Band Camp, looking back

Band camp is almost over. I have only 3 more hours with the beginners in the morning, and then a concert in the afternoon in place of the usually scheduled "advanced" band camp. Looking back, it's been a really fun experience, and I learned quite a few things about band and people.

From the first day, it's pretty easy to identify who plays what instrument. On day one, none of the kids had gotten their instruments yet, but my new friend Andrew, a music major at ACU, and I were able to identify which instruments about 80% of them were going to be playing. 5th and 6th grade band people are also somewhat similar to their counterparts in the MOB.

Flutes are cute and fun, but pretty loud, especially when compared to the clarinets. They really like talking with each other and others, very social. You can't help but love being around them though.

Clarinets are pretty quiet and reserved, but great learners. They listen to what you say, which makes any teacher happy, and play well with others. Most of them also like challenging themselves and were eager to learn new notes that they didn't need to know for months.

Saxophones are loud! The "make you wish you could stick a mute down their throats" loud. They do whatever it takes to make sure everyone's attention is on them. If you say the words "play more softly" they don't make it to their brains, so don't bother. They are also notorious for being late. For two days in a row all 3 of the beginning saxs were at least 20 minutes late, while the 8 clarinets were all there on time.

Trumpets are just disrespectful and silly. I didn't work with them personally, but according to Andrew, they intentionally do what you don't want them to do, and do all kinds of things that annoy people. I heard that one of the trumpet players kept crossing his legs like a girl, knee on other knee. Andrew claimed that he wanted to smack the kid on the back of his head and remind him "You're a man!!" Maybe the trumpets in the MOB should be reminded of that as well.

Trombones got great reviews, but also had no idea how to listen to directions, which I suppose is common among beginner players. They did a great job of annoying Andrew, which I guess is good since he needs to get used to it if he's going to be a band director soon. Low brass think they are the coolest section in the band, and that if they weren't there, everything else would fall apart.

A joke that one of my flutes told me today: If you're flying over a desert in a canoe and the wheels fall off, how many flowers does it take to paint a house?
A: None, cause snakes don't have armpits.

She also tried to teach me how to play flute, but apparently I lack the epic skills that it takes to play it. Flutes must have some kind of wisdom that just transcends my understanding, because I am pretty sure that you can't actually make music with that long rod of metal and buttons. I know where to place my fingers though. I guess that's a start.

Mega Day Mega Blog

I went through today basically thinking of lots of amazing things and how they need to be blogged for the benefit of my friends, no, America. Actually, for the benefit of the entire planet. So I titled this the Mega Blog, cause it's just that awesome. I apologize in advance for the flow of random thoughts that will have little if anything to do with each other. That's just how I roll. (That, and with a d20 in hand. lolz)

I began the day going to one of my personal favorite places on earth, Austin Community College (Wow, sarcasm! That's original!), where my little (little in age, not height) brother had to register to take a class for next semester. I looked through the course catalog and noticed how incredibly easy and low level all of the courses were there. I was one semester away from being finished with the highest level math class they even offer, and had finished the equivalent of every economics class they had in the two classes I had taken (yes, they just had two econ classes). It felt good to let my famous Rice ego roam free again, a feeling I hadn't felt since, well, I started going to Rice. Rice students do a really good job of making you feel stupid, constantly. Especially if you are friends with pre-meds. I have a love-hate relationship with pre-meds. I love all the pre-meds that I know very much, but hate how they ruined my chemistry grade through the entire last year.

So, then I went to band camp. The kind of band camp where you are working with level 1 Band Newbs all day long who haven't even held an instrument in their hands before. I had forgotten how squeaky clarinets sounded, but now I can remember the noise...quite well. This made me remember that just 8 years ago, I was in their shoes. Then I thought of how much has happened in the last 8 years. Everything relating to band, Brentwood, most of my major soccer memories, boy scouts, my faith, youth group, 98% of my friends... All of it in the last 8 years. Heck, everything from Rice was all in the last year alone, and that's huge! And, God willing, I'll have about 10 more sets of 8 years that may be filled with just as many memories, important events, things that have changed my life around, friends to be made...wow! How different will I be a year from now, or 8 years from now?

Speaking of knowing people for a long time, I ran into Nickel, a friend that I've sorta known off and on since elementary school, at Starbucks today while I was helping Andy with his college algebra homework. When I think about how long I've known her, Richard, and some of the other people from elementary that I still keep in tough with, and then I think about what I've gone through since I met them, and that they've had just as many life experiences as me. Each person in this world has a crazy cool story to tell. Life is such a sacred and beautiful thing.

Which leads me into another interesting topic that arose briefly in my life today, abortion. As a Catholic I believe that all life is sacred, and that abortion is completely wrong since it leads to the destruction of a life. But while I was talking with a friend on the way home from Taco Bell after soccer today, he mentioned that he wouldn't be alive if abortion was illegal/ didn't exist. He's Chinese, and his mom got an abortion sometime before he was conceived. Under Chinese law, if his parents had had that child, they wouldn't have been allowed to have another, and my friend wouldn't even be alive. It was kinda a weird thought. So does this mean that the Chinese government goes directly against the Catholic church (aside from the problems with Communism restricting religion in general) and what is a Chinese Catholic to do while living under that kind of government?

My mind does ramble a lot.

Swinging Around

Well, I just got back from swing dancing in downtown Austin with some friends of mine, and it was pretty awesome. I think I have the obligation to share what I learned with my fabulous readers, whoever you are.
1. Swing Dancing is 10% skill and training and 90% improv and making it up as you go. What makes a good swing dancer is a person who has confidence in his or her made up moves, and a large arsenal of moves that he knows work well, most of which he could have made up. You can do almost anything in swing as long as you are able to keep your feet moving in the right rhythm, and even that is optional if you're good enough.
2. The creepier someone looks, the better they tend to be at dancing. On one end I saw a weird looking guy with his grey hair in a pony tail and suspenders going over his shoulder who could really tear it up on the dance floor. At the other end, the nice looking asian guys that seemed to appear in the masses near the beginning didn't look like they could even keep a rhythm. This rule wasn't always the case, but it held true at least 70% of the time I'd say.
3. Veronica Torres has a long lost twin. I danced with a girl named Carly who said she goes to UT who looked almost exactly like one of my friends from Rice but with darker and straighter hair. It was also funny that they both played flute in high school and can both dance really well.
4. It's great to be a girl who hasn't swing danced before, being a guy with hardly any experience sucks! A girl can be good, or at least seem good, if dancing with a guy who is really good at leading complicated moves. If a guy only knows 3 moves, he's basically stuck with those unless he's dancing with a good friend who has been swing dancing for 2 years and knows he don't have a clue and is willing to lead for him. This was the case when I was dancing with my friend Lianna, who between her and her friend Kendall taught me more than the beginner's lesson did, but when I was with other people towards the beginning I was hopeless.
5. Saying you go to Rice is a great conversation starter. Not many people know someone who goes to Rice, but everyone in Austin has heard of it. I talked to many people who were interested in how things were over there, and when I got started on the MOB, most people thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Weekly Obsession: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

I recently stumbled upon an amazingly well done, soon to be 3-part series, called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Another brilliant work by my hero and yours, Joss Whedon, this musical video blog follows the life of a rising superhero named Dr. Horrible as he battles his arch-nemesis, Captain Hammer (played by Nathan Fillion), while also chasing the girl of his dreams. Each act it about 13 minutes long, and only the first two are out so far with the third to be released on Saturday. Go see it now, you won't regret it.
http://www.drhorrible.com/

On the road again!

Well, I finally decided that I need to get my license since it was on my summer goals list and it's now the middle of July. So I went out today to work on my mad driving skills and remembered how much standard cars annoy me. I think driving would be 10 times easier if there was no clutch or stick-shift, but since both of my parents drive standard cars I don't have much of a choice. At least I'll have mad skills of a driver when I'm finished. And I think I covered all of the hard things today, mainly parking, 1st and 2nd gear, and how to change gears and start and stop the car without stalling the engine. I improved drastically over the hour I was practicing, going from a 50% rate of stalling the car on every attempt to about 10%. It'll need to get better before I get on the road, but at least it's something. And I can't think of anything else I really need to learn that doesn't just come from practicing and gaining confidence.

Counter Productive

I got back from eating at Chuy's with my family and grandparents today and we discovered that someone had destroyed my dad's Obama 2008 yard sign while we were gone. I figured it was probably done by someone who doesn't support Obama, but all that means is that now my dad will get a new sign and give the Obama campaign more money. He or she probably should have thought that through.

Things that frustrate me and my Cleric

I spent most of today playing D&D in what is the highest level and most challenging adventure that I've ever faced. It made me realize just how many things DMs can throw at you that make you want to kill them and their firstborn. The top 5 things that made my character upset are
5. Really high spell resistance to the point where you couldn't hit the monsters with a spell if you tried.
4. Undead that drain wisdom. When clerics lose wisdom, they can't cast spells. If anyone loses enough, they can't think and just fall unconscious. Advanced Elite Allips suck.
3. Being hit by area of effect spells when the rest of your party has evasion. We took a delayed blast fireball, chain lightning, and a maximized fireball all in the first round of combat thanks to a time stop. I lost 80% of my hit points. On my turn I ask the rest of the party how much healing they need from a mass cure spell, and they all respond by telling me that they all evaded or absorbed the spell. I just healed myself that round.
2. When your own party attacks you. A stupid magic fountain had an effect that drove the weaker willed members of my party into a confused rage where they all wanted to attack the nearest creature regardless of who it was. I was the healer standing right in the middle of the group. Guess who they went for first.
1. Fey with levels in Seeker of the Song who have 17 natural armor, a 36 charisma, and are capable to singing two songs at once, one of which prevents all enemy spells from being cast. I got to sit around and feel pathetic for an entire combat while being mauled by it's animated ruin friends, which were probably gazebos. Whenever you see a gazebo in an adventure, you know that trouble is afoot! However, my brother's dwarf just plain died during this combat, and as he just said, feeling useless is much better than feeling dead.

Go see Hellboy II

As one of the 200 people who really loved the first Hellboy movie, my family and I had to go see it the day it came out and I was really, really impressed. It had everything I loved about the first movie and added tons of amazing things that were just really cool. The storyline was really cool, with action scenes quickly turning into what you first thought would be slower scenes with more character development and such, but then finish off with unanticipated action. I also really began to fall in love with the character of Hellboy through the movie. He was just really interesting, funny, and a great character. The different creatures from the movie were also amazingly well done and diverse. There was a scene that made the cantina scene from Star Wars look like a bunch of sock puppets. I also got to see a lot more of Abe, who is one of my favorite characters in the series, as well as introducing a new hero who was really funny.
4 out of 5 stars.

Caution: Extreme Nerdiness Ahead

So my highlight for today was definitely the fact that I finally made it to the outlands in World of Warcraft. The outlands are basically the final areas where the super high level people go to get really powerful gear and fight the monsters capable of destroying continents. Pretty exciting stuff.

Aside from that, I spent a good amount of time talking to the new Jones freshmen and thinking of how much I miss my Rice friends like Jessica, Ian, Helen, Rachel, Nathan, Chris, Reagan, Gabbie, Justin, Veronica, Sara, Julia, Joey, Brian, Aaron, and even Kevin sometimes. Oops, now I miss them all even more. *frustration*

This Date in Alex History: Jones College (2007)

This is the first of probably many "This Date in Alex History" blogs where I remember something that happened about a year, two years, or even ten years ago around this date, and talk about it. I'll try to restrict it to really embarrassing moments, really epic moments, or times that changed the direction that my life was going.

With all of the class of '12 people getting their college assignments, I'm reminded of just how stressful it can be. They're really freaking out, sending death threats to their mailmen, and offering their limbs just to find out which college they'll be placed in. So far, most of the Will Ricers, Wiessmen, Hanszenites, Bakerites, and Sidizens have found out, leaving Lovetteers and those from the north colleges sitting in a waiting room.

Last year Jones was the first college to send out their letters to freshmen. Jones freshmen were getting excited about it on facebook, and I still hadn't heard anything. It got to 2 or 3 days after the first Jones letters were received, and since I was from Austin, I assumed that if I was in Jones, I would have gotten my letter by now. This of course led me to believe I was in one of the other colleges, so I took the opportunity to get a head start on making fun of Jones college, which was especially easy since I was told by my Owl Weekend host and his friends at Brown how evil Jones was.

The next day my mom gave me a letter that she said had arrived in the mail a few days ago and she forgot to give to me. Sure enough, the letter was sent from Mary Gibbs Jones College. I felt like an idiot, then got onto facebook and shared my announcement with everyone else, and went to appologize to all of my future college-mates that I had been making fun of for the last couple days. Negative ten points for Alex.

In other news, congrats to Sang Yoon, my most awesome prospie, for getting into Will Rice College. Sure you could have been luckier and gotten into Jones or Martel, but Will Rice is a solid 3rd place on my favorite colleges, so you got pretty lucky.

Saved the phone

I saved my phone, sorta. The old phone died officially, so I decided that I would take the parts from my dead phone and an old phone that my mom used to use and just build a new one. Then I decided that the only part I wanted to use from my dead phone was the sim card, so I just took the sim card and put it in the old phone and was good again in this world. I can talk to friends again, not that anyone ever calls me these days.
I wonder if anyone actually reads this blog. Not sure if I want the answer to be yes or no.

Fun times

In slightly happier news, I just got back from spending about 3 straight days with a bunch of awesome friends from high school. The first day and a half as I mentioned earlier was spent working with Skid and Kameron at the warehouse for Fitovers sunglasses. After getting my $130, we partied at Andy's house for a couple of days. We played some awesome games, watched a lot of movies, and had some equally cool people join us occasionally. It will definitely be on the summer highlight post if I ever make one. Talk to me if you want more details about the fun times that were had, because they are too numerous to list on this blog, but definitely worth hearing about.

In memory of a faithful friend

She helped me keep in contact with my friends, tell other people about fun outings, and helped me coordinate study groups during the school year. But now a good friend of mine is in critical condition. While she is showing signs of recovery, the damage is severe and she may never quite be the same. Due to carelessness earlier today, I left my dear cell phone in my right pocket when I went swimming for about 10 minutes earlier today, and she got really wet. I feel like an idiot. Throughout their history, cell phones and pool water never really got along, and after seeing the damage that the pool water did to my dearest cell phone, I understand why.
Keep her in your prayers.

Working feels good

Day 1 of my 2-day employment went really well. You would originally think that unpacking boxes, then unpacking the boxes inside those boxes, sticking labels on all of the individual boxes of sunglasses, repacking them in their boxes, labeling each of the medium sized boxes that holds 10 boxes of sunglasses, packing those back up, and then labeling the box of 100, would be really boring and tedious.

No, it was not. Seriously.

Being able to talk with two friends while working and standing up for 8 hours made it go by really quickly and I almost would have been able to work for free since I enjoyed it so much.

After making $80 for the day, I went to a devotional at Kameron's church, then used 4 of my free Chick-fil-a coupons from the Magnolia opening back in April to feed myself and some friends, and then we went to Coldstone for some amazing overpriced ice cream. Everything seems cheaper when your wallet is heavier than it has been for the last few months. Andy, James, Skid, Kameron, Sabonis and I stayed outside the Coldstone for a while chatting about random things. We felt pretty guilty about bringing in such a huge group half an hour before they closed. As Kameron said, "If I still worked here, I would hate us right now."

Employed...sorta

I've proven that finding jobs has nothing to do with what you know, but who you know. I'll have a temporary job for a couple days this week thanks to two of my friends who work there. Franklin and Ben both work at some kind of sunglasses store, and apparently they needed extra help and they thought of me. The extra money will definitely help me out, and it should be fun to spend tons of time with friends instead of sitting at home.