'm going to grab them, hang on and not let go until I'm somewhere else besides right here.

So there.

I love Rachel. Oh, how I wish she were here. I can't be the only one who feels like he was born to be alone.

_Dr. M

Pick a Bale of Cotton

One in the morning. Never a better time for a probing question of art and life.

Here's the situation. We're doing a modern arrangement of the old folk tune Pick a Bale of Cotton for County Choir. It's a pretty interesting arrangement, I guess. It's certainly different.

When my mother saw that we were doing that song she thought it was a little weird. Now that I've been thinking about it, I think it is a little bit too. Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

I suppose the central question is, why that song? Why make an arrangement of it, why perform it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that a song black slaves sang as they worked to try and keep their minds off the horrors they were being subjected to? The words are just, "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton, jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay, oh lordy, pick a bale of cotton, oh lordy, pick a bale of hay". We all learned it in grade school. And isn't that sort of where it belongs? As an important part of history, to teach young people about slavery, about the tragedies of the past and how far we've come (and how far we've yet to go)? Why make a bunch of rich white kids stand up on stage and sing a snazzy new arrangement of it, isn't that almost a little insulting? A little disrespectful?

There are so many good spirituals out there we could sing. Songs about God, about overcoming, about the spirit and perseverance of the negro slave, and many good arrangements of them too. Why sing about picking cotton? Why sing a song they only made up to keep from losing their minds, a song literally about what they were being forced to do? I don't know if there is a Nazi anthem, but if there were, it would be almost like singing that.

Maybe it's kind of catchy, maybe it's just fun to sing. But it's not just a fun song to sing. You're singing about picking cotton, for Christ's sake. Try to at least pretend to acknowledge the history there, how significant it still is.

I tried talking about this with Mr. Smith, but he didn't really get what I was saying. I think I'll try and talk to the guest conductor about it tomorrow, see what she thinks. I'm pretty sure she's the one who picked it, after all. She's a little flighty though, kind of a ditz, so maybe she won't get it either. Oh well.

It's now one thirty. Never a better time to eat cold pizza and ice cream and go to bed.

_Dr. M

Happy Things and Depressing Things

Today I had a bad runny nose. I don't know why such a simple problem can make you feel like digging yourself a grave and lying down for a little eternal slumber, but it does.

I talked at length about my poems for Poetry Out Loud today with my ninth grade English teacher who is a really god coach for these kinds of things. She had some very valuable insights, things to work on, etc. Hopefully I'm in line to win the school competition. That's my only wish. Regional, states, yeah I'd like to win them if I could, but all I really want to do is move beyond the school competition.

I decided to change my third poem. My third poem only becomes important if and when I win at the school competition, which only requires two poems, it's not until regional you have to have three. Nonetheless I have been obsessing about it nonstop, and I've settled on Self Employed, by David Ignatow. It's probably one of my favorite poems ever, the problem is it's very short and rather odd. But I really connect with it, and my teacher agreed that I communicate it well. It came down to either that or Why I Am Not a Painter. Painter was the "safer" choice, longer, more familiar, maybe a little more accessible. But Self Employed won out, I mean please, that poem is me.

Self-Employed

By David Ignatow

For Harvey Shapiro

I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?


I hope I win just so I get to perform this poem for an audience. In other news, the more I think about and recite When You Are Old, the more I fall in love with it. It's such a beautiful, striking poem. Unrequited love. Never has there been a sadder theme. Also, when I first read Dressing My Daughters, I thought maybe it was about a man whose wife had died. When I read it again I decided it didn't have to be and I was taking too much from it. But when I recited it this afternoon, my teacher assumed the same thing without questioning it, and it's all because of that one line, "How would she connect these bony valves and stubborn eyelets?" There are many reasons the father might be forced to play this role, the mother might be running an errand, or cooking breakfast. But something about it just gives the impression that he's doing this because she is no longer there, he now has to play both parts of a mother and a father. It adds another layer to the poem which really I don't think will really make a difference in how I recite it (maybe make certain lines a little sadder), but it's good to know other people's impressions.

Knight Life is the school TV studio program which I've been in since tenth grade, we put on the morning news show during homeroom, a live Monday evening show, and cover other school events like concerts and sports games. At certain times the club can seem a little more like a cult, we have a green room (like every tv studio, it's the place people sit and chill before the show) where we eat lunch and have study hall, and go whenever we're skipping class. This year the cult level has been kept to a minimum, I don't know why, I think the people in it just aren't as cool. Anyway, funny things happen sometimes, during shows, during study hall, there are stories, it's fun. Where am I going with this, you ask?

There have been a lot of staff changes in the program. Mr. Fox is the very old teacher who runs the whole studio, he's great. Then there's his assistant, who had an accident at the beginning of the school year (VCR fell on her head, got to watch that) and suffered a concussion and who's still not back yet. Then there is another employee of the audio/video department, a man who basically sits in his office all day waiting for somebody to need a TV in their room or a new projector, or can't figure out how to plug something in. This man was much beloved by everybody in KL (old, senile, and the local Salvation Army for hall passes and I.D. lanyards), but lately he also had some sort of medical condition and decided to call it quits. He's been replaced by this guy, who I got to talk to today for the first time. My talk with him is why I'm now writing about Knight Life in my blog.

I was the only one in the green room ninth period, and I was there because of the poetry practice after school (otherwise I would have left after eighth). This guy happened to be around as well, and since I was there, he started regaling me with stories of when he was in Reading High School, as a student in Knight Life. This guy does not seem very intelligent. He's a really young guy, probably graduated high school in like 2003. He talked with a kind of urban drawl and wore big baggy jeans (despite being a professional full-time employee at a high school). I'm sure if he went to college he dropped out, or just barely graduated. He's now stuck with a loser dead-end job that he'll probably have for the rest of his life, if he doesn't do anything to lose it.

I say we "talked", but I didn't really say much. He told me about the time he hit another kid in the crotch with a tennis ball while they were taping a basketball game. He pointed out which of the ratty old pieces of furniture in the green room had been there when he was a student, and how many students are supposed to have had sex on them. The more he talked, the sadder I got. Here was this man, with presumably no other talents to speak of, nothing notable about him whatsoever, who got four years, just four years, of living in a group where he was excepted, where he was at least semi-important. Four years of fond, random, stupid memories of antics with other students that dozens or hundreds of kids have had before him, and dozens or hundreds more will have after him. But that's all he gets. That's all he has. For the rest of his life, he will have that brief bright spot to look back on as he grinds away at a pointless job in a concrete, windowless "office" (where he does no paperwork and has no computer). His only pastime will be seeing how bad the auditorium gets before they finally fix it up, keeping track of teachers leaving and coming and dieing, and telling students like me about how much fun he had in Knight Life.

Maybe this is only temporary for him and I don't know it. Maybe he's an amazing painter and is only doing this to support his career as an artist. I really, strongly doubt it. Anyway, this isn't the only adult I know who can't seem to grow up, to get past high school. Many people return and keep returning despite having graduated years ago. They find some reason to come back, like helping out with band or school show or something. But they're not just helping, these activities are all they have. These are mainly people with no real futures to speak of, but man, high school sure was a blast.

I find this class of people very depressing. I know I'd rather step on a land mine than step foot in my high school again after I graduate, so I won't be one of them, but I still think of these people sometimes. Hopefully I'm wrong and some of them do go on to do something with their lives.

This afternoon I was with Rachel, which was great. She's leaving on Saturday, I'm sad but only a little. I have a lot to look forward to.

I talked school show over with my mother. She won't be upset if I decide not to do it, I have so much else I want to do this semester music-wise and she understands that. She wonders if I should try out at all, but the thing is I should do it if they really need me for a certain part. I just don't think they do. I'm going to see who all is trying out at the audition sign-ups in two weeks. That will make a difference.

Logic came today. =D Get ready for music that will blast your socks off so hard you won't... be able to find them... again. =(

_Dr. M