School & education related.

All those evenings spent disappointed on dancefloors

I can’t believe I only have one more week of school left, then it’s study leave for exams – and then I sign out forever and ever on December 1st, and it’s goodbye college, hello summer, university! At around this time of year for the past two years in a row, I’ve blogged about going through Leavers’ Concert and counting down how it will be my turn soon – and it was, on the last week of last term. I’m not sure, maybe because it’s still so raw, unfinished, an unsatisfied ending to what was meant to be a climatic evening, that I don’t want to talk about it…. yet. Just at the moment, prizegiving is coming up on Thursday. Despite a nomination for the girls cultural cup, I’m not expecting anything; though I’m sure I will still hold my breath for a split second, regardless.

I’m disappointed that I haven’t had any new epiphanies, nothing worthy of writing a huge tangent about. My sleeping pattern for the past week has been pretty much: sleep at 3 or 4am, get up at 7-something, go to school, come home and sleep until either dinner or hockey time, repeat. It’s been bizarre.

In contrasting matters, I had a little article in the Fringe Indie Magazine – I’m hoping that they will go through with previous plans of printing it, so i can have one sent. It’s not a biggie, but a nice sentiment, something new to try my hand at.

On the sly

I’ve been feeling increasingly down, frustrated stressed out as of late, and in general I don’t have all that much to say right now. The only thing which has occurred that might have some long-term bearing on my life is that I’m already officially accepted into the LLB/BA conjoint degrees at university next year based on my UCAS points. Music and Bmus/BA, however, still says “Pending”… we shall see how that develops after I actually send in my music application, I suppose.

The other day during last period study class, I was much too tired to attempt any more writing and sat around daydreaming instead. I was thinking that I really don’t like the feeling I get when I get asked if my hair is naturally curly. At this point I should explain that my hair is naturally quite wavy – though not enough to be curly, and too much of a mess to be anywhere near straight, so about a year ago I got talked into getting a perm; which has surprisingly lasted a whole year until about now. In other words, I decided that being in-between sucked so chose to incline towards something which I thought looked better than the other (I look awful with proper, straight hair).  But being asked such a question makes me feel somewhat like a fraud. Frankly, I observe other people’s roots for answers, instead of asking them “oh, is your hair actually naturally blonde?” – surely not! It would be social suicide in the land of females, so I’m not quite acquainted with why it’s okay for me to be confronted with “oh I thought so, that it wasn’t naturally that curly”: as if I was fake by further extents than those evidently-bleached-platinum-blondes with skin several shades of unkempt and uneven orange, their lips dripping with gloss.

That said, I don’t have any problem with people dying their hair blonde – except asians, really. Now that is just not meant to be. Gross.

A beach, a tournament and music nationals

I’m not sure exactly what happened to my blog in the week/ends that I was away in Rotorua, but somehow it has nicely resurrected itself upon my return. A blow-by-blow (sorry, couldn’t resist, I copped too many hits to the hand, arms and legs with endless blood and skin loss to not use that term) account of tournament is just far beyond me right now, and to be frank, coming 14th isn’t too exciting. Although, I’m proud to say we only lost to the team who won the Marie Fry cup by 3-1.

The first set of photos are from the Friday night before I left – Angie and I went with our geeky boys to see District 9 – and I have to admit, after having seen the first 20minutes at a friends house on a pirated file, I couldn’t take the first half of the movie seriously. But then it got darker, deeper, and I was almost reduced to curling in my seat. The real fun only began when most of us parted ways, but Freddy, William, Joel and I were adamant that we weren’t going to return home without getting up so some form of shenanigans. It started off with us lying in the middle of Joel’s street. I was determined to get a photo of it, so we acquired William’s camera and ended up heading for a stroll along the beach. The huge downer was that his camera was desperately lacking in battery power, so all the shots we came up with were pretty funny since no one knew what was going to show up until the photo had been taken, nor did the shutter go off when we wanted it to.

The one on the right shows me wincing in surprise as Joel suddenly sat down when the flash went off; and the bottom left, according to Michael, looks like an album cover. I’ll salute to that.

I’ve included a couple of pics from tournament – my warpaint from our last game, luge lifts; and Concert Band National/North Island Festival – our school got 6 straight gold awards! And dammit, the far bottom right picture ended up being the wrong one… in my haste I mis-compiled it… it was meant to be a far, far funnier one. Oops.

I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity

Somewhere amidst my current state of hayfeverish nose-blowing and nose-bleeding, I’ve been having a pretty reckless week. Kicking off Monday morning with Stage Band practise instead of hockey training for a change, we were hyped to attend the KBB Music Festival in town this week – it’s my 5th, and last.

All term I’ve been resentful towards school and agreeing with fellow cynical 7th formers who say that they “won’t be missing” college – and to a large extent, I now realise that I haven’t been completely lying. Maybe it’s because it’s midnight and I tend to get quite wordy and analytical at this time of day (or night, should I say… but it’s day to me, but more on that later), but I suddenly realise that the only place I will truly miss is probably the music department at school. As much grief, frustration and angry tears it has brought me in the past half a decade (good god, did I just say half a decade?!), it’s the one place outside my bedroom that I have spent the most collective time at. Trust me, I wish I was exaggerating when I say that, this Monday alone, I spent 6 hours at music at school: that’s two hours more than I had slept the night before.

For the first time in 4 years I changed my stage band attire – our uniform is basically black, black, and more black, with a gold and maroon waistcoat, but for once I didn’t wear jeans and wore a skirt instead. Mr. Bolley asked where my blazer was from because he thought it was part of some uniform, but I had just decided to wear it instead of the hoodies that everyone else had worn into town for KBB since it suited better (below, right… it looks quite posey, but truth be told I wasn’t looking at the camera because I’d just woken up from the long car ride home). The other picture is of an outfit I put together at the last minute a couple of weeks ago for a gig I photographed. It’s not a very “outfit picture” though, and I don’t even have my long socks and boots on, but I thought I’d just mention that the shirt I’m wearing is actually a dress! Although ironically, I’ve ever worn it out as a dress yet, but I think it looks better like this. You can’t see it in the picture, but I had to tie a black ribbon making the straps meet in the middle, since it was a low back, and very loose, low cut dress.

I’m still quite sketchy on their decision to relocate the festival at the Aotea Centre instead of at the Auckland Town Hall this year; in fact I have yet to find out as to why they did that at all, but the acoustics in the Aotea Centre simply pales in comparison to the Town Hall. The only upside I can think of, is that all the schools have much more storage space for instruments, cases and other gear – but for two days in a row now we’ve been assigned to level 5, which is a bitch of a tramp up the stairs with a bass case/amplifier! We were sneaky for Concert Band today and managed to dodge the event co-ordinators and snag rides upstairs in the lift, yay!

So I mentioned before that I get quite wordy during the late hours, on Sunday night (the reason I slept so little), I used my inspiration to churn out lyrical words as a means of procrastinating from finishing an English assignment. I wrote quite a fair bit, but here are just some snippets; none of them are titled (yet), and I find that phrasing/emjambment/punctuation seems to be a big aspect of things I write. If I ever put music to them, though, there are some lines/words that I will definitely change and rephrase:

The last thing I wrote that night, my personal highlight:
The navy curtains disguise the time of day
Or night, we are uncertain,
It’s been so long since we left.
A room once so small and empty
The hollowness of a house, not home,How did things change the tone?
Candles won’t bring us romance,
But the closed white door a privacy
And in here, a silent intimacy.

This is only the second half, I’ve omitted the first part because in hindsight, it really sucks:
I will leave because you say
so, I will leave
Not of my own accord.
I will leave because you say,
So I will leave.

I’m not too sure where this came from, it was mostly spurned from the first couple of lines:Whatever happened to indifference?
Your sun-stained chest
Makes me cringe that you
Want her berry-kissed lips on you.
Since when could I not keep
A small cup of coffee steady
It would be easier than easy
To shed this on her lap.

What happened to “go with the flow”?
Now I’m looking up maps for directions
It’d be easier if I knew where we were heading
But what a bore that’d be.
And if my only desire is to
Fulfill your desire too
How my paltry needs
Will kill the “me and you”.

A million to go

I can’t believe July has already rolled around. This means that my 7th form (year 13), and final year at college is over halfway over. My audition video for Jazz School at University is due October 1st and I’m starting to freak out – extra practise required is a huge euphemism. I made a potentially life-changing purchase today, but I won’t delve into it until a later date – I kind of want to keep it to myself until things start swaying my way. It’s astonishing and rather frustrating how, despite completing one task, there always is a million or more left to go. I miss the youthful days when homework was a worksheet due in a weeks’ time, and 20 minutes’ music practice a day was more than sufficient.

Despite my laptop half dying on me plus refusing to connect to wireless nor internet via ethernet cable, I’ve been sitting online on Mum’s computer a fair bit (such as now) and researching into future plans and destinations for perhaps 3 years’ time when my Bmus degree is completed. Which brings me to this: tertiary education is so ridiculously overpriced – especially in America?! I can’t begin to imagine how a student without scholarships/financial aid would cope in the USA; how does one pay for a degree that will cost $15,000 a term?! Here, student loans are bad enough, despite being interest free; ommitting student allowances (also goes on the loan), based purely on a rough estimate of if I took out a loan for the duration my bachelor’s degree and stayed living at home, my student loan would stack up to $15-20,000 (approx $5k/year for the degree). The “real world” looks like a scary prospect for a future 21-yaer-old me, with a music degree and debt due to the cost of my tertiary education. Then, if I were to complement my degree with an audio engineering diploma or degree… don’t even get me started on number crunching. I simply don’t understand how students in the US cope since, SAE for example, are charging twice as much for (virtually) the same course in New York as in Auckland. Here’s hoping I land a lot of gigs.

Edit: Just found a photo from that gig in June… I really ought to sort my photos earlier. It’s a reflection of Tomas. Hopefully I’ll get some films done soon too.

1 … 18 19 20 21 22 23