For the past week I’ve been stuck in this general malaise.  I’m stressing about all of the work I have from now through the end of the semester, and it’s causing me to shut down and not get anything done.  I can’t seem to focus on school, and thinking about work gets me really blue to the point where I can’t do anything.  I also can’t stop thinking about marching band and my upcoming drum major audition, and it’s interfering with my school work.  I’m in this funk, and I really need to get work done, but I’m too damn depressed.

School’s winding to an end here in Nashville. Or rather, it’s just gearing up for the last leg. I’m going to be so glad when May 3rd rolls around. I’m already excited about this summer. Instead of getting a labor or office job, I’m setting my own schedule. My overarching official goal/objective is the self-publication of a collection of creative writing. Additionally, I’m going to try to finish a novel a week. My own personal/unofficial objective is to work on my body. I’m going to get up every weekday morning at 8am and do a thirty minute run. I’ll lift weights three times a week, and work on my mace spinning after my morning run. I am also going to try to practice my clarinet five days a week for at least a half hour. So perhaps it will look something like this:

8:00-8:30am Run
8:30-9:00am Spin
9:00-10:30am Workout (MWF)
10:30-11:00am Shower
11:00-12:00pm Practice
12:00-12:45pm Lunch
12:45-2:30pm Write
2:30-5:30pm Read
5:30-6:15pm Dinner
11:00pm Bed

In addition, I will be spending the weekend of May 16th at ACen.  Also, I might go to drum major camp (July 6-13 or 11-18), depending on how I do on my drum major audition coming up in two weeks.  Next season there are going to be a few changes to the way the Spirit of Gold works.  Instead of having a drill instructor for each section, there are going to be two for the woodwinds and two for the brass.  Also, rather than having two co-drum majors, there is going to be a head drum major and an assistant drum major.  I really want to get head drum major.  I’m not sure I could stand being assistant drum major.  After I get head dm, I need to work on getting Dr. Sagen to let us use maces.  This will probably prove to be difficult because he is extremely set in his ways.  However, he is occasionally very unpredictable, so perhaps he’ll be totally on board.  You can never really tell with him.  In the event that I don’t make drum major, Dr. Sagen has already asked me to be clarinet section leader, which is really awesome.  I’m super excited about at least being that, if not dm.  Wish me luck on my audition!

Well, my blog has fallen by the wayside under the weight of a particularly stressful semester. I have two novels and a paper per week in addition to other readings from my classes and sporadic 7-10 pagers. I’m learning a lot, though, and thinking more than I ever have. Hopefully I can keep my gpa up to get into the English honors program. My English professor told me today that they were planning to bump up the gpa requirement for English classes for the honors program to a 3.6. I don’t think I have that right now. Ultimately, I’m doing honors largely to take the seminar on Ulysses that is only open to honors students. For me, that would justify all of the effort I’ve put into keeping up my grades.

Spring break was very relaxing. I did almost no work, which was a great break, but did no favors for me this week as I play catch-up. I sewed a little bit, patching the knees of a pair of my jeans, and making myself a wallet out of upholstery material. I also got started on the staff to go with my Tsukasa costume for the anime convention this year. I’m carving the head out of pink insulation foam, and I got pink dust all of myself and basement. It was crazy. But it’s really starting to look good, even though I have a lot of work left to do on it.

I got an A on my midterm paper in my class on magical realism. I was really proud of this because the professor is crazy and gave me a C- on my first two weekly papers. I might not end up failing that class. I hope, for the sake of my major gpa, that I don’t fail it. We’re currently reading Wild Seed for that class, which is exciting because it’s the only science fiction that we will be reading. Well, it’s sad that we’re not reading more sci-fi, but it’s nice that we get to read one, as that genre is my specialty and, I think, drastically under-read in schools. Maybe I’ll write my honors thesis on sci-fi.

The weather here is phenomenal. It’s currently 72 and sunny. After a spring break that hovered around 21 the whole time, this is practically tropical. Unfortunately, it makes it hard to concentrate on work at a time when I really need to buckle down. Okay, who am I kidding, the whole semester has been “a time when I really need to buckle down.” I can almost never keep up with all of the reading and writing I have to do.

I have my second test for TBS tonight on national officers. I definitely have no idea who any of them are. That’s totally the furthest thing from my mind right now, though. I have to get back into the swing of doing interviews after taking a break this last week. I’m over half way there, but I still have a good thirty left.

Oh! I almost forgot. I got offerend (and am accepting) a job at the theater department’s costume shop sewing starting next fall. I’m so incredibly excited. I’m going to get paid to do something I love and would volunteer to do anyway, and where I will learn skills I want to know which will also be useful to me.

Anyway, I have to go write a philosophy paper. More updates soon, work permitting.

I recently received a comment on an old post about the deaths in Deerfield last year. I wrote a response, and thought I should post it. Here is what Liz said,

“You have no heart. Young lives were lost and that pain alone is enough. Somehow you find it acceptable to judge these situations as if you truly understand them. But I am sorry, it is clear you do not. You have misspoken and disrespected those who deserve to rest in eternal peace. I ask you to please speak only kind words when you mention anything regarding the death of one of these precious souls.”

To which I responded:

I find it interesting to get a comment on this post about the deaths in Deerfield so long after the post was put up. If you hadn’t noticed, I had rather lengthy discussions defending my position with various other people who called me heartless, among much worse names. It might be interesting and informative for you to go back through those posts and people’s comments. Perhaps I can defend myself, not because I care if you call me names or if you have a poor opinion of me, but because I feel that your attitude towards the deaths is misguided and dangerous:

I completely agree that the deaths of the five young people were incredibly tragic. No one should have to die that young. Their souls were indeed, as you say, precious, as are everyone’s. It is particularly painful when people that young die. I too, was saddened and dismayed at their deaths, and one of my most fervent wishes is that circumstances like these never be repeated, that no more teenagers die with so much potential before them.

That being said, I believe that it is essential to adopt a policy of absolute honesty when talking about the incidents. Indeed no person is perfect. I myself would like to be remembered exactly the way I am now, with my attributes remembered in the exact proportions that I presented them to the world; that I neither be remembered as any better or any worse of a person than I actually was. I believe that this is one of the greatest services that the living can do for the dead. The admittance of faults by grieving loved ones is an affirmation of the dead’s life as having been lived in all of its human triumphs and faults. It becomes a declaration of that person’s life as beautiful as it was, not as some idealized version with the bad parts edited out. If the grieving find it unbearable to remember the dead as he or she was and instead must edit that person’s life, that is either a testament to the way the deceased lived their life, or an inability of the survivors to cope with the death. Thus it is an honor to be remembered with all your faults, as this says to the world, “I was not perfect, but yet I am grieved and my time on earth was worthwhile in all the raw and naked beauty of its truth.”

On a less abstract level, your attitude is ultimately dangerous to the community. The truth of the matter is that four of those five people died in incidents directly related to and caused by underage/illegal drug or alcohol use. Those are the irrefutable facts of each case. This must have acted as a wakeup call to the rest of the high school community who were participating in these sorts of activities. Thus the deaths, while tragic, wasteful, and senseless, served a purpose in theoretically warning others against the dangers of participating in activities like drinking and driving.

This being the case, I find it counterproductive to idealize the dead and expunge the circumstances of their deaths from the public memory. Pretending that their deaths had nothing to do with the illegal actions they were participating in negates the preventative effects of their deaths. I strongly feel that martyring those four young adults serves no purpose but to console those grieving. While I cannot fault those who use this as a personal coping mechanism, I find the insistence that others think this way to be disrespectful of the dead. By elevating the dead students to a level of faultlessness, you and the entire Deerfield community are essentially asserting that each death served no purpose. You are taking away the final act of the dead, the final signifier of their life as purposeful, important, and effective. By negating the effect of their deaths you are in fact negating part of their life, fictioning it into a version that is easier to deal with, but has less impact and is more easily swept into that tragic, dusty pile of pointless teenage deaths that ultimately served no purpose.

I feel that this erasure of the dead’s faults and the non-admittance of the circumstances of their deaths and their own (limited) culpability is the greatest disrespect that you can give these young people. I would urge you to reconsider your opinion on the issue. Do not relegate these four precious individuals to the statistical anonymity of teen deaths without significance.

Well, this sure is overdue. I’m going to make it a lightening post, and hopefully this will get me back in the swing of it. My life’s been fairly uneventful. Over winter break I saw Juno. I thought it was pretty amazing. The writing was extremely intelligent, the acting was good, as was the directing and costuming, and the soundtrack (which I downloaded immediately) was one of the best I’d heard in quite a while. My local newspaper’s film critic gave it a bad review because she claimed that it “confused” the already complicated and unfortunate situation of teen pregnancy by depicting it in a way that in no manner resembles the actual experience. While I agree that teen pregnancy is undoubtedly nothing like the movie, I feel that the critic was letting personal moral standards interfere with her disinterested evaluation of the film.

For Christmas I got, among other things, and incredibly nice pair of headphones (which I am now using to listen to Sgt. Pepper’s). I feel kind of bad because they must have been very expensive, but they are absolutely amazing for just about anything–low frequencies are excellent, high ones shine, classical music is beautiful, and rock songs reveal details I didn’t know where there before. For my birthday, my family bought me a wollemi pine through National Geographic. It may not seem like a big deal to get a two-year-old pine tree for a gift, but this is no ordinary tree. The Wollemia nobilis has been thought to be extinct for thousands of years. Then, in 1994 an intrepid explorer found fewer than 100 mature trees in the wild growing in a valley outside of Sydney, Australia. Since then, a preservation effort has been underway, part of which is selling young trees to reduce the chance that an unfortunate accident could wipe out the species. Anyway, it’s an incredible plant. You should check out the official page for the distribution company or the Wikipedia page.

Hopefully more regular updates this coming month…

Wow, a lot since the last post, not the least of which was the trip to Florida for the Vandy/Gators game two weekends ago.  The 15 hour overnight dive each way was hard.  I don’t sleep well on buses, and I’d hardly slept at all the week previous.  I didn’t sleep much Friday night either because we had to get up at 5:30 on Saturday morning.  It was all worth it though to spend Friday in the Magic Kingdom.  We saw the whole thing and rode pretty much all of the rides.  There were a lot of people there, somewhat surprisingly, but none of the lines were very long (I think the longest was 20 min.).  That night we ate dinner at Planet Hollywood in Downtown Disney.  They had one of the original suits from the movie Tron hanging on the wall, which was awesome.  If you haven’t seen that movie, then you need to.  Then we stopped by the Ghirardelli store and got some of the most delicious chocolate ice cream ever.  The game on Saturday was extremely disappointing.  I was, in fact, embarrassed to be associated with Vanderbilt.  Our team was just awful.  Anyway, I spent the last week recovering from that trip and the previous week.

This past weekend I saw the Vanderbilt Theater production of The Tempest.  I’ve been working on the costumes for it for the past month.  It was great to finally see them finished and in use.  The production was great (aside from the amazing costumes).  A few people from my theater class were in it, including the writer for my group for the play that is our theater final.  Unfortunately, I have to write a paper on  the production for Friday.

I also have a revision for my second Faulkner paper due Thursday.  I was supposed to have gotten my professor’s edits to the first draft last Thursday, but I accidentally slept through class (the first one of the semester!).  So I’m going to get the paper tomorrow instead.  This means that I have two days to edit it, rather than seven.  I think this paper is going to need a lot of revising, too.  Also, I have to sign up for classes by Friday.  I have no idea what I want to take, and I still don’t have the adviser code that allows me to sign up.  I’ll get it pulled together somehow.

Meanwhilst, I have poems to edit before a meeting with my poetry professor tomorrow to discuss how I’m doing in the class so far.  I’m somewhat nervous because we literally only get one grade in the class; the final one on a portfolio of eight of our poems.  I have to make sure all of my poems are flawless before I submit them; I really need a 3.5 in my English classes.

The Tron suit: