The One Week CAC Adventure

Week 6 of the school year is about to finish up. Through this quarter, I have noticed many things:

1. I actually have to do my work this year. 

2. I can actually be productive most of the time rather than just at the last minute.

3. Waking up at 5:30 every morning really wears you out. 

4. Gas is still a shit ton-a-gallon. 

What do all of these things have in common? They all play a big part in my day. Everyday. I wake up at 5:30 and take my time to take care of the three S's (besides shave (I want a beard so bad!!)), do aerobics, run, shower, eat, read the paper and cut down a tree because I can!* I get to school around 7:15 every day and practice for a little bit before class. The day goes on and I leave after rehearsals. The problem with this is that I end up spending an hour a day driving to and from school. I could use that hour to read a book, practice trumpet, do homework, etc. After I get home, I spend time with my family. This is followed by moar werk, or I get distracted by teh interwebs. Usually the latter. 

What I'm getting at is that I run out of time quickly. I've wanted to live in an apartment by campus since last year, saying it would help me be more productive. This week, however, an idea struck me right in the noggin! It would be easy to just live in the Creative Arts Center. After realizing how stupid that sounded, I narrowed the time frame to staying there for a week. I present the One Week CAC Adventure/Experiment:

• I will live in the Wright State University Creative Arts Center for one week's time.
•  I will sleep in a practice room in the evening sleeping on either a sleeping bag or air mattress, or both! 
• I will store non-perishables such as bread, soups and Easy Mac in my locker. 
• I WILL shower by using the showers in the Rec Center. 
• I won't take my laptop. I'll only use the Mac Lab, preventing me from wasting time on the computer late at night. 
• It will be while school is in session, not during a break. That would be boring.

There are a couple of things I'm curious about as a result of this. These are:

• How this will affect me mentally and physically. 
• How it will affect my sleep patterns: whether I'll sleep more, or sleep less.
• If I will be more productive or not.
• How long I'll just stand in the shower (w00t! unlimited hot water!!)
• If the CAC is freaky late night.

I'll probably do this in the near near future. Let me know of any suggestions or questions you have. I will make a post of some sorts every night in order to keep track of any progress. Hopefully there will be results! Hopefully the ghosts that haunt the CAC won't eat my soul...

*I only shower, eat and read the paper. F*ck that other stuff. 

A New Start

It has been a VERY long time since I've posted a blog. Ever just remember random things at random points? Well, that's what happened as far as this blog goes! I was busy fighting an evil monkey robot that wanted to steal all of the bananas from the world! Someone had to stop him, so I gave up writing in order to do so!

Look at him! Surely he doesn't need ALL the bananas! 

  I am hoping to begin writing on a regular basis (ha!) and keep my faithful readers informed and entertained throughout the (insert amount of time here).

Another year at Wright State has begun! I am now a Sophomore and am actually forced to put effort into my daily routine! I have classes at 8 A.M every day and arrive at school by 7 in order to practice. It gets very tiring and I find my self drinking coffee(and I don't like it). But, at least I don't have trouble falling asleep at night!

I guess the practicing I did over the summer really helped out for auditions. I made Wind Symphony again this year! The auditions were very very competitive! I'm sure I only made it by a silver! The results were really shocking! On the subject of Wind Symphony, the rep chosen for this quarter is strange. Two of the peaces are basically the same thing, they contain the same melody throughout the majority of them except for one takes place in a cave and echoes all teh time! We are also playing a piece that lasts around 22 minutes. This is a Steven Bryant piece named Ecstatic Waters. This piece uses various electronics throughout, almost as if it were dubstep!

WUB WUB WUB WUB

All of these pieces are also pretty demanding in a lot of sections. For the woodwinds, there is nonstop playing. For the trumpets, everything is either high, loud, or both! After a rehearsal, you feel as if you just got punched in the face by Apollo Creed and then headbutted by Zinedine Zidane. It could still be us getting used to it, so we'll see what happens!

Yo Adrian! I just got out of Wind Symphony!

So far, there aren't many complaints about this year. Hopefully it'll continue to be great! 

"There will be an unplanned power outage at 3 P.M. today..."- Wright State Office of Communications

A thought

Recently I've been having a certain thought in mind. Some might see it as morbid, but I see it as important: I'm going to die. Now, its not a constant thought that just lingers in my mind and worries me. It actually inspires me. It motivates me to be more productive, but not work myself to the bone (obviously, since I'm on the internet typing a blog). It also allows me to really think about what I have and be thankful for everything.

I am very fortunate to have loving family and friends, many opportunities that a lot of people don't have, etc. I have noticed that I haven't told these people in my life how much they mean to me. I've been working on doing this and letting them know. Along with showing love to family and friends, I've been trying to do the same to complete strangers. Even the smallest gesture can affect someone, so why not let it be a good one?

Lastly, I've been buying a lot of strange instruments on Craigslist. Some people think its stupid, others think its pretty awesome. The reason for this is the fact that you only get one chance to learn, so why not learn as many instruments as you can and just have fun with it? Enjoy music, play as much music as you can on everything that you can.

I just wanted to write that out. Think about it. Tell someone that you love them. Enjoy and embrace everything.


"I was glad that I'd taken the time to tell my parents just
how much I love them whenever I could. You see, the, the
people in your life, the people in your life that you love,
well, you gotta let them know how you feel cause one day,
that opportunity, it's gonna be gone."- Fred Leblanc

"There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live - I have no use for the sour-faced man - and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do." - Teddy Roosevelt 

The Quest Begins!

So, I've decided to take up a challenge (I wasn't actually challenged by someone, I just consider it a challenge because its hard for me). I am going to grow a mustache. After having many recent discussions about this style of facial hair with my buddy Jake, I am motivated to get one. I make it sound like you can just go out to a store a get a mustache from the mustache store, take it up to the counter and buy it from a guy sporting a Dali mustache. Unfortunately, its not that simple.

Growing a stache will take a lot of patience and time. It will also require some care of the hairs that'll grow above my upper lip. I'll need to make it JUST RIGHT so I won't look like a creep.

This may be the hardest task of my life. This is a quest to achieve a special stage of manhood. Only the worthy are worth (??) to sport a stache proudly. These people include Ron Burgundy and Tom Selleck. Most people other than these two fail at everything.

The definition of manhood.

Mustaches were popular with a certain group of people: dictators. People such as Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Houssein, etc. etc. You notice that these men, although evil, got shit done (for a while at least). You look at wannabe rulers like Mussolini and Gadahfi, they didn't have mustaches and they were/are getting their butts handed to them! 

See a trend? People with mustaches have a sort of super natural power that I wish to obtain one day. This quest may take a very long time, or I may sprout thousands of hairs over night, you never know. But be warned, if you make fun of my mustache when its just a trashy little bit of hair, beware of my wrath when it is more full than a clown car. 

"Its magic. You just have to pet it and take care of it"

Lets Try Again!

So its been about a month since I've posted anything on here. Like most, if not all projects I start, I never kept up with it. I hadn't even thought about this blog since the last time I posted. I couldn't even remember my last post! To my surprise, other people brought up this blog today while we were all trapped inside a black hole of conversation that seem to appear all the time in CAC. A black hole so powerful, one minute you're about to walk out the door, the next, its actually been 45 minutes and you somehow got talked into going to get food. This is a force that cannot be explained, nor can it be defeated.

So this is just a brief little intro into what I hope will be a continuing work in progress. I hope to entertain you all in someway or fashion through this or just use it to speak(type) my thoughts. Anywho, I hope to post more often! Please check it out!

"So, I just realized I started each paragraph of this blog with the word, "So"...Huh."

Trolls Trolling! Trololo!!

If anyone has spent ANY time on some sort of social networking website or anything that deals with interacting with other people such as MMO's, then they have come into contact with a troll. These aren't your trolls from Norse mythology or the naked ones with purple hair, these are internet trolls. An internet troll is defined as:

"a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum,chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response"

                                                                             (Danny Devito as a troll)

These Trolls make A LOT of people very angry. For example, in the sandbox game, Minecraft, a troll is one who goes around destroying people's creations. They are bad guys in this sense. People find them very annoying and unnecessary; I however, think that they are needed. Although I believe in peace and harmony, there will ALWAYS be some sort of antagonist. They make things interesting. Imagine Lord of the Rings without Sauron: the Hobbits would just sit in the Shire smoking and prancing around. Sounds like a GREAT story, doesn't it? 


Lets take a real world example: Adolf Hitler. He spread fear around the entire world during the late 30's/early 40's through propaganda, brute force and other tactics. He wanted fear, and he got it. Yes, Hitler was a horrible person; however, his leading to war turned out to be a good thing. It brought much of the world together after the first world war. America came together as a country, and the world economy began to heal after the Great Depression. I'm not promoting Hitler in any way at all, I am only saying that the second world war, known as the Great War lead to the healing of a nation. 

Not all trolls were bad people. Look at Socrates. He was one of the first Greek philosophers. He went around asking people really tough questions in order to teach a point. His biggest thing was that the only thing you can really know is how much you don't know. He was later arrested and took his punishment proudly. This lead to more people asking questions and new ways of thinking. Imagine if Socrates hadn't trolled Greece. I'm sure someone would have come along eventually, but who knows how long it would have taken for a new troll to come along?




Yes, I'm expecting people for getting angry at me for this, because I AM trolling right now. I'll probably be called many different things, but it happens. I'll probably be told my facts are all wrong and that I know nothing of history, etc. etc. It happens. Please comment. I appreciate all of your opinions. 

                                   "You've gotta pay the troll toll, if you wanna get on that nerd's nerves!" 

The Hindemarathon is Over

 Last night was the Wind Symphony concert for winter quarter. We played a total of three pieces, one of them being the extremely long Hindemith Symphony in B Flat. We received the piece at the beginning of the year and worked on it up until the concert last night. It has been said that this is the pinnacle piece for wind bands, I'm not sure about that, but its pretty damn cool. It had been a long and sometimes grueling process. We heard many of the same metaphors and stories throughout the two quarters of learning it. Stories such as how "scholars" debate whether the Second Movement is actually the Second AND Third movement due the different sections in it.

Like I said before, we've been practicing this piece for a very long time, even spending entire rehearsals on it, known as "Hindemarathons" by saxaphonist John Seaton. Playing this piece sure seemed like a marathon. After the concert was over last night, I still felt the adrenaline of the piece until about ten or fifteen minutes after, when I  was hit by a wall of fatigue. The piece was very exciting and required quite a bit of thinking, it was a great experience to play it.

Its said that Paul Hindemith was a Nazi, being from Germany during that era. A lot of the symbolism used in this piece had something to do with Nazis (except for the part where clarinets were supposed to "tickle" us, I can't picture Hitler tickling anyone...). This symbolism allowed for some very risky things to slip during class, but it happens. I actually did not think of Nazis. The piece actually made me think of Hell and Dante's Inferno. This may have to do with my playing of the game around the time of receiving the symphony. If you can't tell, its a pretty dark piece, but it is also awesome.

So I would like to close with this: It really was an honor to play this piece. Even though sometimes I wanted to stab myself in the throat during rehearsals. In the end, however, the run of the Symphony went pretty well on the concert. I was glad to have the run we did, it could have been better, but it could've been worse too. Sp hopefully we did Hindemith proud!

 Paul Hindemith

"'Pick the cherries. SO MANY CHERRIES!!!"