Horn party

I just came from the end-of-the-year horn party, and basically.....I'm gonna miss all those peeps.

We sat and talked (still for a decent amount of time, even though I was late -- I lost track of time playing my games), ate food , and then watched Jurassic Park. Considering it was with a bunch of band people (and since it contained music that 7 of the 12 people there had played in a concert), the music was especially note-worthy (Haaaaah. Pun).

John Williams composed it, of course, and if you didn't know, he's a horn player.
Need I say more? It only figures that he wrote the most epic horn parts out there today. It's pure auditory candy.

What's better, though, is that two girls there hadn't seen it before. I couldn't help but laugh at the effect the scary parts had on everybody, especially on those who didn't know it was coming, BUT--to make it better, our very own Mr Snow decided to scream at the jumpy parts and make the whole room freak out! It was amazing. :)

I'll reiterate: I will miss them.
They're all excellent horn players and musicians. Most of them I couldn't even begin to rival in their skill. They dedicate much more time into playing than I do, and it shows. Each one of them made me bump up my skill; I had to grow into my position when it came to horn choir and symphonic band alike. I got better, with the entirety of the thanks to them.

Suddenly I wish we had taken a picture of us all together. Even then, though, forgetting would be impossible, rendering a photo useless, and all the pictures I need are of the memory-video variety.

Thanks, you guys.

A good song.

Some music isn't music. It just isn't good, in both senses of the word. It's bad music, and the stuff in it is bad.

A good song has emotion. It makes you happy. It makes you sad. It makes you wonder. It makes you feel.

A good song does not utterly bash on women, as most peoples' ideas of a "good song" very frequently does.
Rap, Hip Hop, or whatever you want to call it, is not good music.

A good song does not instill straight-out lust or describe acts that are linked to it in sultry ways.

Why do people listen to it, let alone enjoy listening to it?

It disappoints me immensely.


This is just one of many good songs.

Demographics

I had a thought this morning, but I want to see if it's true.

I want to see the gender demographic of my blog's visitors.

***Keep in mind that I posted a link of this on Facebook, so if you only came because you saw that, and haven't visited often before, answer accordingly.

So mark whatcha are:

Thanks, monkeys :)

Flash, bang.

I like lightning.

It has power. Bolts can raise the temperature of the air around it 50,000°F, dealing a mass expansion and massive boom -- thunder.

Thunderstorms are in my top list of natural phenomena.



Cumulonimbus clouds are what "make" thunderstorms. At least in the summertime, they do. See that tower of cloud? That's got crazy currents in it. What happens when water gets flung upward into the atmosphere? It turns to ice, dummy. The ice doesn't stand a chance against the currents, though, so they still get tossed around.


And the ice bumps into other ice, and the charges change. Positive goes up, and negative goes down. The separation makes the particles seek each other out.


Think of one ice particle as a wool sock, and another as a shag carpet. Everyone knows that you can zap your mom when you slide your feet on the carpet. Your body is like the cumulonimbus as a whole, and when your finger (the bottom of the cloud) gets close to your mom's arm (the ground) the charges release in a spark (or a devastating blast of electrical energy only 30 microseconds long).


There's always a little "click" sound when you get close enough to yer mum's arm. I suppose you could say that's the spark heating up the air and making it expand? I dunno. In any case, a full-fledged bolt of lightning heats it up more, faster, and in huge quantities. 

Then.... Boom.   (It's a link. Click on it.)

Not much is more fascinating and terrifying (at the same) than a crackling explosion of thunder. 

I live for it.

Humbug

Rawr at unneeded stress. Why am I so lazy?

Flutter by

Ya know what I just realized? Well, lemme tell ya....

Remember back in middle school when you saw your crush walking toward you, and you got "butterflies"?
Yeah, that feeling. It's a crazy feeling, right? Happy, almost.
And scared. Terrified:

"Has she noticed me? Is she even going to? Ah, who cares? I like her, and--Oh, man. Eye contact. And was that a smile? What if she talks to me? I'll blabber like an idiot. Who cares? Yeah, I know. I do. Man, I'm so nervous..."

A typical scenario, right? Right.
Does anyone still feel that, or are we all desensitized at this age?
I realized I don't so much anymore.
Maybe I'm immune -- like it's there, but I don't notice. On that note, it's the same as getting nervous for a performance. That, I've noticed, I have been able to learn to ignore to the point of not noticing it.

In any case: Pity. It was fun.

The 1st Amendment to SS

I figured that last post wasn't really appropriate for a public showcase. It was for more personal reasons that I wrote it. So it's archived away and saved as a draft. Thanks for reading it, anyway. :)

Tuesday night is the second-to-last big thing I have to do this semester. Once that concert is over, I'm completely out of classes to attend until the Acapella Choir sings at graduation. (At least I think my classes are over...hopefully they will be.)

Ooof. What will I do? I might go home.....longboard a bunch.....sit on the computer..... Yeh, it'll be a strange start to a strange summer.
I'll need stuff to do.  : /

No biggie. Kinda.

Gibberish!

Sorry about that strange post with all the >?()#&>?  ?>%>#%%)&W#%#?>Hi mom!?*((&??><<<$#%#^?$>^ stuff. I tried to send something from my phone at around 4:00 last night, and apparently Blogger doesn't like how cell phones encrypt the messages. I'll re-post it later, maybe. I hope I didn't scare you all away.

**Edit:  I won't repost it.

Straaange things were happenin' last night...

It was a night of cool stuff, and lucky stuff, and pretty okay stuff. Oh, and fun stuff.

The Jazz II concert was a success. We played some good music.
[[I'll edit this with a link or two to the songs we played.]]
That concert got owned (but....it did its share of owning in a couple of ways, too).
About midway through the very first song, I realized my chops were going out. It's a killer song, to begin with, but I wasn't going to push it very hard. Lots of octave-lower stuffs.

Beyond the Sea was my favorite, by far. I had the flugelhorn duet with the lead alto. Flugelhorns are the coziest high-brass instruments out there. It's like.....hmm.
Imagine a trumpet and a French horn having children, but with the trumpet contributing most of the dominant traits. It's a trumpet, mostly, but the tone is deep and dark like a horn. S'the best.

(...this is a flugelhorn, in case you didn't know...)

Apart from one solo that I wasn't really ready for ("Chicken Scratch"), it was a lot of fun. 

It's decidedly so:  there's no shame in playing an octave lower if you're bound to mess up the high notes.

Later that night, I StumbledUpon a website that had a list of games "that make you think about life". Some of the games are ingenious. The creators really put a lot of thought into them, and they have crazy-deep meaning. This is the website. I personally like "The Company of Myself", both for the gameplay, and for the seriously emotional plot line. It tugs at something in a mind, it does... Enjoy them, eh?

Next up, events pretty much fueled each other... First, two local girls were throwing things at mine and my roommate's windows. We sneaked outside to try to scare them off, but they were gone by the time we detoured around the block. I went back to Stumbling, then heard more things hit the window, so I rushed out of my room to go scare 'em. They were coming up the stairs to my apartment (go figure) so I popped down over the rail and rawr'd at them. Scared 'em good!
They/we started playing Guitar Hero and stopped sometime around 2:30/3:00 AM. Meanwhile, one girl had opened the front window in order to cool down the room a bit.

Once they left, I moseyed back to my room and sat, plugging in my phone and whatnot. Then I heard sounds coming from the living room, like someone was messing with the blinds. I grabbed my sword from the ground (of course) and turned on the hall light. When I got to the living room, there was just a cool breeze coming in from the screen-less window and frantic footsteps running downstairs.

Yeah--we were almost burglarized at about 4:00 AM last night. Not sleeping pays off, apparently.
I figured I ought to report it to the police that some hoodlum is climbin' in yo windows, so the next half hour was talking to an officer over the phone, relaying info, blah blah.  I didn't sleep until about 5:00; the adrenaline was gone by then.

In hindsight, I almost wish I hadn't turned on a light and the dude had come inside. It would have been pretty funny to see his reaction to me holding a 3-foot katana, yelling at him (and surely waking up my roommates) while he frantically tried to either get out the window or the locked door.  I suppose if he was armed, there could've been a li'l tussle, so I'm fortunate to have scared him off.

Still......I wanted to go all samurai on his butt.

D'awww.....

A blogger friend of mine recently posted something about a draft post that she didn't post, which instead she posted posteriorly (Try fitting THAT redundancy over your posterior...). I was curious about my saved drafts and found one that I like.


It's a random, happy moment, and one that makes me 'xcited for the unknown future...


As written: 

"Daughter name: Emma
Potential middle name: Vivian"

Some day, I will have a daughter, and maybe her name will be something along those lines.


Some day.


--Stoker

A board

There's a longboard in my room right now. Four nights ago I rode one for the first time, and was hooked. (It's like what they say about smoking and drugs and stuff--only once. This is a good thing, though.) A friend of mine (I have decided to not disclose names on here anymore; blogs are Google-able) let me borrow one of her two, and I am indeedly addicted. 


The speed and smoothness is a thrill. 


Aaaaand I'm too tired to really get passionate about it. Meh. 


So anyway, I longboard now.


--Justin

Phoenix

I discovered a new band today, and I think I can surely like them.

Josh was blasting music when I got home from class, and one song sounded a lot like The Killers mixed with Empire of the Sun. A few songs I'm hearing now have a White Stripes and Gorillaz sound to them, too. And Daft Punk.

It pleases my ears. A lot.

I just hope they don't swear 'n' stuff. That could ruin a good song a bit.

-->  Phoenix  <--

Stalking the stalkers!

Not to creep you guys out or anything, but.....


.....I stalk you as much as you stalk Sepiated Spirals.

Blame the stat counter, and IP addresses, and my ability to reason out when you look at my blog from said stat counters and IP addresses.

Yeah, I'm a creeper sometimes.

Forgive me, eh?

--Justin

Freewrite, mk. I

It's due time I just......wrote.


It's 1:24 AM at the start of things, here. Lately, this is far from late. (Hah. Pun?) Last night, even, I was up until 4:30. It's strange, too--I make it a habit to wake up around noon every morning, and this morning was no different. Usually if I stay up late (2ish) then wake up earlier than 10, it hurts immensely having only....
.....hi, math.....
....8 hours of sleep (I honestly had to take 20 seconds or more to reason that amount out). 


But that's not right...
Amend that wake-up-at-10 to "the early hour of 9". 
There. 7 hours of sleep sounds more painful. To me, anyway.


Anyway (transitive redundancy?), compared to my 10 hour, 2 AM - Noon sleep schedule, I am really not that tired today. My body decides 8 might be okay like the doctors always say it needs? Typical.
This sleep schedule will soon perish.


Allergies shall, too. Itchy eyes, runny nose, incessant sneezing... They're the bane of my current out-doors-y life.  Y'know, it's funny that those symptoms are much akin to the way having a cold was portrayed in movies and stories and things from yonder childhood. Maybe I should have some soup, then. That always helps the suffering characters. Hmm.


Now I'm beginning to wonder when I'll clean up my room. Doubtfully, "soon". There's no need. Yet. I suppose I'll need clean clothes in a few days.... Yeh, there's my resolve for some roomy organization. 
--I'm glad I could put that to words for all you readers. 


Do I have readers? I hope so. I heard once that Facebook is for either people who want attention, or people with self-esteem issues. Classic narcissists vs. internal haters. With this....I dunno. I have a reason for blogging every now and then. I want people to see, sometimes, and other times it's an info dump.


This is a bit of both. I want to know if this is read, and by whom, in all sorts of egocentric ways, but I'll go about it all crafty-like with an amazing...

Official-looking Poll -- complete with varied font type, for your ocular enjoyment!

I read this blog.... (mark all that apply)