Posts tagged as memories
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- Wednesday, August 11, 2010:
Memory Day: Eighth Grade Extracurriculars As everyone who fell by the wayside in the ultra-competitive Christopher Newport University admissions process can attest, you MUST start your extracurricular activities in eighth grade if you want to have any chance of getting into college and avoiding a lifetime career degreasing the grills at Flamers. To carry on the eighth grade theme of this year's updates, here are the clubs and sports I was a part of in 1993. Since there are 9 people on a boat in crew, a pos... - Wednesday, March 31, 2010:
Memory Day: A Decade Ago "Five million, two hundred fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes" is long in both the temporal and literal senses -- it would not have made a catchy lyric for any plays about AIDS, but it does accurately represent how long it's been since my fourth year at Virginia Tech. I'm not even any taller today than I was back then, unless height can be measured in circumference. March 31, 2000 was the day after the VT Brass Ensemble concert, which featured... - Wednesday, March 10, 2010:
List Day: Eight Puerto Rico Experiences Wandering along Playa Lucia, and watching a dirty, old, pervert surreptitiously repositioning his car so he could watch the white chick in the swimsuit. Driving past signs for a Ferreteria and learning, with some dismay, that it is a hardware store, and not a place where you can have ferret for lunch. Driving back to our hotel near Yabucoa after dark on Highway 3, a G-string width road that wends around a mountain wherever there happe... - Wednesday, February 24, 2010:
Stuff in My Drawers Day It was around September of 1988 when I decided I could invent games just as cool as Infocom text-adventure games by drawing mazes on paper, and this was the first one I ever did. I now have a folder of over fifty, a mix of traditional mazes, Infocom box-style maps, and other images, and my fourth grade compatriots would crowd around the lunch table going through my mazes while I directed the action. None of us had ever heard or played Dungeons and Dragons (and to this day, I've... - Wednesday, February 03, 2010:
Vocabulary Day learning words the first grader way Here is Ken. I never actually knew anyone named Ken, but based on his crippled flamingo physique, I'm guessing that he would have been that friend who came to houses only to find all the lights off and the occupants scarcely daring to breathe in the foyer, hoping he'll go away. Ken and Beth can swing. If you don't know... - Wednesday, January 20, 2010:
Memory Day: Decades The interesting thing about a decade is not how much changes during that time -- it's how quickly the time went by. Since I've now been around for three, here is a look at the road trip of my life. Thirty years ago , I was 0 years old, an age that is only interesting when you are in the denominator of a fraction, so let's move ahead a decade. Twenty years ago , I was 10 years old and in Mrs. Turner's sixth grade class at James K. Po... - Wednesday, January 13, 2010:
Memory Day: Army Men Like most young lads who grew up in the 80s before toys were a garish mash of retarded Power Rangers and Pokemon, the core unit of outdoor play was the Army Man. Arriving from China in thick plastic bags hanging off the ends of the aisles at Best Company in Shirlington, these crudely stamped lumps were probably the Chicken McNuggets of the plastic industry, but they provided hours of fun even if they were poisonous to touch or eat. As a child of an economist grow... - Wednesday, December 23, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part V For the final segment of Cool Places I Visited While You Spent the Month of October Working , I'll be talking about hikes. I'm always been a fan of hiking (of the "go up a mountain with a water bottle and then go home and eat dinner" variety, and not the "BOIL YOUR WATER AND CHECK FOR SCORPIONS IN YOUR UNDERPANTS variety, or even the "Dulles Toll Road Fare" variety), and Kauai is eminently hikable with surprisingly diverse scenery for an island only 18 miles across. ... - Wednesday, December 09, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part IV Our time on Kauai was split into two discrete segments: for the first four days, we stayed at a fancy resort and worked strenuously to relax on and nearby the complex. For the last ten days, we rented a car and moved to a second-floor condo in Kapa'a overlooking the tidepools, allowing us to travel around the island and experience some of the more heady excitements and hikes. While on the resort, we had an hour-long outdoor couples massage in an airy tent on the beach,... - Wednesday, November 18, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part III Having been tiny people since birth, most of the hikes on Kauai would have depleted our caloric composition to below zero, so it was in our health's best interest to consume as many different kinds of food as possible. Besides the fact that seafood is present in almost every restaurant, there is no specific Kauai cuisine. There's only an interesting hodge podge of ethnic plates from sushi to tacos to burgers. Here are four of the more memorable restaurants we ate at while on the island:&nb... - Wednesday, November 11, 2009:
Memory Day: November 11 Happy Veterans' Day / Kelley Corbett's Birthday. I'll be working from home today since our company contracts to the government, and the government takes their holidays very, very seriously. I'm sure there was at least one government program manager who took the day before or after this one off to give a little more time of reflection and/or golf to the enlisted men. I've never been a big fan of the concept of floater holidays that turn successive years of holidays into m... - Wednesday, November 04, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon Part II When it comes to beaches, Kauai does everything right. Besides the rule that every beach is public property, regardless of which movie star's house abuts the area, There are also picnic pavilions, showers, and reasonably clean bathrooms available at major stopping points. Camping is allowed at several beaches, and because being an island leads to a very high proportion of coastlines, you can usually just roll your car into one of the million little highway shoulder spots and find you... - Wednesday, October 28, 2009:
Memory Day: Hawaii Honeymoon If you haven't been paying close attention so far, I got married three weeks ago and fled to Kauai, an island paradise which is the farthest western public island in Hawaii. My oceanic travels are exceedingly limited, comprised of my Fresh Off the Plane trip from South Korea , and a 2008 trip to big cities in Europe. We chose Kauai because the Caribbean was in hurricane season, and there seemed to be enough varied activities to last us for the two weeks we wanted to spen... - Wednesday, September 09, 2009:
Memory Day: Stuffed Animals In the halcyon days of my youth (a period after the idyllic but before the tempestuous), I owned more stuffed animals than a taxidermist with defaulting clients. The collection of roughly thirty completely filled up a rectangular laundry basket, and the animals were all shapes and sizes, like the hippo on the left who is surprisingly happy for a mouth-breather and was probably a hand-me-down from my sister. My stuffed animal collection obeyed three basic rules: none of... - Wednesday, September 02, 2009:
Memory Day: The Admiral's Overture In the winter of 1996, with only six months of composing under my belt, I was asked by a former band director to compose a piece for her middle school band. Although it wasn't my first world premiere (it was actually the fifth), it was the first one triggered by an outside request rather than my incessant attempts to bug band directors who couldn't say no to me. I would later learn that it's HARD to get people to play your music (with the exception of flute solos, because once you've... - Wednesday, August 19, 2009:
Memory Day: Old Snapshots This is my old friend, Daniel Bethancourt, at our Sixth Grade graduation in June 1990. Sixth grade graduations are necessary milestones in today's society, since half of the class abruptly drops out immediately after to become car mechanics and air conditioning repair boys. Daniel moved to the West Coast immediately after sixth grade, and I've only seen him once since then -- he is now Father Daniel at an Orthodox Christian parish in Lousiana. &... - Wednesday, August 05, 2009:
Memory Day: Christmas Every family has their Christmas traditions (even the Jewish ones who bemoan the fact that everything's closed on Christmas Day). The Uri! household traditions were fairly tame -- we did not construct ear wax candles in every window or go a'carolin' in four-part Hi-Lo's harmony, but we did go through the same motions every year for many, many years. A Uri! Christmas began with a tree, much like the French phrase, très bien , when pronounced by a redneck. In ... - Wednesday, June 17, 2009:
Memory Fragment Media Day a triple threat of memories, old photos and fragments ♣ This picture was taken around 1991 at our powerful 486 computer with 5 1/4" drive, 3 1/2" drive, and tape drive. It had 256-color VGA and an Ad Lib card, but only 24 of the colors ever worked. I am playing Ultima 6, based on the hint book open in front of me. ♣ A wild party at Rosie and Jen's house in February 1998, wher... - Thursday, June 11, 2009:
T-Shirt Day Remember when I wore a bunch of hats ? This is kind of like that. This is the same shirt I wore at Disney World in yesterday's post. Evidently Boy Scouts have horrible design and colour picking skills. I guess that's what Girl Scouts are for! AMIRITE? All that artistic talent centralized in a single place for the summer and this is the best shirt they could come up with. In ot... - Wednesday, June 10, 2009:
Memory Day: Disney World The last major family vacation we ever took was a week-long trip to Florida in August of 1994. Neither my sister or I were very excited about this trip -- she was only days away from leaving for her freshman year at UVa and would rather have been hanging out with her friends doing nothing, and I was going on the trip directly from a week-long stay at a Boy Scout Science and Energy camp without any time in the middle to simply be at home and recharge. The vacation didn'... - Wednesday, June 03, 2009:
Memory Day: Junior Year Awards Ceremony As if sitting through an elementary school assembly in a multipurpose gym/auditorium smelling of feet while kids were awarded for perfect attendance wasn't bad enough, the assemblies only got worse as the years went on. By the time I'd gotten to T.C. Williams High School, the awards program was fifteen pages long (16 with an addendum) and had awards for every class and every subject, as well as scholarships, Book Awards, and other ridiculous categories. Having a technical school on the pre... - Wednesday, May 27, 2009:
Memory Day: MV Auditions For the last two years of my five-year Marching Virginians tour, I was one of two section leaders (with Pat Brown and Joanna Swift), which meant that I had the privilege of sitting in a hot room with the trumpet professor, Dr. Bachelder, listening to seventy or eighty trumpet players zealously murdering their sheet music and vying for one of the sixty-three available trumpet spots in the marching band. We had all kinds enter the audition room, from eager freshmen who w... - Wednesday, May 13, 2009:
Journal Fragments random excerpts from my first year of grad school ♣ September 3, 2001 : Yesterday evening, I went to the department head's house for a music theory welcoming picnic but it's actually next week. Luckily no one was home so I didn't look completely dumb. ♣ October 14, 2001 : Mark was drunk and telling Kathy his opinions of people in our Pedagogy class and labeled me as the "quietly competent" one. I've heard t... - Wednesday, April 22, 2009:
Memory Day: Learn2Drive My first driving experience (outside of steering on my dad's lap) came at the Go Kart Raceway after sixth grade, at the birthday/going-away party of the occasionally mentioned Daniel Bethancourt. The track workers were leery of letting someone so small drive a go kart, and after getting stuck on the tire-barriers twice, they drove me back to the beginning and told me to go wait in the video arcade. Three years later, I took the classroom portion of Driver's Ed during... - Wednesday, April 15, 2009:
Memory Day: Fifteen Years Ago Today On Friday, April 15, 1994, I was fourteen years old, and a stalwart tenth grader at T.C. Williams High School. With public schools slowly migrating away from the "junior high" system, tenth graders were at the bottom of the high school caste (and freshmen had a school all to themselves like some sort of prepubescent syphillis quarantine). Here are a few memorable moments from this day, taken from the journal I kept at the time. ♠ Homeroom was a hodge-podge amal... - Wednesday, April 01, 2009:
Memory Day: April Fool's Day ♣ On April 1, 1995, twelve of my close friends received an invitation to an end-of-the-year party. Well-versed in my rambling multi-page invitations and penchant for planning months in advance, invitees were surprised to discover that this party would take place at King's Dominion on a day when the park was closed to the general public. They were more surprised when the last page revealed it to be an April Fool's joke. My dedication to this joke was so strong that I actually pu... - Wednesday, March 25, 2009:
Memory Day: Dr. Patel Dr. Manu Patel was the AP Physics teacher at TC Williams in my senior year. I've briefly mentioned Dr. Patel in previous posts here and here , but he's always been a supporting character. The time has come for him to get the full day's update that he deserves. I first met Dr. Patel in 1990 when my friend, Daniel Bethancourt, and I (as the two top students in our class) were extricated from the sixth grade for a day to experience a full day of science... - Wednesday, March 18, 2009:
Memory Day: Old Computer Games In the last two years of the 1980s, when Becca was either not yet born or incapable of walking under her own power, computer games were slightly stagnant. Infocom had been bought out by Activision, so text adventures were on their way out, and Sierra's "Quest" games were just starting to rise. For a kid who thrived on computer games (and who did not own a Nintendo until the 90s) this dearth of games resulted in some interesting, yet horrible, purchases. The number one rule whe... - Tuesday, March 10, 2009:
Shoe Day Yesterday afternoon, I finally found a new pair of brown shoes on the clearance rack of DSW. For years I've been looking for a comfortable soft-leather pair under fifty bucks that aren't dotted with ridiculous seams or resembling the tasseled loafers every high school boy wears to church, and these were so comfortable that they felt just as broken in as my old shoes. Thus ends the journey of my old brown shoes, purchased for $19.95 at the Chantilly Payless in 2002, back ... - Wednesday, February 18, 2009:
Memory Fragments Day ♦ Back in the days when Chompy wasn't an agoraphobic recluse like Sigourney Weaver in Copycat , we used to take her to various locales that passed as parks around Tallahassee, where she'd do her best to escape. Once, she broke free and did a 100 yard dash towards the nearest highway. Since smokey Mike had the lung capacity of a third clarinetist in marching band, I had to pursue, and tackled her mere feet from the road. ♦ In fourth grade TAG clas... - Wednesday, February 11, 2009:
Memory Day: Transfer Credit Going into college, I had 14 AP credits in English and Physics, and the feeling of getting exempt from additional classes to sit in my dorm room reading the entire back archives of Sluggy was intoxicating. Since I had embarked upon a course that would ultimately net 190 credits (I think 96 were needed to be a qualified liberal arts major), I decided to see just how many more transferred credits I could get without leaving the home base buildings of McBryde and Squires. There... - Wednesday, February 04, 2009:
Memory Day: High School Music Theory When I looked through my old journals for thoughts on the music theory class I took in my senior year, I noticed that I generally wrote one of four single sentences throughout the year: theory was boring, theory was dull, we had a sub in theory and did nothing, or theory was a video. The reason it was so boring was likely the wide range of personalities in the class -- like all public school classes without the TOR (Talented or Rich) label, more time was spent on the remedial cases than th... - Wednesday, January 28, 2009:
Five Years Day Fifteen Years Ago Today... I was snowed in at home as a tenth grader. Unfortunately, it was a Student Evaluation Day which meant that we already had the day off, which is like winning the lottery after you die. I spent the day playing computer games and shoveling snow. Ten Years Ago Today... I was living with Nathan, the dirtiest roommate I've ever had, in East AJ and taking Operating Systems, Polifrone's Contemporary Music Literature class, and... - Wednesday, December 03, 2008:
Pet Day: Booty Booty (born Athena) was only fourteen weeks old when I adopted her from a rescue agency in Tallahassee in March 2003. Mike (of Mike and Chompy) was in attendance at Petsmart when I picked her out of the cage full of ugly kitties and did the obligatory lying to the stereotypical rescue worker who believed that all cats needed someone to be home 24 hours a day and have access to fresh salmon and litter boxes full of shredded money. I took her back to my two-room apartment in Parkwood a... - Tuesday, November 25, 2008:
Memory Day: A Day in the Eighth Grade The 1992-93 school year was my Eighth Grade year at Francis Hammond Junior High School. Because it was a junior high school and not a middle school, the top grade was 9, and eighth graders had no particular positive or negative status. This was part of the Alexandria City Public School System's experiment to inappropriately teach kids that "freshman" are at the top of the food chain. (The failed experiment was cancelled after I entered the tenth grade -- subsequent ninth graders were... - Wednesday, November 19, 2008:
Memory Day: Table Top Games When I was younger, I was a bona fide athlete in top physical condition. Evidence of this can be found in the December 1992 issue of Sports Illustrated for Kids , which showcased the strenuous activity of Table Top Games -- not the nerdy, Dew-fueled games of dungeons and wizards, but real feats of physical strength with balls and goal lines and protective gear. For the sake of full disclosure, we were not called upon by the magazine for our skill at bouncing... - Wednesday, October 29, 2008:
Memory Day: Al's Magic Shop On snow days and the occasional summer holiday in my youth, I would accompany one of my parents to work, because government coworkers are much cheaper babysitters than the real thing. Every trip had its traditions, like getting to punch the Bus Transfer button in the Metro station, and pulling the bus cord when we finally arrived back home. Another tradition when I accompanied my dad was a trip to Al's Magic Shop, a longtime DC business that finally closed in 2004. Thi... - Wednesday, October 22, 2008:
Memory Day: Dinnertime When I was growing up, my parents had a staggered workday schedule. My dad would be on the 6:10 bus to the Pentagon Metro station and at his desk by 7 AM, which got him home in just enough time to catch the tail end of Duck Tales (though he never took advantage of this scheduling perk). My mom followed a more traditional rush hour timetable, where she drank coffee and watched the fake-smiled anchors on Good Morning, America!. As a result, she generally left the house arou... - Wednesday, October 15, 2008:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day carefully preserved in journals and the Wayback Machine Friday, October 15, 1993 : A typical day in my sophomore year saw my English class reading Julius Caesar out loud in its entirety ( ...we only have sixty more pages to go...) because our near-retirement teacher also ran a bed & breakfast in Berryville, and tried to think up as many substitute-friendly activities as possible to stretch the lessons out without any actual... - Wednesday, October 01, 2008:
Memory Day: All-District Band All-District Band is like the Pro-Bowl for band members, but without any hopes of making millions of dollars or getting on a Wheaties box. Every year, hopeful band geeks from an arbitrarily drawn district (which were obviously gerrymandered to favor schools that actually cared about music education) would line up for a five minute audition that would make or break their all-star ambitions. The auditions were done blind by members of the nearest military band, who needed ... - Wednesday, September 24, 2008:
Stuff in My Drawers Day Artwork of 1985 This first picture was drawn on a trip to Smoke Hole Canyon in West Virginia. From the nearest town of Petersburg, you apparently can only reach the canyon by canoe on the South Branch Potomac River, passing through a scenic field of daisies. After paddling a ways, you should take Exit 22 to reach the canyon, which is nestled between two prickly African boobies. If you choose not to take Exit 22, you will have to get out of your canoe and w... - Wednesday, September 17, 2008:
Stuff in My Drawers Day Creative Writing, October 16, 1987 The Famous Professor: Mike Howl It was 1934, April 2, 2:34. He'd just come from collecting bugs from a canyon. In his laboratory (the garage), Professor Howl was experimenting with the dead ladybugs he'd dug up. He found that they held evidence of time, and electricity. With this he could make a time machine!!! He copied the plans very carefully. He got in and checked it (and ... - Thursday, September 11, 2008:
Resumé Day You've never truly had to artifically inflate your curriculum vitae until you have to write one for the Personal Management Merit Badge in Seventh Grade. It's good to know that I learned all about "different levels of life" in Life Science (cellular vs. society, not Kshatriyas vs. Dalits). Without tooting my own horn, I can honestly say that I was an expert on rear entry safety, and the school administrators felt good knowing that I was on rear duty. I wa... - Monday, September 08, 2008:
Pet Day: Chameleons Probably the shortest pet fad to imprint upon my childhood was the pair of chameleons I owned around 1991 as a requirement for the Reptile Study merit badge . Because I owned them for just a few months and they lacked a cuddly nature, I don't even remember their names, although I'm guessing they were hilariously witty names like Cami and Leon that only an eleven-year-old could invent. The picture on the left is the only proof that these lizards actually existe... - Wednesday, September 03, 2008:
Lego Day The very first Lego set that I ever owned was the 1986 edition of the Shell Service Station. Shell's efforts to imprint children while they were young seems to have failed, since I only go to Shell stations when there's a line of cars at the cheaper station around the corner. Despite that, this set was pretty neat for a Town set, with all sorts of extra gadgets and subplots, like the mechanic in coveralls whose lifelong dream was to go on the road as a ventriloquist with his blue all... - Wednesday, August 13, 2008:
Memory Day: Sweaty Lightweights Back in my high school Crew days, I was the coxswain for the Lightweight boat. As in most weight-restricted sports, the Lightweight bracket started out as a way for Lilliputians to compete against each other, but ended up as a just another abusable system where coaches tried to stack the fat without exceeding the upper limit. On the men's Lightweight boat, there were two weight restrictions: no single rower could be over 145 pounds, and the entire boat's average had to... - Wednesday, August 06, 2008:
Pet Day: Speedy and Pokey It was in the Spring of either fifth or sixth grade when the next animals entered the URI! household menagerie. This time, instead of a peeing kitty, it was a pair of fluffy guinea pigs. Although we didn't realize it at the time, guinea pigs are easily some of the most worthless pets in the history of pets. Now, many pets don't have much to offer to the human race -- snakes spend the entire day sitting stock still on a stick, stoically staring. However, guinea pigs are ... - Wednesday, July 23, 2008:
BU Begins origins of a superhero Soon Bok Yoon, from the planet Wooie -- I may as well have been an extra in Star Wars. Only six days after my birth, they already knew that I would be handsome, intelligent, and able to poop without difficulties. As part of the Care and Feeding of Your New Alien packet, new parents are warned that all Oriental kids are plague monkeys. Another part of the packet is a twel... - Monday, July 21, 2008:
Camping Inventory Day Vint Hill Farms, Spring Camboree 1989 Spring Camboree 1992 Spotsylvania County, every month for years Camp Sinoquipe, every month for years Camp Big Mac, every year for 4 years Rock Enon, every year for 4 years Camp Goshen, 1994 Virginia Beach 2001 The Cove, 2007 The Cove, 2008 Co... - Monday, June 09, 2008:
Vocabulary Day learning words the first grader way Look at Jeff's new cowboy boots. More importantly, look at Jeff's inappropriately wide stance. The jet plane landed on the runway . Three dimensional spatial awareness comes in third grade. We had hotdogs for lunch. The lesson of the week was ... - Wednesday, June 04, 2008:
Poetry Day a line analysis of classic poetry Waiting for Christmas by BU (age 5) I cicles hang at Christmas. The author is metaphorically referring to the silver tinsel which adorns the tree. Real icicles are not cost-effective for indoor tree decoration, given their tendency to melt. They are L ovely to. Some scholars argue that this line is incomplete, and believe that ... - Wednesday, May 28, 2008:
Memory Day: Senior Schedule Going to public school is like going to traffic school -- you show up, tune out, put in the time, and walk away with a certificate. My senior year of high school was easily one of the most enjoyable school years, because other than the three AP exams I took mid-year, it was an exercise in daily mingling. First Period : Music theory was a class of three musicians and three non-musicians, so the classes were geared towards the latter. We learned basic chord progre... - Monday, May 19, 2008:
Pet Day: Cindy The first pet which my family owned was a small grey cat with a white spot on its neck named Cindy. There are no remaining up-close photos of this cat although its likeness has been immortalized in one of those premade sculptures you can purchase and paint to give other people the impression that you're artistic. We owned Cindy when I was in first grade, at the same time when we owned two expensive leather couches (because foreshadowing is most effective when experienced d... - Thursday, May 15, 2008:
Memory Day: School Newsletters Every month in elementary school, we would receive a copy of the school newsletter to take home to our parents. Contrary to popular impression, these newsletters were not safety pinned to our jackets -- we maintained the complete responsibility for delivery, which is probably why most elementary school parents were clueless. Every newsletter began with a pithy unreferenced quotation, teaching children that plagiarism is appropriate in all settings, and the body of the letter was type... - Wednesday, March 19, 2008:
Memory Day: Carmen Sandiego Educational games in the 80s were a hit-or-miss affair. For every awesome game like Ancient Empires or Oregon Trail, there was a steamer like Logic Master or Gertrude's Boot. One game series that never got old, though, was Carmen Sandiego. This Broderbund series had you tracking pun-named criminals through various geographical and historical areas while looking answers up in a provided reference book, like the World Almanac. There were five major games in the series before... - Monday, March 10, 2008:
Five Years Day Fifteen Years Ago Today... I was a tiny bespectacled freshman at Francis C. Hammond Junior High. Tonight was the City Fine Arts Concert, so my Wednesday afternoon lesson with Jack Dahlinger (a retired high school band director who loved to play duets all lesson long) happened at 4:30 instead of 7:30. Lessons on concert and recital days were always great because you could use the concert as an excuse to not do anything strenuous -- "I have a two-measure solo tonight ... - Wednesday, February 13, 2008:
Memory Day: Saturday Mornings The Saturday Morning Routine was an aspect of life instilled by my Dad, who saw every weekend as an opportunity to do extra work for the Home. We would wake up every Saturday between 6:30 and 7 and eat some cereal while perusing the Washington Post. At the time, I limited my reading to the comics and the NASDAQ stock exchange, where I could keep tabs on my shares in Babbage's and Sierra On-Line (both of which ultimately went out of business). Around 7:30 we would load up t... - Wednesday, January 23, 2008:
Memory Day: Comedy Records While driving home from the super-secret pencil factory in Bailey's Crossroad yesterday, I stumbled upon an Interview with Ray Stevens on XM Radio channel 2 -- I was trying to get to UPOP on 29 and didn't hit the 9 fast enough. The interviewer himself was annoying, as most interviewers and talk show hosts are wont to be, but it was a fun trip down memory lane to hear some of Ray's greatest hits and his commentary on them. To shamelessly milk this bit of nostalgia, I've dec... - Wednesday, December 05, 2007:
Memory Day: Junior High Gym Class In junior high gym, we had to purchase and wear ugly blue uniforms with white enamel labels, where we were supposed to write our name in permanent marker. There were a surprisingly high number of gym uniform thefts which, to me, is about as logical as stealing bowling shoes or used dentist bibs. There was also a washer and dryer in a locked cage in the locker room where your gym teacher could wash a uniform if your family was too poor to wash it yourself. I used to g... - Wednesday, November 14, 2007:
Evolution Day When I was growing up, my dad took so many pictures that their value is depreciating faster than the US dollar. The current rate is roughly ten pictures for 1 yen, and it's sure to sink further now that I've discovered another bin full that were never scanned or added to albums. Here are some long lost pictures from various Band Parents' Days since 1993. Like rings in a tree, you can tell how old I am by how long my hair is and how round my glasses are. &n... - Thursday, October 18, 2007:
Journal Day As mentioned in previous posts, I used to keep a private daily journal religiously throughout high school, writing in it every single day. The habit dropped off in college and I only wrote in spurts until around 2004 when I stopped altogether. It got to the point where keeping a private journal and a public blog at the same time was far too much work and one would inevitably suffer (as you can see from posts like these ). Reading through old journal entries last... - Tuesday, October 09, 2007:
Birth Day Mike (of Mike and Chompy, and sometimes Jamie) was a fellow composing grad student at Florida State, arriving from an "I just graduated but don't want to enter the real world yet" background like me (unlike the vast "I was in the real world and hated in so now I'm fleeing and sacrificing my salary in the process" populace). In our first semester we had 16th Century Counterpoint and Pedagogy of Music Theory I together -- two-thirds of my total courseload since grad school, as everyone... - Wednesday, October 03, 2007:
Memory Day: Gymnastics As I mentioned a couple months ago, being stuck in day care was an agonizing way to spend the afternoon, much like that of a cat dipped in peanut butter trying to groom itself. In fact, it was after-school day care and not college applications that sparked in us the early drive to do extracurricular activities. One of mine was gymnastics, which I started in fourth grade with my sister (who was in sixth). Luckily for us, the city's gymnastics program was o... - Wednesday, September 26, 2007:
Memory Day: The Preserved Past 1990 was the watershed year when Aaron Ulm, Josh Lambert, Sharif Ahmed, and BU graduated from the SIXTH GRADE, a feat which is just slightly more impressive than beating Super Mario Brothers with a Game Genie inserted for permanent invincibility. Every speechmaker you might expect appeared at this ceremony: the musical arrangement by the vocal music teacher (who worked for at least four different schools), a first grader (who said "I wanna be like you!"), a senior (who said "In six y... - Wednesday, September 05, 2007:
Memory Day: Childhood According to Google Maps The Babysitter's Apartment : On the ground floor of Mayflower Square, a solidly Latino apartment complex before it was hip to be Latino and densely populated, lived our babysitter who cared for us until the year I finished kindergarten. The nearest elementary school had every other grade, so my sister had to take a bus across the city to Jefferson Houston for first and third grades. The apartment looked over a one hundred foot hill which was perfect for cramming onto ... - Wednesday, August 29, 2007:
Memory Day: Day Care For three years in elementary school, my sister and I attended day care every morning from 7 to 8:30 and every evening from 3:00 to 5:00. This wasn't today's version of day care that costs more than a semester of college and lasts all day with "child care professionals" -- instead, it was merely a holding pen for kids whose parents' work schedule didn't sync up with the school schedule, run for minimum wage by the least-qualified workers in the day care industry. You could probably p... - Thursday, August 16, 2007:
Memory Day: Jump Rope Week With the exception of the time Arnold Schwarzenegger visited for a photo opportunity (during which all seven black kids got to sit in front so our school would look ethnic), our elementary school gym program was neither exciting or innovative. We had gym three times a week, and spent ten minutes running around a circle, jumping over cones to the sounds of really bad 80s records. Sometimes, if we had exhausted all other possibilities, we had off-the-wall diversions like Parachute Day&... - Wednesday, August 15, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day BU at 15 data points August 15, 1992 : I had a Saturday afternoon art class at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, which I missed because I was off at Junior Leadership Camp wearing this colourful hat. August 15, 1993 : I don't have any information about this day, but I was probably at high school band camp, learning the show for Mirada and Fascinating Rhythm . I was just going into tenth grade, and my sist... - Thursday, August 09, 2007:
Stuff in My Drawers Day When I was in kindergarten, I had some brilliant ideas on how to improve the quality of life around my house, mainly by building a cooler house. The ground floor of The Pickett Oak had traditional sensibilities -- you came in from the terras and immediately freshened up in the powder room (whatever the hell that is). Food was prepared in the kichen and eaten in the dinner room (no word on where lunch is eaten), and clothes were washed in the youteltey room.&nb... - Monday, August 06, 2007:
Memory Day: Old Roommates Next week, little Becca, the second-youngest regular visitor to the URI! Zone, will leave the area for her first semester at Virginia Tech, continuing the longstanding family tradition of doing everything the four older sisters do (with one inexplicable "who the heck goes to James Madison University? whatevs." anomaly in the early nineties, that will probably be rewritten in the Official Family Biography pamphlet when their homestead becomes a Historic Preservation Site).... - Friday, July 20, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part V of V The feeling of hearing Scintillation performed in a reverberating chapel for the Closing Ceremonies instilled in me the hunger to compose (a hunger which soldiered on through years of composition lessons that had varying degrees of annoyance, until it finally consumed itself sometime during grad school). When I returned home, I immediately wrote Glossalalia March , and these two pieces became the bookends for my Fifth Year Re... - Thursday, July 19, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part IV of V Before my senior year, I was a decent (if uninspired) trumpet player, easily making last chair or first alternate in All-District Bands. Although I was no Jason Price, I had a strong sense of rhythm and sightreading, and a secret weapon, my "beautiful tone". It didn't matter if I was playing a marching band tune or the solo in a Jim Swearingen song -- the only compliment I would ever get was "Wow, you have a beautiful tone!". I was the Tone Master -- if printers ran on tone instead o... - Wednesday, July 18, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part III of V Governor's School wasn't wholly about Celtic lore and jamming a yin in my yang though. Each evening throughout the four-week program was an offsite field trip to some suitably artistic locale in downtown Richmond, starting with a quaint fireworks show at some Civil War monument (the one with a cannon and some grass) on the Fourth of July. This was one of the few outdoor activities that was NOT cancelled because of summertime thunderstorms, since the adminstration's fears that we would all ... - Tuesday, July 17, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part II of V In yesterday's comments section, Anna recalled that she was always puzzled why anyone ever wanted to go to Governor's School, and I'll be the first to confess that it wasn't at the top of my list of summer activities. I had to attend a drum major camp during the week immediately before it, and being a home-base-introvert, I didn't think I'd want to go to two separate camps without returning home for a while first. This ambivalence was not positively helped by the "Course II" options that a... - Monday, July 16, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part I of V It's been awhile since I had an honest-to-goodness themed week on the URI! Zone, like Video Game Music Week from 2002, or the lesser-known failure, Integer Divisors of the Number "1" Week. Because everyone loves a miniseries (unless they are un-American), I've decided to create a week-long Memory Day feature about my attendance at the Governor's School for the Visual and Performing Arts, twelve years ago this month. The Governor's School is a month-long p... - Wednesday, July 11, 2007:
Memory Day: English Class English and Social Studies classes were my least favourite classes growing up. Like the eternal battle between Pluto and Neptune vying for the "rock farthest from the Sun" award, the two classes constantly tried to outdo each other on the curriculum-hatred scale. (The worst year was eleventh grade, when they decepticonned the two classes into a two-hour monstrosity called "American Civilization" that you had to take if you were going to a real college). Perhaps it's ironic that I now write... - Monday, July 09, 2007:
Stuff in my Drawers Day an occasional look at the worthless detritus of childhood from my file cabinet It's a simple enough exercise that everyone has to do at some point in school: write a word down the left side of your paper and then use those letters to make new words that describe the original word. It is fitting, then, that I started THANKSGIVING with "turkey", but from there, something may have gone horribly wrong. (1985) This was a fake adver... - Monday, July 02, 2007:
Lessons from the First Grade A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word, but has a different meaning. It is also a handheld device made by Apple. In the top picture, a muscle-bound giant is attempting to pay the price with the Empire State Building. Below, those damned kids flipped the hold-trigger and left the gas nozzle on the ground again. The 80s were a simpler time, where we didn't look for c... - Wednesday, June 27, 2007:
Memory Day: Food Because my dad got home from work three hours earlier than my mom, he was always in charge of weekday dinners. A typical meal for my sister and I consisted of boiled hot dogs, green beans, and a tall glass of milk, which we would eat at the dining room table while reading cartoon and kids' books. My favourite meal as a kid was two Celeste Pizza-for-One's, cooked on the microwave crisper disc that never actually made the crust crisp. When I was sick of these, the favo... - Wednesday, June 06, 2007:
Memory Day: To Grandmother's House If you were to tally up all the vacation days I spent outside of my hometown as a child, the bulk of them would take place in Burton, Michigan (a small town of 30,000 just outside of Flint). Michigan was the home of my grandparents on my mother's side, and the defacto place for my parents to dump the kids on extended holidays and revisit that long-lost concept, the "quiet house". The town of Burton was on the dulling edge of modernism, boasting a shopping mall roughly the length of a... - Wednesday, May 30, 2007:
Memory Day: The Foreign Language Requirement In my high school, there were two paths to a diploma: the Standard path (which generally included a course with the abbreviation "ec" but not in the context of "ecology" or "eclampsia") and the Advanced path. Because of grade inflation, the Advanced track was actually the common track that most students followed, with Standard being the new Subpar. (The same is happening in the food industry, where a Large pizza is now roughly the size of a prematurely-born opossum). To qu... - Wednesday, May 23, 2007:
Memory Day: Pickett Woods The street I grew up on was intended to be a major thoroughfare between Seminary Road and Duke Street in Alexandria. Before this plan could come to fruition, the rich folks in their wooded manors at the north end of the street managed to block it, not wanting additional traffic near their diamond tennis courts. The result of this was that I lived on a dead end street wide enough for five lanes of traffic, which was perfect for pretending to know how to skateboard. Pickett Street stops and ... - Wednesday, May 16, 2007:
Memory Day: Assistantships At the end of last Wednesday's post , I had just completed a relaxing year of being a graduate research assistant with absolutely no responsibilities. Though pleasant, it did not give me any real-world teaching experience for my eventual career as an academic in the music world (although I will now be an expert at picking up my Unemployment check, should I ever lose my job). For my second year, I was picked up as a super-assistant in music theory for one of my favour... - Wednesday, May 09, 2007:
Memory Day: Assistantships In most cases, graduate school is far cheaper than your run-of-the-mill college experience because of that nifty little occupation known as the assistantship. A graduate assistant is defined as the person who will do everything the professor doesn't want to do for one percent of the till and a rebate on tuition fees. Because academics are far too busy to actually want to teach anything, there are a million billion available assistantships all over the globe, and anyone who says they ... - Tuesday, May 01, 2007:
May Day Today is the first day of the month of May. Today is also the first day of the rest of your life, but since your life doesn't really matter much, we'll talk about May instead. May is easily one of the Top Twelve months of the year, and definitely makes the Top Three in my book. It's the time when the weather finally decides to stop dicking around and the days are consistently warm -- when you can leave the windows open by night and watch all the sun dresses go past by day. The h... - Wednesday, April 25, 2007:
Memory Day: Indoor Track This is me in a 1994 indoor track picture, sitting next to Jay Morrison and two seats down from Ian Schmidt's hair (not pictured). When you don't turn 16 until your senior year in high school, you tend to bike everywhere, and years of criss-crossing the city by bike had blessed me with calves the size of migrating bison. As a sophomore, I decided to put these muscles to use for the good of humanity by joining the indoor track team. Actually, my reasons weren't quite so phi... - Thursday, April 19, 2007:
What's In My Drawers Day an occasional jaunt into my past via the crap in my drawers I am not a particularly hatful person. It's not that I hate hats (for there's enough hate without hat hate), it's just that hats aren't really a part of my daily ensemble. This hasn't always been the case -- throughout my formative years, I almost always wore a ball cap on my head. I can't really pinpoint the reason why, because it usually wasn't even a cool cap -- just whatever cheap cap I'... - Wednesday, April 11, 2007:
Memory Day: Dinosaurs! RAAR! Every young child has a singular fascination at some point in their lives -- a topic that they simply cannot get enough of, that they consume voraciously like a fat sheikh devouring a stuffed camel. My fixation was dinosaurs (RAAR!). There was a period in my life where I would come home from school and spend the entire afternoon pretending to be an archaeologist in a three-square-yard dirt pile next to the house where the sun didn't shine strongly enough to grow grass. I h... - Thursday, April 05, 2007:
Psychoanalysis Day Sixteen years ago when I was in the seventh grade, the entire class body had to take a series of multiple choice psychology tests to determine which of us should prepare for great ambitions and college life, and which should immediately start reserving spots in the city jail. Here are the results of mine -- how closely do they match up with what you know about me? Happy Birthday Geoffrey King! It's still a DUI if it's a horse... &nb... - Wednesday, March 28, 2007:
Memory Day: Parties What with the pool table, home theatre, and private champagne room, my house has always been a prime location for playing the part of the host. However, this "I'd rather stay home and invite everyone else over" behaviour isn't new -- I was hosting extravagant parties as far back as junior high school. It started simple, with the obligatory birthday party, but soon expanded into a June "End of the Year Party!", a December "Other End of the Year Party!", and a random h... - Monday, March 26, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day It's always seemed to me that the education system should gradually increase in difficulty and effort as you progress (see also, any arcade game from the 80s). In American society, the scale seems skewed, with high school entailing high stress and a mad rush to prepare for college, and college being a collosal waste of time (this imbalanced buildup and letdown is also reflected in the Matrix trilogy). I can't remember either phase of life being particularly hard, but I do remem... - Wednesday, March 07, 2007:
Memory Day: Beach Sunrises Six years ago when I was pretending to learn about composing in Florida, I would open each weekend by visiting a local nature preserve or state park. One of my earliest trips was to Marsh Sands Beach, a small east-facing beach on the Gulf of Mexico that was just fifteen minutes outside of Tallahassee (a straight shot down one of the main roads). Although this beach would ultimately be remembered for the low-tide island I claimed (Briland ), watching horseshoe crabs h... - Thursday, March 01, 2007:
What's in My Drawers Day or "why it's a good thing I never became a cartoonist" Junior High School in the early 90s. With a single cartooning class under my belt from the Torpedo Factory Art Gallery, I was obviously inches away from an exclusive New Yorker deal, but somehow my life took a turn towards Music. Though those cartooning days are long gone, these sketches still survive. Remember, everything is funnier when you're in Junior High. Almost every singl... - Thursday, January 18, 2007:
Time-Lapsed Blogography Day BU at 15 data points January 18, 1992 : I spent the day, and the rest of the weekend at Camp Big Mac in Markham, Virginia with the Boy Scout Troop. Camp Big Mac was a step down from our usual camping spot because it was a desolate snowy mountain in the frigid wastes of Shenandoah Valley, but it was also a step up because it had a dining cabin with a wood stove. January 18, 1993 : Today was the final Board of Review for my Eagle ... - Tuesday, January 16, 2007:
Memory Day: The School Nurse The school nurse at my elementary school was the archetype upon which every future stereotypical school nurse was ever founded. Picture a stark white lady in her early seventies named Beverly (or maybe it was Virginia), wearing white orthopedic shoes and a purple sweater with hair in a ridiculously tight bun the colour of polar bears in a blizzard. Her job was to treat the neverending parade of kids complaining of stomach aches who occasionally threw up in the halls or the... - Monday, January 08, 2007:
Pearls of Wisdom from Yearbooks of Yore 7th Grade, 1991 Sadly, I was! 8th Grade, 1992 The sweets guy is the one that brings candy to class. This note would be completely unremarkable, were it not for these happenings a decade later . 8th Grade, 1992 "You impudent little freak" was a catchphrase for a very very short period of time in 1992 -- was it from SNL or something? "Bammafied bamma" lasted much longer.&n... - Thursday, January 04, 2007:
Memory Day: The Secret Society of Safety Patrols The elementary school Safety Patrol program is a hands-on extracurricular activity designed to teach our budding citizens-students about the inefficiency of bureaucracy and the futility of law enforcement and positive change. Each member of the Safety Patrol is given an appallingly orange belt, no doubt stamped out of a much larger, yet still appallingly orange skin of vinyl, probably left over from the previous year's reupholstering of the school buses. The clasps are too loose for ... - Tuesday, October 31, 2006:
Halloweens of Yore In 1992 (ninth grade), I went trick-or-treating as a Candy Recycler (a.k.a. teenager who is too cool to think up a real costume but still wants candy). The recycling sign hanging off the trash can was a carry over from my Environmental Science merit badge and is still highly useful at parties. "Do you recycle beer bottles? OH." I've gone trick-or-treating as both a wizard and a warrior (but never a rogue). Coincidentally, the walking stick I used for my wizard costume and ... - Wednesday, October 18, 2006:
Letters of Recommendation In an ephemeral span of nine days in February 2003, I wrote eight letters of recommendation that would ultimately change the course of Man's evolution. You see, Florida State had built an all-inclusive dormitory specifically for music majors, where students could live in high tech suites with computer labs, practice rooms, and classrooms all in the same building. The concept was very similar to that of a mental hospital, but with slightly more sanitary conditions. As an aside, it sho... - Wednesday, October 11, 2006:
All About Me I am Brian. I like to go to the swimming pool. I like to watch TV -- especially Batman. I like to go to my firend, Megan's, house. I like to go on vacation to the fun places. The fun places are just south of the border on I-95 and also in my pants. My grandpa has a garden. He lives in Michigan. I play with the cat there and probably got fecal cat disease from all the times it scratched me because it was an outdoor cat and never had its nails cut. I like the scarecrow (whi... - Monday, September 25, 2006:
Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man Looking at old class pictures can be nostalgic, but it also shows how quickly you forget the people you spent 180 days out of the year with in a compulsory educational setting. At one point, I probably could have given you complete biographical sketches of everyone in these pictures down to what they usually wore to class and what their favourite legume was. Now I'm lucky if I can remember their first name at all! This was the A.M. kindergarten class at William Ramsey, the... - Wednesday, September 20, 2006:
Where Are They Now? When I was a young and impressionable primary schooler at Polk School, I had a friend named Tony who lived a few streets over. Tony is the star of a news update I posted last year about the boy who farted while doing sit-ups . He had a little sister a couple years younger who performed in every single school talent show by doing a dance routine to popular songs by Tiffany, like I Think We're Alone Now with her friend, Emily Beatty. Tony was a l... - Tuesday, September 12, 2006:
Memory Day: The Safe Spot I had a very cool bed as a child. Where some kids slept in racecars or My Little Pony stables, my twin bed had a captain's wheel as the headboard. When my mom would sing songs to my sister and I before we went to bed, the wheel would often be a prop in the reenactment of the song about the galleon and the guy thrown overboard for his love. This bed was fairly high off the ground, because underneath it was an old-fashioned trundle bed which was only put into service at Christmas time ... - Thursday, August 24, 2006:
Congratulations! American schools have always loved to shower their unique snowflake children with awards, deserved or not. Nowadays, it seems that everyone on a team gets trophies for outstanding effort even if they didn't deserve them, because to do otherwise would shatter the fragile psyche of underachieving kids everywhere. This seems like a new phenomenon, but it's actually been around for many years. Here are some samples from my youth and how they should be translated. Good Ci... - Wednesday, July 12, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2004 - 2005 When you leave hallowed halls of progressive education, you completely relinquish your frame of reference since you can no longer say things like, "That was when I was a senior" or "I got arrested the summer after I went to France". I actually had to skim over my old posts from 2004 and 2005 to remember everything that happened, which wasn't much. I know the order of major events, but no longer have a good impression of where on my timeline they wer... - Tuesday, July 11, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2002 - 2003 The first year of grad school was all about figuring things out -- meeting the people that would form the nucleus of the atomic hanging out group, discovering all the hidden fees that Bank of America threw onto every transaction, realizing that grad school was just like undergrad but with more free time, and chatting it up with the cute girl in the office for two weeks until she absent-mindedly scratched her nose one day revealing a wedding ba... - Monday, July 10, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 2000 - 2001 For my fifth and final year as a college overachiever, I finally moved off campus to escape the antics of serial fire-alarm pullers and people that threw up in, on, and around dormitory bathroom stalls. I moved into a three-bedroom Foxridge apartment with Rosie and Anna, sacrificing high speed Internet for the master bedroom with a private bathroom and Friday-night pajama'd pillow fights. Having 14.4k dial-up after four years of T1 came as a s... - Friday, July 07, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 1998 - 1999 1998: The year of Monica Lewinsky, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , Google, and Windows 98. Also my junior year of college, Kim's freshman year of college, and Anna's senior year in high school. The year I first had a car on campus (a problem-plagued 1994 Dodge Spirit) and the year I started pulling out of all my online circles and actually going outside. Now that the novelty of having a website had worn off, the URI! Domain ... - Thursday, July 06, 2006:
Memoirs of a BUsha: Ten Years of the URI! Zone 1996 - 1997 I wrote my first homepage on the night of August 30, 1996 at the end of the first week of classes. Being a scholarly freshman concerned about my academics, I was not out partying that night, although my roommate was. I remember this because he stumbled into the dorm room with a girl that was most definitely not his girlfriend (since she was still a senior at his high school) around 2 AM when I was figuring out how online visitors could go to b... - Thursday, June 22, 2006:
Vacation Memories I spent many summers in elementary school at my grandparents' house in Flint, Michigan. Their next door neighbours had a trampoline, a giant swimming pool, a woodworking shop, and two to four spoiled grandkids. Sometimes when we didn't want to play with them, we'd hide in the den and have our grandmother tell them we weren't home. Every evening after I started playing trumpet, I would play Taps from the front porch which all the old retirees in the area loved. I can't remember how th... - Thursday, June 01, 2006:
Welcome to the month of June! Unless you are living in the completely wrong hemisphere of the world, June is the bringer of summer, stirring up images of Pop-ice, fireworks, and dirty beaches with crabs. I realize that summer comes early in other places, such as Tallahassee, but it doesn't really count when the average temperature rises from 87 to 94. When you're living in the humid armpit of the Southern giant, the only surefire way to tell that it's summertime is when Chompy hides ... - Thursday, May 25, 2006:
Memory Day: High School High Points High school was a blatant waste of time and money, using up hours in the day better spent playing video games, going to the library and reading, or going out back to smoke crack with Zulfan Bakri. However, you could always count on a few peaks to brighten the year and prevent mass suicides. Field Hockey Home Games As a sign of solidarity, the field hockey team always wore their skirts on days when they were playing at home. Mix in a gaggle of goggling horm... - Tuesday, May 09, 2006:
Repressed Memories Day: The Math Emporium We shall build a utopian society where students will voluntarily come to take advantage of free Macintosh computers loaded with math software. Students will regularly revel in the bursting joy of mathematics. This could have been the mission statement for the Virginia Tech Math Emporium, that ridiculous pork barrel project nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains that continues to harass students to this very day. Maybe it looked good on paper, or maybe they just ha... - Tuesday, May 02, 2006:
Goo Goo Gaa Gaa I should have known going into it that I'd never make it as a great composer, because I could never compete with the pure talent which is evident in this song: (2.12MB MP3). Whoever wrote this song deserves to be in Chapter One of every History of Western Music book on the face of the planet. Goo Goo Gaa Gaa is a representative track from an 80s audio cassette called Are We There Yet?: Songs for the Car published by Rand McNally. I no longer ... - Wednesday, April 12, 2006:
The Evolution of a Composer: A Pictorial (Part II of II) I finally decided to go to school for composing and ended up at Virginia Tech in 1996 where my first composition professor hated everything I brought in and constantly asked me to do exercises where I should "put a few wrong notes in the score". Over time, lessons became less about learning new craft (because I was a stubborn son of a bitch) and more about a cat-and-mouse game where I would try to convert his dissonance exercises into tonality. One trick I used to do was to put four ... - Tuesday, April 11, 2006:
The Evolution of a Composer: A Pictorial (Part I of II) In fifth grade (1989) I wrote and submitted my first composition ever, The Proud Beagle for solo cornet. I wrote it for cornet because I played cornet, and I played cornet because my hands were too tiny for a trumpet. This piece won second place in the school's yearly Reflections contest, and my clever sequence of sixths in the B section earmarked me as a tyke to keep your eyes on. (I washed my ear soon after). I didn't write again until tenth grade... - Tuesday, March 28, 2006:
I had to work onsite at Bailey's Crossroads yesterday so I took the opportunity to stop by my old high school and visit with my former Crew coach (who's also an eleventh grade English teacher). It was the first visit I'd made to the school since 2002 when I offloaded several hundred pounds of "Drum Major Teaching Materials" on the desk of the latest revolving-door band director, who may have been named Josquin, but perhaps it was Palestrina. T.C. Williams High School from... - Tuesday, March 21, 2006:
You are bidding on the authentic lunchbox discussed in the February 15th edition of the famous URI! Zone blog . This is the ONLY "lunchbox owned by BU in the late 80s" available for public consumption, and was recently rediscovered in the basement of his childhood home. The front of the box features Gizmo next to his carrying case, and Billy Peltzer in the background. The back of ... - Tuesday, March 14, 2006:
Things I Remember I remember watching cartoons on USA, where the opening animation was a bullet train (maybe the Cartoon Train) choo-choo'ing through the countryside and going through tunnels. I remember the Nickelodeon station identification commercial where a set of false teeth gobbled up everything on the screen, and there was a different sound effect on each upbeat. The last two upbeats were filled with "Nick" and "olodeon!", followed by a springy sound and laughter. I rememb... - Tuesday, February 14, 2006:
Happy Singles-Awareness Day! There's a big bowl of Valentine's Day candy on my desk at work if you want any. Pay no attention to the fact that it's been there since Halloween -- Jolly Ranchers are the ancient Greek candy of love, and Hershey's Kisses are inherently smooch-themed anyhow. You also won't find any gross powdery-tasting conversation hearts in my bucket -- the only way they'd ever be good is if they were made out of Sweettarts. When I was in elementary school, ... - Tuesday, January 24, 2006:
List Day: Five Random Stories from College 1) In my freshman year, I spent 100% of my time in class or in my room. I was one of those guys that always had the door shut. I roomed with a sax player named Andy who had dreams of being in Chip McNeill's jazz band and would spend hours practicing to Kenny G CDs on his soprano saxophone. Despite this, he was much cooler and more outgoing than I, and made it his life's purpose to turn me into a social animal. This mostly failed, but we were good friends. I lived in 5050 ... - Wednesday, January 18, 2006:
When I was a little tyke in elementary school, my sister and I spent a couple summers at Summer Day Camp since both of my parents worked and we were untrustworthy prepubescents who would probably burn the house down unattended. One time, in an ever-so-eighties kind of way, they ran out of things for us to do, so we all went on a field trip to the roller rink. I had never roller-skated before and lacked the innate sense of rolling balance that everyone else seemed to have (no doubt be... - Monday, January 02, 2006:
Happy New Year! Welcome back to the 2006 edition of the URI! Zone. In August of this year, this site will have been around for ten long years (although it will have only acted as a blog-like enema of the tortured soul for five of those years). What this means, for people who are not so hot with numbers, is that my site is older than Napster, older than Slashdot, and older than MacOS 8. It's just one year younger than Amazon, eBay, and the Java programming language, and HoTMaiL is its... - Thursday, November 17, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education, Part III of III Ninth Grade 25) I was in ninth grade one year before it seceded to form its own union (making schools become K-5, 6-8, 9, 10-12) so being a freshman meant being at the top of the school, not the bottom. Somehow I was in the popular crowd and actually had my own cadre of kids that would follow my lead. We would often make fun of kids, especially the fat girl in band, for no other reason than the fact that we were kids, and kids are inherently cruel. One day after maki... - Wednesday, November 16, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education, Part II of III Fifth Grade 13) I had Mr. Ferris in fifth grade, and once had to write a 250-word punishment for talking when I wasn't supposed to. That was the only one I ever got, even though he handed them out like candy. I had Language Arts and Science with Mrs. Nicholson. In science class, we had footprint-shaped plastic terrariums where we grew seeds and farmed aphids. My terrarium always ended up moldy and dead. Mrs. Nicholson's class was a split class of fith graders and six... - Tuesday, November 15, 2005:
Extended List Day: 36 Memories from Primary Education Kindergarten 1) I remember very little from Kindergarten. I had Mrs. Lovo and Mrs. Wheatley in the morning session at William Ramsey Elementary School, which was just a couple blocks from where my all-day babysitter lived. I thought the school was cool because it had an attached nature center with a beehive in it, and you could watch the bees fly in and out. 2) As you can see from the above transcript, I was always destined for grea... - Thursday, November 03, 2005:
2/14/1997 9:56 PM To all CS Majors on CSLAB, On Friday the 7th, I mailed out a malicious email to CS Majors. Not only was the message malicious, it was also fraudulent. I repeat the message in question was not sent out by Markus Groener, but by me. For producing and sending out the message I can only ask for forgiveness from Mr. Groener. It was wrong for me to produce and send out the message. In the process of doing so, I not only violated the Honor Code for fraud; but I also violated the ... - Wednesday, October 19, 2005:
Every Entry Gets a Title This Week Last weekend, I got the first e-mail about my ten-year high-school reunion from our slacker-assed Class President, Mike Sharp. If I recall correctly, we actually had co-Presidents, the black girl (Tori) and the white guy (see above), so as to make sure that no one felt underrepresented. This was because we came from a high school that was ever so equal opportunity (a euphemism for "70% Black, 20% Hispanic, 9% White, with special guest star, BU, as the Token Asian #1"). So, Mike got t... - Thursday, September 22, 2005:
On Friday afternoon, I'm taking a weekend trip down to Tallahassee to visit the few remaining FSU people still clinging to the Spanish-moss-coated city like barnacles on a dry-docked hull. Florida-Mike and Florida-Kathy each chipped in a quarter of the cost of plane tickets for my birthday which was quite nice of them. I think it's ridiculous, though, that the flight from here to Florida is twice as expensive as a flight from here to San Diego, our country's Mexican outpost on the fa... - Tuesday, August 23, 2005:
I have a little over three weeks until I turn twenty-six -- I got a big laugh at my last music presentation after telling the audience that I wasn't born until three years after A Fifth of Beethoven was mixed by the Walter Murphy Orchestra. For the lifespan of these daily updates, birthdays have not been a big deal; they were just a day where I took off from work and made filler updates like this one , and I think Number 26 will be no different. S... - Monday, August 22, 2005:
I sore on a stack of Bibles that I wouldn't t'ache today's update to talk about my weekend of moving and it pains me to go back on that, but I figured that at least I could mention how stiff I am so you'd know that I wasn't just pulling your muscle. I'll spare you the whole soredid tale, but if anyone has some pain-relieving bruise I could quaff, I could leave this world of hurt. I'll give you a moment to cauterize that horrible introductory paragraph from your brain befo... - Monday, August 15, 2005:
I would say that my weekend was pretty hectic, but my outlook on such things might be skewed. Having long ago relinquished the title of Social Butterfly of Loudoun County , I consider any weekend busy if I go outside the house more than four times in a single day (bonus points for getting in my car and driving somewhere. Beep beep, monsieur!) On Friday evening, I cleaned the house and recorded some music examples for my presentation, and then Jack came over for... - Tuesday, June 14, 2005:
This week is still ancient history week. Eleven years ago today was June 14, 1994. Like a peculiar suburban Tennessee Williams play, it was a hot and humid half-day at the end of my sophomore year, and it was the last day of "going to every class" before exams. The Alexandria City Public School System, like any good school system, felt that students would not benefit unless they went to every class but had an inability to divide the day into increments of five minutes at a time... - Monday, June 13, 2005:
As a sequel to my "Do you remember what you were doing years ago" post, I was planning on picking a random day from high school and writing about it for each of this week's updates. As luck would have it, June 13, 1996 was the day I graduated from high school, aptly illustrated in the photo to the left (which includes the college-age sister too embarrassed to get any closer to the family, but does not include my dad who mistakenly stood on the wrong side of the camera too often to ge... - Saturday, April 13, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part VI of VI Of all the books I read as a kid, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game was probably the one that got the most face time. Part murder mystery and part treasure hunt, this slightly surreal book told the tale of a deceased millionaire and the seemingly random people selected to be his heirs. The entire book turned out to be as twisty and convoluted as a movie like The Usual Suspects . If you've never read it... - Friday, April 12, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part V of VI John D. Fitzgerald wrote a seven book series about the Great Brain in the 1970s. It was about a boy in a small Utah town at the end of the nineteenth century who was smarter than the average joe. Told from the point of his little brother, the Great Brain spends most of his time swindling his friends and family. An eighth book was published from manuscript after the author's death but I haven't read it. The books were light,... - Thursday, April 11, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part IV of VI Without a doubt, Gordon Korman was my favourite young adult author. Since 1978, he has written a large quantity of humourous books, the most well-known being the Bruno and Boots series at MacDonald Hall. Korman's writing was clear and accessible, and his characters got caught up in genuinely funny situations and dialogue. In fact, I Want to Go Home (1981) still holds the distinction for the only boo... - Wednesday, April 10, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part III of VI Lloyd Alexander was best known as the author of the Prydain Chronicles, five books and a collection of short stories set in a fantasy world (which was based on Welsh legends). Although it's all swords and sorcery, the books are fairly well-known, since the first two were turned into a Disney movie and the fifth was a Newberry Award winner. The books tell of the adventures of Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends as they gr... - Tuesday, April 09, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part II of VI In the seventies and eighties, John Bellairs wrote fifteen books with a mix of supernatural, science-fiction, religious, and treasure-hunting elements. He effectively did the Harry Potter schtick years before it became mass-marketed. Bellair's books were divided into three series by main characters, his protagonists being Lewis Barnavelt, Anthony Monday, and Johnny Dixon. Although his emotions were poorly written, they wer... - Monday, April 08, 2002:
Authors of Yesteryear, Part I of VI This isn't quite expansive enough to be a special feature; it's more like a featurette. This week I'll be posting some brief memories of young adult authors I read as a kid. C.S. Lewis will be the first author covered, since everyone is probably familiar with his most famous series, The Narnia Chronicles. This series was made up of five chronological books detailing the magic adventures of plain English children in the fant...
