"And when sickness turns my ego up, I know you'll act as a clever medicine..." ~Incubus
Once again, Christmas day is just around the corner. That one day in the year we seem to need to spend three months and thousands of dollars to prepare for. The seasons going well for me this year...I got great grades in my first semester of SIUC (four A's and a B), and I absolutely nailed my vocal juries (for the uninformed, every private vocal student has to undergo a two song audition with six members of the music staff; extremely nerve racking, to say the least) which was the high point of my semester.
Instead of straining to be a tenor next semester (which I do pull off well), I'll finally get to be a baritone, which is something I've been asking for at all my previous schools, but never got recognized. Hopefully, I'll also get to advance to the Choral Union next year.
I rounded out the semester with WIDB by finishing up a few projects and fixing a couple of record players. I hadn't had much experience with record players before working there, but it's made me want to eventually have a record player. They're a pain in the ass to maintain but the sound they produce is something digital music will never be able to recreate. Next semester I'll be applying for a specialty show along with my three weekly rotation shows. I'm hoping to start a movie review format, that way I can meld two of my favorite pastimes; DJing and movies. I did (what I thought at least was) an excellent job this semester, so getting my show should be a cinch. Keeping up with all the writing I'll inevitably have to do for it, however, may be a different story.
I'm cramped for time at Southern. While I love being there, the university life is really quite demanding. I have hobbies that I like to entertain, such as reading, playing piano, walking and PC gaming, not to mention my plethora of TV shows and movies, but squeezing that all in with class, WIDB and Tina just isn't an easy task. I do get to do all those things, not having a full-time job does free one up some, but not nearly as much as I would like to. However, I suppose that's life.
Speaking of reading, I've zipped through Brave New World and Fight Club already over break (the latter being completed in a day...I get crazy with the reading sometimes). Diego let me borrow Siddhartha by Herman Hesse which I plan on starting next. I read Steppenwolf by Hess over the summer and it ended up becoming my favorite book (that being another one day read), so I'm really looking forward to reading another of his works.
Tinkering around on the piano has led to an interest in Beethoven. I worked on several simplified pieces of his to get me back into form on the piano, and lately I've been working on the 'Pathetique' sonata; even though the piece requires extreme technical skill, I've been enjoying the challenge. I've also been dabbling in Schumann, working on 'Dreaming' and 'Of Foreign Lands and People'.
Over the last few days I've finally got around to making a copy of this journal on my computer, in case anything were to happen to the server it's stored on at LJ. I read through a lot of it and it reminded me of how important this is, of how I wish I had more of these entries over the last two years, so I could read (and ultimately remember) more of what I'd been through during those times. It's really cool to be able to go all the way back to when I was still just a fresh kid at Taco Bell and read through all the changes, physically and emotionally, that I went through during those times, reading about early encounters with people that would become my best friends, and being able to see how it all added up to the sum of the person I am today.
Nostalgia is a great thing. It keeps you warm in old age, and this is the perfect place for me to create it.
Thanks to everyone that's taken this little journey with me over the last four and a half years. It's nice to have a place to vent and a place to store treasured memories.
Here's hoping to lots more in the coming New Year.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Instead of straining to be a tenor next semester (which I do pull off well), I'll finally get to be a baritone, which is something I've been asking for at all my previous schools, but never got recognized. Hopefully, I'll also get to advance to the Choral Union next year.
I rounded out the semester with WIDB by finishing up a few projects and fixing a couple of record players. I hadn't had much experience with record players before working there, but it's made me want to eventually have a record player. They're a pain in the ass to maintain but the sound they produce is something digital music will never be able to recreate. Next semester I'll be applying for a specialty show along with my three weekly rotation shows. I'm hoping to start a movie review format, that way I can meld two of my favorite pastimes; DJing and movies. I did (what I thought at least was) an excellent job this semester, so getting my show should be a cinch. Keeping up with all the writing I'll inevitably have to do for it, however, may be a different story.
I'm cramped for time at Southern. While I love being there, the university life is really quite demanding. I have hobbies that I like to entertain, such as reading, playing piano, walking and PC gaming, not to mention my plethora of TV shows and movies, but squeezing that all in with class, WIDB and Tina just isn't an easy task. I do get to do all those things, not having a full-time job does free one up some, but not nearly as much as I would like to. However, I suppose that's life.
Speaking of reading, I've zipped through Brave New World and Fight Club already over break (the latter being completed in a day...I get crazy with the reading sometimes). Diego let me borrow Siddhartha by Herman Hesse which I plan on starting next. I read Steppenwolf by Hess over the summer and it ended up becoming my favorite book (that being another one day read), so I'm really looking forward to reading another of his works.
Tinkering around on the piano has led to an interest in Beethoven. I worked on several simplified pieces of his to get me back into form on the piano, and lately I've been working on the 'Pathetique' sonata; even though the piece requires extreme technical skill, I've been enjoying the challenge. I've also been dabbling in Schumann, working on 'Dreaming' and 'Of Foreign Lands and People'.
Over the last few days I've finally got around to making a copy of this journal on my computer, in case anything were to happen to the server it's stored on at LJ. I read through a lot of it and it reminded me of how important this is, of how I wish I had more of these entries over the last two years, so I could read (and ultimately remember) more of what I'd been through during those times. It's really cool to be able to go all the way back to when I was still just a fresh kid at Taco Bell and read through all the changes, physically and emotionally, that I went through during those times, reading about early encounters with people that would become my best friends, and being able to see how it all added up to the sum of the person I am today.
Nostalgia is a great thing. It keeps you warm in old age, and this is the perfect place for me to create it.
Thanks to everyone that's taken this little journey with me over the last four and a half years. It's nice to have a place to vent and a place to store treasured memories.
Here's hoping to lots more in the coming New Year.
Merry Christmas, everyone.