J TERM at Spring Arbor, Part II

Saturday ended up being packed with fun. Madelyn, Jen, Andy and I went sledding on Mt. Beebe, and since my back was still messed up from the last time I sledded over a jump on Mt. Beebe, I went down the hill and hit the jump on my mountain bike instead. Later that day my friend my friends Nick and Renee Nestorak also invited me to come sledding at their house in our hometown of Hillsdale.

"I would really love to," I responded to Renee on Facebook, "but I promised someone I would jam with him tonight."

That someone was named Joe, a fellow Spanish major who commuted and was in my "cell" group as a fellow incoming transfer student. We hadn't been in touch much, but earlier in the week he had invited me to jam and I had hesitantly agreed. I also invited our friend Brittany, also a transfer and cell group member, and co-sufferer with me for three hours of history each morning, to join us. We were going to meet at 7:00 in my room, which was the time when open hours started -- those elusive time frames on a Christian campus when girls can be in a guy's dorm room so long as the door is open and no one so much as thinks about sitting on a bed.

At 5:15 I met Andy Hinz for a round of ping pong, which didn't end until 5:45 when I rallied from 16-20 to win the tie-breaker 22-20. Since I didn't have a meal plan, Andy, Madelyn, and Jen wanted to sneak me into the Dining Commons. Since students are allowed to take their plates of food out of the DC to eat in the cozier Cougar Den, Trevor gave me a half-finished plate so that I could walk in looking as if I had already been in once. I felt very uncomfortable with it, since I don't mind sliding one by the system but I do feel badly about sliding one by any of the very nice ladies who's job it is to swipe cards and admit students. Long story short, it didn't work, and I returned to the Cougar Den. Andy and Madelyn were already in the DC, but Jen politely sat with me in the Cougar Den as I finished Trevor's almond chicken, then went in to get me some more. I wanted to find some wonderfully pleasant thing to start a great conversation about, but my attempts continued to flop because the only thing that was really on my mind was my uncertainty of direction in life. Finally I just brought that topic up. Jen listened thoughtfully and asked a few questions where appropriate, until the conversation meandered into topics that she wanted to talk about as well. By the time we were done talking, I realized that it was five after seven and I raced back to U-hall, hoping that the clocks were five minutes fast and I would be able to meet Joe on time for our 7:00 jam session.

Joe was in the lobby studying, and when I came in we both texted Brittany and headed to my room. He was rather awed by Tyler's Marshall half-stack that was "just chillin'" in the corner, so I invited him to try it out as I plugged my Fender Strat into my 15 watt Peavey. Once Brittany walked in I was working out a lead part for a moderate pop-rock tune with Christian lyrics that were hard to hear over the amplifiers. So far I was pleasantly surprised. Just because someone has recorded music doesn't mean they are any good, but I assumed that this was an original and as such it was as good as most. I anticipated the next couple changes and brought the melody back to the root before jumping up and pulling up a chair for Brittany. Joe turned back the distortion and strummed out a pretty little progression, so I sat back down and did my best to add an expressive melodic line. We built the song from thoughtful to triumphant, then brought it back around for a unified resolution.

"Hey hey," I said, meeting Joe's grin. "That's my new favorite." Joe cranked the Marshall back up and the room was drenched with heavy distortion. I turned the dials on the little Peavey until each note I played seared with electricity.

"IS THIS TOO LOUD?!?" I yelled to Brittany.

"WHAT?!?"

"IS IT TOO LOUD?!?!?"

"YOU'RE FINE!!"

With the amp maxed out I could manipulate any given note until it melted into turbulent stream of scorching overtones, or run my fingers over the frets like an adrenaline-laden tourist sprinting across a bed of coals. I searched unfamiliar territory on the guitar neck, finding some surprises and meeting them with enthusiastic intuitions as Joe raced through an exciting barre chord progression in C major. For the grand finale I shredded out 64th notes as Joe grabbed a chord form at the bottom of the neck and brought it upward across every single fret, then pulled his pick across the guitar strings like a thousand nails hitting an amplified chalkboard.

"That's my new favorite," I said, quickly turning back the distortion and looking sheepishly at Brittany, who laughed heartily.

Joe and I continued to play for another hour. At the height of our creativity, I spontaneously emulated his rhythm guitar with a simpler double-time riff, and he took the opportunity to improvise a new, complimentary rhythm part with barre chords sliding and shifting but somehow always resolving.

"I LOVE THAT RIGHT NOW YOU'RE IMPROVISING OVER HIS IMPROVISATION," Brittany yelled. Joe once again slid a barre chord slowly up the entire neck and slashed his pick obnoxiously across the strings.

"IT'S THE ONLY WORTHWHILE WAY OF ENDING A SONG!!!" I yelled to Brittany, and Joe launched into another song filled with hammer-ons and pull-offs.

There are only so many strings on the guitar, but somehow Joe managed to grab extraneous notes on top of his barre chords that encouraged and directed my surprisingly successful forays into unknown scale structures.

"Ok, one more song," Joe finally said.

"Let's make it another pretty one," I said. My heightened musical intuition had been dwindling and I felt more like a tourist who had lost his adrenaline rush and continued to stumble painfully through the remainder of coals.

The last song came to a close quite literally on a good note, and Brittany insisted that we should play at an open mic night. I really wanted to -- not only because I like girls and girls like guitarists, but because this was exactly the kind of thing I wasn't doing to make my college experience worthwhile. Thank goodness Joe was persistent in getting ahold of me.

"Joe, I really enjoyed this, and I would love to get together again soon to do some more jamming."

"Thank you, good sir. I'll be in touch."

an ode to high school

So I've been afflicted by a moderate case of melancholy.
It started to show up when I sat down to email my old band teacher Mr. Rushing about some recommendation letters I asked him to write for me. But then I took a moment to be sincere with him. I haven't done that kind of thing in a while, so I was a bit out of practice; I think that may have played a part in triggering the melancholy. I've been a bit out of touch with people. My comfort zone is becoming much more comfortable - yet also much smaller. Back in high school, situations used to arise that called either for sincerity or total withdrawal from normal social interaction. I've never been the most social person, but I never wanted to miss out on what life has to offer, so I practiced sincerity. When a friendship became borderline "something more," sincerity. In order to have a more enjoyable lunch-time experience, I could spend it with Larry and Aaron discussing things close to our hearts - namely writing, poetry and art. Those were some great times - and the key was sincerity. It seems like going beyond your comfort level in the short run usually results in a more fulfilled life in the long run.
I got a lot of practice with sincerity my junior and senior years in high school. But lately, I've been out of practice. You might notice that I'm being pretty sincere right now - but it is a lot different when you are addressing a single person. As I'd imagine is true for most people, I find it very easy to pour my heart out onto a computer screen with the vague knowledge that someone on the other end might be reading my writing at some unknown point in time. But since leaving high school, and even, to my surprise, since taking a gap year from college, I've found myself deficient in interaction with people. Oh yes - I am doing a lot. I'm doing a ton of things that are really ME. Playing sax for a couple hours a day, playing guitar for a couple hours a day, reading a novel in Spanish, even making my own website that I'm beginning to feel rather proud of, though it still needs lots of work (tourofpoverty09.org). Yet all these things don't seem to amount to very much in the human experience when they are lacking that ingredient of unexpected, spontaneous, and sometimes even uncomfortable interaction with other people of all sorts.
Yes, my life is very comfortable. I know exactly what I'm going to do every weekend (visit my best friends at Spring Arbor University), and I know that I am going to greatly enjoy it. I know what I am going to do each day - and the things I do are going to be the things I enjoy most in life -- at least if they aren't, I have no one to blame except myself, since I have devoted this year to staying at home and accomplishing and doing those things which hold the greatest importance to me.

But let's get back to the melancholy I was experiencing. It started off with my sincerity towards my band teacher - about how much band had meant to me. Because once I got writing and thinking about it, I couldn't even imagine what my life might have been had my father not convinced me to join band back in the 6th grade, and if I hadn't had such a great band teacher. Half of my high school experience - no, perhaps much more - could be defined by things that came about entirely because of my role in the band and it's role in my life. Some of the best moments of my life, the experience of being truly looked up to, my best relationships, the indescribable feeling that sums up the dozens of fall nights spent at the football field or away games; that incredible feeling that results when the mind tries to remember the highest highs and lowest lows as if they occurred in a single moment... the infamous and always amazing band trips.. before even coming to my love of playing music.
All these moments.. all of them shared. Not a single memory stands on its own unless it was shared with someone. I think I've figured out what they say about that. It's not actually that you remember it longer because they also remember it and can remind you. You just remember it longer.
I look at high school and see -- high school was when you just went to school and life happened to you. You didn't have to build your own path up in front of yourself. The path was already constructed, and you could decorate it, or you could stray from it, but even if you strayed from it you could return to it, and even if you decided not to decorate it too much it was still somewhat interesting as it was. I strayed from it ... I found other paths.. I spent all my time in another town developing different relationships with different people than those who were set there for me by virtue of what school system I attended. Then some things happened, the other path I was blazing turned rough, and I came back to the path set up for me at Hillsdale High School. It didn't seem like much at the time - but at least it was there for me to return to. Not anymore. Meanwhile, back in my senior year of high school, I returned to high school from a crazy summer, not feeling like decorating my path at all. I just wanted to walk the remaining portion and be done with it. But then all these beautiful things kept happening to me. It's crazy. In high school all you have to do is go to school and life happens to you. I know "life" is not always a good thing. But unless you are literally starving or caught in the middle of a war or something (which it should be acknowledged many people in the world are), there is always good in life, and probably more than there might seem on first glance.
Now, though, my melancholy is initiated by an email to my old band teacher. It's deepened when I look at my shelves and see a gift I was given by a classmate during my senior year. Because I'm doing so many meaningful things right now - but they seem to mean very little when they are not being shared with anyone.
I mean, I share it with my best friends. And it's true - I am blessed to have a few truly good friends rather than a multitude of acquaintances. And not that anyone could replace the incredible friends I have right now. But I think that the human spirit is always seeking something more than what it already knows. And not an incremental increase, like "today I know 18 more Spanish words than yesterday" or "I am a little bit better of a musician." Those things are good. But there comes a point when the only thing that is truly new is a new person, or a new experience with an old person. Hanging out at a college and already knowing what you are going to talk about doesn't do it. We've gotta be making progress in our lives, or no matter how good they are they don't feel good. I took a year off to make progress in things that were important to me - music, Spanish, fighting poverty. But I kinda missed the human factor in all of that. You see, before I took a year off college, I thought that what I missed about high school were all the things I did in my spare time. I inexplicably had a massive amount of spare time in high school; probably explained by the fact that I never did homework at home. So I managed to find time to practice and become relatively good at tennis, art, guitar, saxophone, photography, writing, driving just because I could, and a hundred and one other things that I used to do - and enjoy - because of all that spare time I had to fill. I thought I missed doing all those things - and all those things were extremely enjoyable and even worthwhile on their own. But what I really missed was being able to fill all of my time outside of school with all of those things - yet still have life happen to me anyways. All of those things have a meaning when they come in addition to life, not as a substitute. They form an amazing addition and make an already good life better, but they can't make an already good life. It's time to give up the substitutes and give up the comfort and go reinvent that already good life... as well as just getting out there and letting it happen to me.

Wow. I never meant to pull a conclusion from this bit of writing, but I guess I just did. Hold me to it, please.

This is a really long rambling note and I didn't express some things I intended to express, and I expressed many that I had not intended to express. So if you read it know that, and I am going to arbitrarily end it now cause I don't have any direction to go with it. I'd say that in the whole thing there are maybe 3 or 4 sentences that I actually like. But if you read it, please feel free to let me know what your thoughts on those subjects are.