Summer Playlist

Oh shnap! I almost forgot to post a summer playlist. As usual, I have far more songs on my itunes summer playlist than I can reasonably post, so I've narrowed it down to 40. Also as usual, some bands had so many ideal summer songs that I had to just pick a few. Some of the best summer bands are Led Zeppelin, Eliza Doolittle, The Aquabats, Guster, Queen, The White Stripes, The Beatles, and The Decemberists. Interestingly, my summer playlist has the highest concentration of songs I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I enjoy listening to from time to time. And several of them even made it to this list out of the nearly 400 songs on my itunes playlist. Mostly they're just upbeat songs that make me want to dance if only I knew how, and they all have some sort of nostalgic significance connecting to dearly beloved people. So don't hate.

1. Rocky Road to Dublin (aBuck63)
2. Ceann Dubh Dilis (Anuna)
3. Pool Party (The Aquabats)
   
4. Theme Song (Arthur and Friends)
5. Sk8r Boi (Avril Lavigne)
6. I Wanna Hold Your Hand (The Beatles)
7. I've Got a Feelin' (The Black-Eyed Peas)
8. Stick Shifts and Safety Belts (Cake)
9. If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out (Cat Stevens)
10. Put Your Records On (Corinne Bailey Rae)
    
11. The Sporting Life (The Decemberists)
12. Pack Up (Eliza Doolittle)
13. You Got Me (Elk City)
14. What You Call Love (Guster)
15. Loch Lomond (Jesse Ferguson)
16. Thick as a Brick (Jethro Tull)
17. All These Things That I've Done (The Killers)
18. 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson)
19. Dragon Island (Koji Kondo, from The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker)
20. What Is and What Should Never Be (Led Zeppelin)
21. Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin)
22. The Best Way to Travel (The Moody Blues)
23. The Cave (Mumford and Sons)
24. Knights of Cydonia (Muse)
25. He Reigns (The Newsboys)
26. Away from You (The O.C. Supertones)
27. Creatures of the Earth (The Pages)
28. Free Four (Pink Floyd)
29. Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
30. Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
31. Can't Always Get What You Want (The Rolling Stones)
    
32. Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother (Sufjan Stevens)
33. Gone (Switchfoot)
34. Dynamite (Taio Cruz)
35. Galop and Dance of the Parents (Tchaikovsky, from The Nutcraker)
36. Tribute (Tenacious D)
37. Mama Told Me Not to Come (Three Dog Night)
38. Over the Waterfall and Harvest Home (Tropical Harps)
39. Hotel Yorba (The White Stripes)
40. Joker and the Thief (Wolfmother)

I bet Mr. Dodson is secretly a linguist.

We all know well the words of the poet Dodson:*

He's climbin' in yo window.
He's snatchin' yo people up.
He's tryin' to rape 'em
So y'all need to hide yo kids, hide yo wife
Hide yo kids, hide yo wife
Hide yo kids, hide to wife
And hide yo husband, too
Cuz he's rapin' errybody our here.

I was thinking about this song the other day when I noticed something intriguing about Mr. Dodson's choice of words in the phrase "snatchin' yo people up." You see, the word "rape" comes from a Latin word meaning "to catch up or carry off." As you can see, the lyrics to the song demonstrate a clear understanding of the etymology of the word "rape", thereby suggesting that Antoine Dodson is secretly a linguist.

*If, perchance, you don't know about Mr. Antoine Dodson, I refer you to these two videos. First: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNhaLUT520  Second: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw.

I'm typing this primarily so that I can have at least one post for every month this year.

And as a reminder to myself that this does exist and that I should get back to it this summer. I will either have lots of spare time this summer, or none at all. I should be deciding soon. If you've ever been suddenly expected to make major life decisions in a week or less, I'm sure you know what great fun it is.

My long hiatus was brought on by a whole slew of things demanding my undivided attention, often at the same time. Trying to split your undivided attention is a tricky business, so all the less demanding things got put on hold. As was mentioned before, I hope to return this summer.

I can't think of too many non-stressful things to post about at the moment, so I'm just going to once again redesign the look of my blog and share a few wonderful things that I've found/that have been brought to my attention since the last time I posted:

• Philosiology: a guide to living with your philosopher
• Hyperbole and a Half
• Internet Monk
• Mumford and Sons
• The Civil Wars
• The King of Limbs - Radiohead
• The King's Speech
• Stranger Than Fiction (the website for this one is a little over-the-top in my opinion, so you could also look it up on INMD or something)
• Zombocom
• "nuzz" is the sound a camel makes (I think this is actually from this winter, but it's worth sharing)
• animal crackers and applesauce as the best snack ever
• at 3:30 AM on rainy nights, enormous earth worms by the doznes wriggle in the same direction across a stretch of sidewalk I use to get from the horticulture building to my dorm

Hmm. A list of blogs, recent music artists, not super mainstream movies, and other strange things. I'm not a hipster, I promise (although I get along quite well with the nice ones). I should probably also note that my beau is responsible for/involved in the discovery of half of these things. I guess that makes him cool or something. It could even mean that I like him.

Ta-ta for now. I hope to post again soon.

Edit: I didn't redo my blog's look until after I posted this, so I had no idea what I was about to do. Apparently with one of the templates, changing the background picture just makes it pop up in the title area behind the main part of the site. I was messing around and thinking about the ridiculous possibilities when I tried out the chicks. It was perfect. Especially that one to the left of the center. It's begging for your help with its little orange felt beak and beady black eyes. It just makes me giggle. A little dark, perhaps, but you have to admit it's amusing. Since I was going to be silly anyway, I chose the font "Lobster" for my title and headings. It's such a great font name, but I'll never use it in a "serious" layout, so I decided it would get its chance to shine today.

Spring Songs

It's time once again for another season playlist and blog background. Today's background is not only spring-like, but relates to what I would be doing right now if I were responsible and hadn't lost my keys: science. It's time for planting arabidopsis like crazy in the lab. I was tending to some plants in the greenhouse when I got my keys locked in the lab. Since it's Sunday, nobody was there to unlock it and let me get my keys. So now I'm unable to finish what I need to get done, so I'm just going to publish this post instead.

I finally got around to categorizing all of my iTunes music by season, and as a result I have far too many songs in each season to continue my 20 songs per season trend from fall and winter. I have 270 just for spring, and that's one of my short lists. With great effort, I've narrowed it down to 40. In the process I had to get rid of some excellent spring songs, so just because I've missed a nice song doesn't mean I don't believe it suits the season.

1. Prelude No. 1 (Bach)
2. If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out (Cat Stevens)
3. The Door in the Air (from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian)
4. Raindrop Prelude No. 15 in D flat Minor (Chopin)
5. Analyse (The Cranberries)
6. Danses Sacree et Profane (Debussy)
7. La Fille Aux Cheveaux de Lin (Debussy)
8. Sons and Daughters (The Decemberists)
9. Old Old Fashioned (Frightened Rabbit)
10. When U Love Somebody (The Fruit Bats)
11. Ballooning (Gulley)
12. That’s No Way to Get to Heaven (Guster)
13. Death of a Tune (Hidden Cameras)
14. Moths (Jethro Tull)
15. Saria’s Song (from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time)
16. Title Theme (from The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker)
17. Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin)
18. Many Meetings (from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)
19. The Morning: Another Morning (The Moody Blues)
20. Nice to Be Here (The Moody Blues)
21. Flaming (Pink Floyd)
22. Dawn (from Pride and Prejudice)
23. Leaving Netherfield (from Pride and Prejudice)
24. Intro et Allegro (Ravel)
25. Scheherezade - The Young Prince and Princess (Rimsky-Korsakov)
26. Tendrement (Satie)
27. Je Te Veux (Satie)
28. Allegro (Satie)
29. Meet Me by the Water (Saturday Looks Good to Me)
30. Black Hole (The Silent Years)
31. For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her (Simon & Garfunkel)
32. America (Simon & Garfunkel)
33. Rustles of Spring (Sinding)
34. Kiss Me (Sixpence None the Richer)
35. Nutcracker – Waltz of the Flowers (Tchaikovsky)
36. Swan Lake – 7. Sujet (Tchaikovsky)
37. I’ve Always Loved You (Third Day)
38. Whiskey in the Jar (traditional Celtic tune)
39. Drowsy Maggie (traditional Celtic tune)
40. All Creatures of Our God and King (traditional hymn)

Edit: I've decided that since I typically refer to new blog layouts as they are used, but once I change it again it's hard to know what I'm talking about, I'm going to post screen-shots of the new-to-that-post design after I've changed things. Here is what my blog looked like when I published this:

Winter Playlist

This playlist will probably be the shortest of the four, but I still have enough songs that it took some work to narrow it down to 20. It seems that I don't have a whole lot of music that says "winter." A good portion of the songs on here don't even say winter, they just say "listen to me during wintertime," if that makes sense. There's a subtle difference, I assure you.

1. Starting Over (Audion Adrenaline)
2. If I Laugh (Cat Stevens)
3. Claire de Lune (Debussy)
4. Nocturne (Gulley)
5. The City in the Sea (Gulley)
6. One Brown Mouse (Jethro Tull)
7. No Quarter (Led Zeppelin)
8. One More Time to Live (The Moody Blues)
9. A Postcard to Henry Purcell (Pride and Prejudice)
10. Pyramid Song (Radiohead)
11. You and Whose Army? (Radiohead)
12. We Suck Young Blood - Your Time Is Up (Radiohead)
13. House of Cards (Radiohead)
14. Symphony #2 - Adagio, Alegretto (Rimsky-Korsakov)
15. Silent Night (Sarah McLachlan)
16. Premiere Gymnopedie (Satie)
17. Deuxieme Gymnopedie (Satie)
18. Sonnerie de la Rose-Croix: Air de l'Ordre (Satie)
19. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Simon and Garfunkel)
20.  Greensleeves (Vince Guaraldi Trio)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

In my opinion, the most wonderful time of the year starts at Thanksgiving and reaches all the way through Christmas. Things changed a little bit since I've gone off to college, but a lot has remained the same.

Tradition starts the day before Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Preparation Day, on which we do most of out cooking and cleaning on that day. As of four years ago, it is tradition that I prepare the turkey. This often involves doing strange things with it to make my mom cringe. It started when I discovered that the liver has a fun consistency. Now in addition to playing with the liver, we investigate the kidneys and heart, wiggle the neck around, massage the turkey's skin, and tickle its armpits.

Thanksgiving Day itself probably has more traditions than any other day in the Gast house. I get up at 7:00 or 8:00 am to start the Thanksgiving puzzle. More people trickle out of bed as the morning goes on. By 9:00 when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade starts, pretty much everyone is awake. My dad or Rachel starts making cinnamon rolls, and we watch the parade and work on the puzzle. After the parade, sometimes we leave the TV on to make fun of the dog show. Ronda usually arrives around noon to help us finish the cooking. I always take care of the green bean casserole, and usually forget to add seasonings unless my mom reminds me. Uncle Andy along with Abby and Theresa get there sometime in the early afternoon and bring with them cocktail shrimp to snack on alongside Ronda's famous chip dip. At 4:00 we start dinner. Around 4:30 Uncle Mike arrives and we subtly make fun of him until he leaves. Things die down over the evening as friends and relatives leave one-by-one. Once it's dark, the Christmas lights come on for the first night of the season.

The next day is Christmas decoration day. We leave the house sometime in the late morning and head out to a tree farm in Morrow to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. It used to take us hours. Now we're becoming more and more efficient. I think we had our tree in 10 minutes last year. This year it took about 20 if you count cutting it down, but that's still not too shabby. After we've picked the tree we each get a new ornament to put on it. For a while we went to Elder Beerman's, then switched to Delhi Garden Center, and now we just get them at the tree farm. Many of us have gradually drifted from picking ornaments we actually like to picking the strangest ones we can find. The tree is weirder and weirder every year. As we drive home with the tree inside the van, we listen to Christmas music stations. Once we get home, Mom puts in the Oakridge Boys or the Partridge Family Christmas CDs. The day usually ends with watching the first Christmas movie of the season.

Christmas traditions are much more varied and have changed quite a lot over the past decade or so, so I'll just describe what we do now. On and off we participate in Advent, whether it's on our own or with the whole church. The weekend before Christmas my mom's side of the family gets together. We have a four-year location rotation between my mom, her sister in southern Michigan, her brother in Indianapolis, and her parents in northern Michigan. This year we'll be at Aunt Wendy's house. Every year we do something different together and then eat and open gifts. Christmas Eve we go to church, and Rachel and I usually play in an orchestral ensemble.

Christmas day, nobody is allowed to leave their room until 6:00 am. At that time, we can open our stockings. Everyone has to be awake by 8:00 am for official gift opening. When Cathy and Chris Gowen are in town, they join us. After we open gifts, we eat Panera bagels or cinnamon rolls for breakfast and hang out around the house until lunch time. Around 1:00 in the afternoon we head over to my dad's parents' house in Kenwood and repeat the process with his side of the family. When we get back home in the evening, we often watch a Christmas movie together.

I like tradition. I'm no Reb Tevia, but I like knowing that certain things will be roughly the same every year. I don't mind adding new things, but I am not a huge fan of taking away old traditions. I guess it goes along with being a person of habit. I wonder how things will grow and change as our family grows and changes. One day all seven of us kids will be out of the house. Will we live close enough to get together? Will we have our own kids to add to the mix? Will we still get up to do puzzles on Thanksgiving or open Christmas stockings at 6:00 am? Who knows. Only time will tell.

Pyruvate goes through the membrane...

One of my favorite ways to memorize information is through strange phrases and songs. I'll share a few of them now.

For AP Biology there were a few, but in particular the song for memorizing the reactions between glycolysis and the Krebs cycle of aerobic respiration stuck with me. It should be sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques." I will warn you in advance that the last few lines are crammed full of more words than should really fit.

Pyruvate goes
   through the membrane
And loses its carboxyl group
   as CO2
Then NAD+ is reduced
   and Coenzyme-A is added
And you end up with acetyl-Coenzyme-A
   with a weak sulfide bond

For our next academic song, we move on to CHEM 112 during my second semester. This song is sung to the tune of "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from the musical "Oklahoma!" (preferably with a twang) and helps you remember the seven strong acids.

Well there are seven strong acids,
And you should know them right well.
Those seven fine, strong acids -
Mem'rizin' them would be swell

HCl, HBr, HI,
HNO3 belongs, too.
HClO3 and -O4.
H2SO4 loves you.

Those are the seven strong acids.
Aren't you glad you know this song?
If you can sing it in your head
There ain't no way you'll go wrong.

Organic Chemistry in my third semester has inspired a set of phrases for differentiating between the two types of stereoisomers: enantiomers and diastereomers.

For enantiomers (mirror images): An (en-) aunt (-ant-) of mine likes to look in mirrors.

For diastereomers (non-mirror images): You will die (di-) if you look at a basilisk's eyes and you do not non have a mirror.

I also have an o-chem song for remembering the order of priority for numbering functional groups according to the IUPAC system, and I'm working on one for memorizing why certain reactions work the way they do. Here's the IUPAC numbering priority system to the tune of "Hey Jude" (yes, I did skip a few verses and whatnot, but you should be able to follow it):

Hey Jude, don't make it bad;
take a long list and make it better.
Remember to put it into a song
to know IUPAC numb'ring order.

So let it out and let it in:
acids, esters, aldehydes, ketones, alcohols.
Look at you, you're halfway through:
amines, alkenes, alkynes, alkanes, ethers, and halides.

Na, na, na, na-na-na naaa
Na-na-na naaa...

I often do this for Bible verses as well. I've got Colossians 1:9-14 memorized to the tune of "Starlight" by Muse, Psalm 63:5-8 to the tune of "Hotel Yorba" by The White Stripes, 1 John 1:7-10 to the tune of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, and many others. Those are all quite long since I memorized them for Forge, otherwise I'd put them on here. That's all for now, but I'll add new songs as they come into being.

Autumnal Playlist

Ever since I discovered that I could make playlists on iTunes, I have experimented with many different ways to categorize my music. I've grouped them by mood, weather, favorites of genres and artists, and many other means. Now it's time to group them by season. Thus far my fall playlist has over 100 songs and is still growing, so I'll just give you the 20 most autumnal songs from the current list.

1. Dance Of The Charming Young Maiden (Alberto Ginastera)
2. Epping Forest (Anne Roos)
3. Never Grow Old (The Cranberries)
4. The Crane Wife 3 (The Decemberists)
5. In My Native Land, Op 43, No 3 (Edvard Grieg)
6. World On Fire (The Glaciers)
7. Premier Gymnopedie (Erik Satie)
8. Cheap Day Return (Jethro Tull)
9. Wond'ring Aloud (Jethro Tull)
10. One Brown Mouse (Jethro Tull)
11. Broadford Bazaar (Jethro Tull)
12. Fire At Midnight (Jethro Tull)
13. Home (Jethro Tull)
14. She Moves Through The Fair/Wind That Shakes The Barley (Kilrush)
15. I Talk To The Wind (King Crimson)
16. The Battle Of Evermore (Led Zeppelin)
17. Legend of a Mind (The Moody Blues)
18. Pyramid Song (Radiohead)
19. Scarborough Fair/Canticle (Simon & Garfunkel)
20. We're Going To Be Friends (The White Stripes)

This is one for the good days. I have it all here in red, blue, green...

It's time for another happy list! This one, too, came from Sara, Courtney, and me during AP Calculus our senior year. The title came from a fantastic song ("Videotape" by Radiohead) and refers to the pleasant memories from Rahn's class and the fact that we used three different colors of pens (they were red, blue, and green, unfortunately). Courtney's additions are in courier, Sara's are in georgia, and mine are in trebuchet.

• creating a new world (after watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with magical creatures and wars and magic and somehow create a best-selling book out of all of it :D)
• picnics at Winton Woods
• swinging (especially at nighttime)
• finding random words in Japanese
• watching the sun rise or set
• odd but pretty names
• doodling
• the color combination of these pens [1]
• untrodden snow
• delays [2]
• the sound of a waterfall (or any other body of water)
• birdsongs
• soft thunder storms at night
• coral reefs
• fall colors
• taking pictures
• splatter-painting
• June 4, 2009 (only 17 weeks from today!) [3]
• books that suck you in
• knowing 3 of 17 weeks we aren't here! [4]
• multiples of 3
• budding flowers
• fresh-baked cookies
• the wind
• color guard
• JESUS!
• tea (it's kind of hard to follow yours Sara - it kind of wins)
• music (any kind - it's all great)
• dancing down hallways (Shantytown...haha)
• working with charcoal (or any other messy art medium)
• all cello bands (Apocalyptica, Breaking of Reality...)
• acoustic guitar music
• reading beside a fire while watching snow fall

[1] Courtney had lime green, Sara had teal, and I had purple.
[2] Snow delays, that is. We had gotten one that morning if I remember correctly.
[3] Graduation Day
[4] She was referring to the trips and breaks before graduation.

Happy Lists

Last year several happy lists emerged from Mr. Rahn's AP calculus class. There were some days when Courtney, Sara, and I simply couldn't listen to calculus anymore, so we passed around sheets of paper and listed things that made us happy. Here's the original list. My additions are in the Trebuchet font, Sara's are in the Georgia font, and Courtney's are in the Courier font.

• •    soup
• •    blue eyes
• •    reading a good book on a rainy day
• •    this pen*
• •    a hillside when its leaves change color
• •    Benny and Joon
• •    the scent of fallen leaves
• •    books/movies that make you cry
• •    chocolate, anytime, anywhere
• •    the wind
• •    perfectly golden roasted marshmallows
• •    doing random things at random times without caring what other people think about it (ex: taking jumping pictures in the rain during lunch)
• •    singing in the rain (both the musical and the actual activity)
• •    singing in general (the girls 100 building bathroom, best acoustics EVER)
• •    feeling good for no reason
• •    climbing trees (especially if I get covered in sap)
• •    trying on clothes at stores and striking poses in the mirror
• •    maria's hat**
• •    the oscillating universe (both the awesome dance move and the woefully obsolete astrophysical hypothesis)
• •    decorating Christmas trees (the good-smelling kind in your living room and x-mas tree shaped cookies)
• •    going through the day with a good song stuck in your head and dancing to it at random moments
• •    walking barefoot in nice, cool mud
• •    the smell of an herb garden
• •    the dog at Imago
• •    Imago in general
• •    harvest moons on midnight-black nights
• •    Halloween
• •    Reese's cups
• •    being in love
• •    being in love with someone who loves you back
• •    playing "Adagio" on the piano
• •    playing any piece in 6-8 time
• •    not playing class music
• •    bubbles
• •    saying "je ne sais pas"
• •    swinging
• •    prismacolor colored pencils
• •    the color of KMnO4
• •    photo booth pics!
• •    separation of photosynthetic pigments on chromatography paper
• •    cozy sweatshirts
• •    caution tape and duct tape
• •    gaff tape and glow tape
• •    the Festival of Lights
• •    any shade of green

* The pen I was using was my teal G2 pen.
** I was wearing my colorful stocking cap from Colombia.

A Few of My Favorite Things

And by "a few" I mean eleventy-one. There are more, I just thought I'd limit myself. I think I did one of these a while ago. It's just going to be a list of a large number of my favorite things. Things that make me laugh, smile, or, in a few rare cases, cry in a happy sort of way.

1. alphabetical order
2. bare feet
3. bees
4. birches
5. birds
6. blowing bubbles
7. california poppies
8. campfires
9. celery
10. cello
11. Celtic music
12. chai tea lattes
13. chalk pastels
14. charcoal
15. cherry cordial ice cream
16. chlorophyll
17. cinnamon
18. climbing trees
19. clover crowns
20. columbine flowers
21. cornflower
22. crocuses
23. dandelions
24. dragonflies
25. eskimo kisses
26. family
27. fingerpainting
28. fire
29. fireflies
30. fog
31. friendship
32. frost
33. fuchsia
34. galoshes
35. God
36. grass
37. green, blue, and orange together
38. guitar
39. hearty sandwiches
40. hearty soups
41. hugs
42. ice fog
43. Jesus
44. juice
45. ladybugs
46. lakes
47. languages
48. lily-of-the-valley
49. lists
50. long, flowing skirts
51. maples
52. microtubules
53. millipedes
54. mint chocolate chip ice cream
55. mountains
56. mud
57. musicals
58. my plant friends
59. names
60. oaks
61. ocarina
62. old hymns
63. orange gerbera daisies
64. origami
65. otters
66. parsing Latin names
67. painting
68. pennywhistles
69. peonies
70. piano
71. pines
72. planaria
73. polarity
74. puddles
75. rabbits
76. rain
77. rapier fighting
78. reading
79. Rick Astley
80. scented candles
81. scylla
82. silence
83. singing
84. skype
85. slugs
86. smoothies
87. snails
88. snow
89. snowdrops
90. spring beauties
91. spruces
92. stars
93. storms
94. streams
95. sunrise
96. sunset
97. swings
98. the moon
99. the smell of old books
100. the sun
101. the trololololo man
102. the word "picaresque"
103. the word "turtle"
104. the word "whimsical"
105. twilight (the time of day, not the silly book)
106. umbrellas
107. viola
108. water striders
109. wildflower bouquets
110. wind
111. worms

Midnight in Lockland

On Saturday night, I was in West Chester for a graduation party. Much to my delight and relief, I arrived without trouble. However, the ride home was a different story. As is my custom, I wound up rather lost in an unfamiliar area.

Around 11 PM I left West Chester with Amy and Joe. As you know, I absolutely despise driving on highways. Driving on highways in the dark is worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken is even worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken while wearing my glasses rather than my contacts is nearly the worst possible driving scenario I could imagine. Fortunately, I had two friends with me, and it turned out that Amy is excellent at getting un-lost and keeping me from freaking out. Joe didn't do me much good, but at least he didn't make anything worse. Before I even hit a main road, I had to pull over to calm myself down. I convinced myself that although my glasses didn't give me perfect vision, they were plenty good enough to allow to drive safely. I also called my dad to ask whether or not the headlights ever got fixed. They hadn't, which meant that my brights are the equivalent of any other car's normal headlights. I was afraid that I'd have to drive without my brights, and without them I can only see about ten feet in front of the car - and that's not an exaggeration. Amy helped with the calming down. After a few minutes and a switch of CDs (it was decided that Rimsky-Korsakov is much more calming than Apocalyptica), we were ready to go.

Merging onto 75 made me nervous, as usual, but as usual nothing bad happened. There was no cataclysmic ten-car pile-up. I'm getting more and more used to merging. The only real problem on the highway came when I couldn't find the white dashed line between my lane and the one next to me. I was not okay with that. After a moment of investigation, Amy discovered that I was still in a real lane. The dashed line had just been covered by road sealant stuff.

We were nearly home when I made a horrible mistake. I wasn't sure which exit to get off at, so when I saw the sign for the Lockland-Reading exit, I chose it. I've driven around in Reading plenty of times and Lockland a couple, so I was confident that I'd be able to find my way home. I was familiar with the intersection I found myself at, but I didn't remember exactly how to get home. I tried a couple possibilities, but I didn't seem to get closer to anywhere familiar enough that I could easily get home. We got into shadier and shadier parts of Lockland. Eventually it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to lock the car doors. When I talked to Kirby the next day, she informed that one of the streets I had spent a lot of time on was one that George had told her to never ever drive on at night under any circumstances. I thought about calling George since he lives in Lockland, but I decided against it. I'm not sure why. It would have been much wiser to call George. I suppose that my reluctance to ask for directions is part of what makes me Man-ria. I found my way back to the intersection we started at and pulled over to get out my GPS. It hadn't even occurred to me to use it until that point. We plugged it into the car and everything, but we couldn't get it to turn on. Amy and I both tried everything we could think of, but to no avail. We even looked for the instruction manual, but couldn't find it.

At Amy's insistence, we abandoned hope of finding our way through Lockland and got back on 75-south. The next exit we saw was for 562 - the Norwood Lateral. Amy and I thought that would get us back to Ronald Reagan. We were wrong. Our first mistake was that we got on going the wrong direction. We took the first exit we found to switch directions. The place where we got off was even shadier than any place we had encountered in Lockland. We spent about 100 yards on that road before getting back on 562 in the opposite direction which took us onto 75-north. Amy called her dad and was asking for him to Map-Quest the way home when I saw a sign for Ronald Reagan. The transition from 75 to Ronald Reagan to Galbraith was uneventful.

Instead of turning left on Galbraith like normal, Amy recommended that we take a short-cut to her house. So we turned right and took Congress Run. Up to this point, the inside of my windshield had gradually begun to fog up, and none of the usual methods were working to clear it off. I even tried wiping it with a towel, but that didn't help either. So I was stuck driving up Congress Run at night with a fogged-up windshield and without real brights. Congress Run is an insane street. Driving on it is an adventure - an adventure best reserved for sunny days. It's incredibly steep and narrow with hairpin turns screened by thick vegetation. It provided an entirely different sort of adventure than Lockland, although it was still an unpleasant adventure. After taking at least three times as long as it would normally take to drive down that street, we arrived at Compton and made it to her house without trouble. I dropped her off, drove Joe home, and returned to my home around 12:30 AM. What should have been a 20-30 minute drive turned into what may have been the scariest hour and a half of my life. I am now more determined than ever to learn how to get from place to place on the highways.

Nihilism in the Choir*

As my readers know, the Finneytown Chorale received a 1 in class AA at contest last weekend. This means that we qualified to move on to state contest. After a vote, we decided that we'd try it. Unfortunately, today we learned that scheduling conflicts would make it nearly impossible to go on any of the four possible contest days (well we could still actually fit in two places, but our teacher doesn't seem to be trying very hard). Because of this, anarchy and nihilism will reign in the choir.

Anarchy was already a problem. My teacher has never demanded much respect from the students, so he hasn't gotten nearly as much as he would like. Surprise, surprise. But I won't rail against Mr. McKee's classroom "control" at this time. I won't spend much time describing anarchy since I've given some description in person to my readers in the past. I'm just sick and tired of non-stop chatter and nonsense. People talk while other people talk about why we shouldn't be talking all the time. It's immensely aggravating. It's not like we're the concert choir, full of people who just needed another credit. We're all talented musicians, and an extremely high percentage of us are honors kids and "good students."

Now that we're not going to contest, we have nothing to work towards (as some people see it). This is where the nihilism comes in. With no purpose/goal to work towards, there's no reason for the hooligans not to cause mayhem. Some of my classmates and I would consider it a good enough goal to simply create beautiful music and to share this music with our family and friends. However, about half of the problematic people are seniors with severe cases of senioritis. They really don't care about anything school-related at this point, even if that means being inconsiderate towards others. My teacher might have us do this awesome but incredibly complicated Eric Whitaker piece, and maybe that will inspire some to actually work. I have my doubts.

A few of my friends and I are actually considering how nice it might be to have a study hall fourth bell with AP exams approaching. I probably won't switch classes, though. I've stuck with it this far, so I might as well finish strong.


*My original title for this post was "Nihilism and Anarchy in the Choir" but "Nihilism in the Choir" sounds like an awesome band name, so I had to leave it that way.

In Which The Man Tries to Prevent Me from Being True to Mine Ownself

I have a particularly low voice for a girl. My friend Mike has a particularly high voice for a guy. We've agreed that he'd do quite well as a first alto, and I'd do quite well as a first tenor, so we decided to switch voice parts for the senior ensemble song. He chickened out, but I still learned the tenor part and have been singing as a tenor for the past few weeks (and blending far more easily into the tenor section than the alto section).

On Friday, our conductor finally figured out that I've been singing with the guys. He had an issue with that, and told me to go back to the alto part. So now our formation is thrown off, I need to relearn the song (I know both parts, but I keep on finding myself singing an alto-tenor hybrid part), and I stick out. The alto part for the song is in the break in my range, which means I have to sing loudly to get a decent tone, and there are some notes on which I can't change my tone much to match my section or I'll lose the pitch (or they could just sing darker like they're supposed to).

I'm considering sticking it to the man and singing the tenor part anyway. He didn't even notice I had switched parts from listening - he noticed when I filled a tenor slot in the formation. I blend so well as a tenor that it's nearly impossible to tell by ear that there's a girl singing with them. I don't see why he's so adamantly against me being a tenor for just one song. I'll have to talk with him about it. If he's still against it, I'll just be an alto. I see no reason to pick a fight with my conductor just to prove I can.

Adventures in Rural Indiana

Once upon a time (by which I mean more than a month ago by now), four brave adventurers set out on what was destined to become a memorable journey filled with curious sights and experiences...

Here's what I remember about the Indiana trip that Anna/Betsy, Seth, Josh, and I took a few weeks ago. The events within each paragraph are probably not in the proper order, but all the events in one paragraph followed those in the preceding paragraph and came before the ones in the next.

This particular telling of the tales of that day will start with my brief exploration of the UC campus led by Josh. Among other things, I got to see the office of Mr. Man (I'm wanting to say his name was Man D. Kwon, but I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly), some telescopes atop the astronomy and physics buildings, interesting architecture, and the unnatural community of dorms in which my guide lives. The trees were unnaturally straight (even the redbud!) and still had an unusual percentage of their leaves, and the grass was eerily green. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit the wizard's tower.

After we picked up Seth and Anna/Betsy, we left UC and got on the highway. The grass beside one of the earlier highways was strewn with garbage galore. It was depressing. I avoided looking at it. We passed one of those houses with horrible kitschy lawn ornaments covering the front yard. At one point, Seth spotted what appeared to be a real monkey sitting on a picnic table. Throughout the trip we played roadkill bingo. Or at least I did. I saw (and circled in red pen, incidentally) a squirrel, a rabbit, a tire, a groundhog, a dog, a raccoon, a cat, and several mysterious masses of mangled flesh in addition to smelling a dead skunk.

Once we got to downtown Anderson, the real adventures started. Downtown Anderson was a very shady place. It even has a Shadyside Memorial Park, which I will get to in a moment. The GPS led us astray, and told us to turn onto this ultra shady back street. It was mildly frightening. When we tried to get off of that street, we nearly had a nasty run-in with a huge pick-up truck. Apparently he didn't have a stop sign. We decided to stop to ask for directions, so we pulled into Shadyside Memorial Park. At the entrance there were these horrid little stone pillar things. They tried to look nice, but they failed miserably. It made me sad to look at them, so I turned away. Nobody was in the park... except for some guy sitting in his car in the parking lot near the playground. Drug dealer? Pedophile? Who knows. All I know is that he fit very well into the general mood of downtown Anderson. We were supposed to be going north, but evidently we were going south. I didn't know that. Normally, the GPS shows the car driving towards to top of the screen. At the top of the screen was North Anderson, so I assumed that we were going north. However, if I had looked at the little car, I would have realized that it was driving towards the bottom of the screen, meaning that we were going south. It took me a while to notice that, so I kept objecting every time Josh tried to turn around. I'm not sure how much time my confusion added to the trip. We didn't reset the GPS with the new directions, so it kept on telling us to make a u-turn.

The return trip provided even more excitement. We became lost again. The GPS's directions had us driving in the middle of nowhere for quite some time. Maybe it wanted revenge for all the times we refused to make a u-turn, despite its protests. Most of the time, we were on hilly roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. As we crested each hill, we feared that we would find another car about to collide with us. Fortunately, there were no accidents. In fact, we rarely saw any signs of real civilization whatsoever. It was kind of creepy. Due to excessive exhaustion combined with the most caffeine I've ever consumed in a day, I was slap-happy the entire time. It made the drive even more interesting for me. At one point, I burst out laughing and finally managed to communicate that I was amused by the fact that we hadn't driven on a lined road in a long time. Normally, that wouldn't have been that funny, but caffeine + fatigue = all sorts of interesting thoughts. Throughout the landscape dotted with lonely buildings and grotesque, leafless trees were little cement monoliths of mystery. They were all over the place, and we couldn't figure out what on earth they might be. There was also an old, mostly destroyed tower-ish structure. I don't remember what it was, or if we found out what it was at all. For part of the countryside ride, we listened to Captain Beefheart. I tried brainstorming for an essay while it was playing. That didn't go as well as it could have. Thank goodness Josh stopped it somewhere near track 13. I can only take so much Beefheart. We stopped for a bathroom break as soon as we saw signs of civilization. Raleigh, IN, was hardly civilization, but it was something. The greasy diner place we stopped at was interesting. They sold cans of beans. They sold other things too, but I only remember the cans of beans. There was a layer of grease on the countertop. Betsy/Anna was the only one brave enough to use the bathroom hidden away in the furnace room. As we left, we heard the locals chuckling. They were probably laughing at us city folk, and I don't blame them. We stopped again later in Metamora at the Hav-A-Bite, and that was a much nicer experience. Well, maybe not for Seth, but he said he felt much better after throwing up. Next to the bathrooms was a poster of the "little houses of Metamora." The distinguishing feature of the town was Mt. Metamora. Mt. Metamora was a large hill with a small building of mystery perching atop it. The building had a cross on the side, so maybe it was a church or a monastery of some sort. The hill was covered in dead grass with a few gnarled trees. Someone suggested that it may have been a landfill at one point. Relatively close to the time we finally made it back to the highway, there was a railroad along the road and a canal next to that. It made me smile. We were driving alongside the evolution of technology. After a while, we got on the highway. At some point during the trip back home, we saw a yard with live llamas in it. I have no idea where this fits in with the chronology of events. That's all.

Concert Week

Concert week technically started on Thursday the 4th and won't end until Thursday the 18th, but seven of the ten concerts fit between Monday the 8th and Friday the 12th, so I'm considering that week to be concert week.

The first concert was the elementary instrumental concert. Heather played in the fourth grade orchestra (the first group), and Allison played in the sixth grade band (the last group), so we got the joy of staying for the entire concert. Before the concert, I got to help tune the seventy-some stringed instruments in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade orchestras. I'll admit, I wasn't all that concerned with absolute perfection. Their instruments go out of tune quickly, and they can't play in tune to begin with, so I figured I wouldn't be adding a whole lot of pain to the listening experience by letting a few of the instruments remain slightly out of tune. The fourth-graders weren't supposed to get to use their bows, but my sister brought hers out anyway and had to be sent back to put it away. The fourth and fifth grade orchestras performed at the expected skill level, but the 9-member sixth grade orchestra should have been much better. The fifth grade band played as expected, but the sixth grade band played exceptionally well. They were actually pleasant to listen to for the most part.

On the Monday of the main concert week, we got to hear the fifth and sixth grade voices of Whitaker along with the Whitaker percussion ensemble. The songs were surprisingly un-hokey, considering the director. He's really quite a character. I don't know how else to describe him. You should see how high he crosses his lowercase t's (I'm not sure if I wrote that properly, but I'm sure that you all get the idea). As usual, the percussion ensemble played painfully repetitive songs that lasted somewhere between five and ten minutes each.

I guess it's typical for local churches and other groups to ask the high school's audition choir (Chorale) to come and sing around Christmastime. This year we're singing at two or three churches and an assisted living home, along with our annual concerts for the senior citizens of the community and the middle and high school students. Our first in a long series of concerts came on Tuesday during school. We drove over to St. Paul's Church of Christ in North College Hill to play for a group of elderly women. I called them the Widow Brigade in my head. Our first song didn't go so well, but the others went just fine. Our last song was a version of the "Ave Maria" that is evidently sung at many funerals. It actually caused several of the old women to cry. In the last song, my friend Eddie and I sing a tenor solo as a duet. He never wanted to sing it in the first place, but I think our conductor felt bad about giving both tenor solos to girls, so he had Eddie and I sing the lower one together. Since he had never intended to try out for the solo, he didn't know the words until today. The fact that he had no idea what he was singing would always make me a nervous wreck during rehearsals, so I'm glad he fixed it in time for our first concert. I felt that we did well, and several of the Chorale members told us that our balance and blend was excellent. Hurrah! I have one last thing to mention about the kind old ladies: one of them looked a little spacey and was wearing a pair of reindeer antlers tied on top of her head with a large bow under her chin. We had a hard time looking in her direction with a straight face.

Tuesday night was the high school and middle school instrumental concert. Before the concert, we did some last minute practicing. A week before, we had started looking at a variation of Greensleeves, and it wasn't coming together well at all. She told us to pull out the song, and I raised my hand and politely asked if she really thought we were prepared to perform the song. She completely blew up and yelled something about how we never listen to her or do anything she says. So we played through the last section of the song. The ending part is just the traditional Greensleeves. When we were done, she told us that we would just be playing the ending since that was the only part we could play even moderately well. I know that she's been under a lot of stress these past few weeks, but I don't still don't feel that she was justified in biting my head off. The concert started out with the jazz band, and they were excellent (as usual). They were followed by the middle school orchestra. They were not excellent. Between the middle and high school orchestras, I played a piece in a quintet with two violins, a cello, and a harp. It went pretty well...except for the fact that the first violin can't count to save her life. She came in a beat late on one of her entrances and bungled things up. She always misses that part. You'd think that she would hear that something wasn't fitting together correctly, but she never seems to notice. Until this year, she's been a soloist taking private lessons. She can't play with groups very well, but she doesn't seem to notice that. The high school orchestra did okay. We always do a lot better during actual performances than we do during practices. The high school band was wonderful like they always are. For the finale, we had the high school orchestra cram on stage with the full high school band to play a song together. The orchestra has 27 people, and the band has 70-something. And we were behind them. The cellos had a mic, but that was it. Evidently, it sounded fantastic, but I have to wonder if the strings were heard.


Wednesday evening we went to the third and fourth grade chorus concert at my old elementary school. The director has been rotating through the same set of songs since Dan was in third grade. This year she actually added a new one. We were shocked.


The final official concert was Thursday night's high school choir concert. Between choirs, we have solos or ensembles. For this concert, almost all of them were fantastic. The first one was horrible, but it just made the others look even better. Adam Weber sang "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," and he has the perfect voice and attitude for that song. It may have been my favorite of the solos. Chorale went last, and all of our songs went pretty well. The audience about died laughing during "Fruitcake," and we got a standing ovation after "Ave Maria." Both Sean and Dan (the opening soloists) and Eddie and I (the second set of soloists) blended better than we had for any previous rehearsal, and Victoria finally fixed the pronunciation on her solo. I love singing that song. I love singing in Latin in general. It fits my tone very well. If I sing a senior solo, it will probably be something in Latin.

On Friday during the day, the high school choruses sang a condensed version of Thursday's concert in the morning for the middle school and our community's senior citizens. We had to cut one of our songs, we never felt as comfortable with that one as we did with the others. In the afternoon, we sang for the high school, but the principal took away ten minutes of our concert time, so we had to skip "Ave Maria." It's somewhere between seven and eight minutes long, and our conductor didn't think that very many of the students would have the attention span to sit through it. He may have been right, but I still really wish that we could have sung it for everyone.

I have two more chorale concerts this week, but they aren't likely to be very eventful. If something exciting happens, I'll make a comment.