Where's a better place to spend the 4th of July than Washington DC? And guess who gets to march down Constitution Avenue for this 4th of July--ME!!! Tomorrow I embark on the adventure of my summer. Four days of sheer amazingness in our nation's capital.
On Independence Day, my high school band will be representing the state of South Carolina in the National Independence Day Parade. It'll be a lovely balmy temperature of 96 degrees in Washington DC as we Aiken High marching band members march in full dress uniform. Despite the stifling heat of DC, I'm looking forward to this trip of a lifetime. Roll stepping down Constitution Avenue. Visiting famous monuments. Watching the National Symphony Orchestra and hearing an epic Stars and Stripes Forever piccolo solo. Can't wait until tomorrow evening when everything begins.
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Everyone at some point in his or her life has one of those days. You know exactly what I'm talking about--one of those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days where nothing seems to go right or perhaps you feel like a total moron/loser/idiot/incompetant little ant struggling to make his way in the world. Maybe you just bombed an exam that's worth fifty percent of your yearly grade or perhaps you and your best friend had a explosive cat fight in chemistry class that left you A) without a lab partner for the week and B) without a friend to sit with at lunch. We all have those kinds of days that just purely stink and seem as if we've just hit the black hole of Calcutta. Now the question is "How can you fight these terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days?" 1) Talk it out. Seriously, don't bottle everything up until it explodes and spews nasty mess all over the place. Confide in a close friend, parent, or just anyone who is willing to listen. Psychology studies say that it's better to talk out our problems than to try to attempt to patch up the entire world by ourselves. 2) Write it out. Take a scrap sheet of paper and write down everything that's been bugging you or anything that's on your mind at that moment. Write phrases, words, and even names of people all over the paper (yeah, I mean sideways, upside down, diagonally, and so forth) until the entire paper is covered...or until everything that's on your mind is out on paper. The important thing about this exercise is to keep writing and just let your mind jump freely from one thought to another. It's kinda like Sigmund Freud's technique of free association. 3) Try to make peace with those around you. Boyfriend/girlfriend problems? Talk it out--when I say that, I mean "face-to-face", NOT through text message. Always settle serious matters face-to-face. It'll save you a lot of misunderstandings in the long run. 4) Remember to take care of your basic needs. If you haven't eaten lunch today, go eat something. You haven't slept because you were up late working on a project? Go sleep. You have a killer headache and your limbs feel as if they're going to fall off? Take two Advil, get some rest, and see if you feel better in the morning. 5) Take a break from your stressor. Are you seriously stressed out because you have to perform a flute trio at Friday's student recital and you've had very limited rehearsal time because the trio has been working on two other flutes tunes, one of which is being cut due to time limitations and intense piano accompaniment and the other being a tune that is miserably long and hard and ridiculously fast for the first flute part which is...oh yeah, mine...and that also has to be recorded on DVD by the end of the week if we want to put that on the showcase performance...is that stressing you out? It sure is stressing me out. Here's some advice to you and to me: Stop worrying for a second, take a break from work (or in my case five hours of at home practice time) and chill for a sec. 6) Go find a nice quiet dark room and listen to your favorite song. Music oftentimes takes my mind off of things and it tends to be very healing for me. Sometimes when we're upset, we'll listen to music that fuels our dark moods. When people have bad days, they have a tendency to gravitate toward extremely depressing breakup songs or anger filled screamo/heavy metal music. Don't do that. Find your favorite song that's simply beautiful and just listen. Listen to the colors and textures of the music, close your eyes, and imagine. 7) Forgive and forget. Nobody is perfect. We're all going to make mistakes and we're all going to have shortcomings that we should just accept rather than dewell on them for all eternity. Forgive your friend for writing on the screen of your TI-84 graphing calculator with a mechanical pencil. Forgive your boyfriend for being completely clueless that you were indeed upset, hence the awkwardly silent and uncomfortable car ride home today. Forgive yourself for your own mistakes for not all of your mistakes--or any that I can possibly think of right now--will lead to the end of the world. 8) Breathe. If you feel like today was the worst day of your life because of one tiny little thing, just keep in mind that in five years from now you're not even going to remember this minor crisis. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. In the words of a fellow flutist of mine, "If you have a bad audition, go home, watch some TV, and pig out on some chocolate ice cream. After that, move on and try again." 9) Keep in mind that tomorrow can and will be a better day for you if you can keep positive and not let anything bring you down. What did I learn at Furman's Summer Orientation? 1) As a music major, more than half of my freshman classes will be music classes--not that that's a bad thing at all! It's like a dream come true for me to do music activities all day long! 2) Just because there's so much good food in the DH, don't pig out on everything...or better worded would be "don't eat five cookies, a slice of apple pie, and ice cream and call that your dinner." All the food in the DH is pretty great there, but just remember to eat healthy or else you'll find yourself gaining a good seven pounds in your freshman year. 3) Furman's simply a beautiful campus. Period. 4) There are several study abroad programs there and I seriously hope that I may travel to Italy in my junior year with the music department at Furman. Where's a better place in the world to study music than Italy? 5) Going up the stairs of the bell tower isn't exactly the wisest idea if you're scared of heights like me. 6) Don't get a tray in the DH. Not necessary and you'll definitely look lame carrying one around when everyone else is just carrying back plates of food to their table. 7) When in doubt, ask and talk to the people around you because everyone there whether they're a professor or a senior neuroscience major, everyone's willing to help you out. Oh, and they don't mind answering stupid questions. Good thing to know, right? 8) Leaving home and going to college may not be such a terrifying and upsetting thing afterall. 9) Making friends with other Furman students is pretty simple and easy because everyone up there is incredibly friendly and they just give off good vibes when you're around them. 10) Of course, I can't wait to be there in the fall! Go Paladins! Kendall Driscoll's 20 Tips for Surviving Life (or at Least Junior and Senior Year of High School)6/17/2012 As a fun little writing project of mine back at the end of my junior year, I decided to make a list of tips for surviving life. Each day (or whenever I got around to writing), I'd jot down one additional tip to add to the list. Looking back on the odd assortment of random and sometimes conflicting tips gives me a good chuckle as I see how it tells a story of me trying to make sense of things in my life. Some of these tips may be valid and helpful. At least, I think so. Kendall Driscoll's 20 Tips for Surviving Life 1) This list for surviving each day will hopefully be helpful--at least it'll be a good place to start. Go explore new territory, revisit old territory, and make up all the land inbetween. 2) Friends can be found anywhere, especially in the first violin section. Go find some violinists and make some music just because. 3) Life loses its beauty with lack of sleep. Just go to sleep. Now. 4) When the heart and mind say conflicting statements, you'll find yourself in verbal irony saying the exact opposite of what you had been thinking. The heart wins novels. The mind wins reality. Just accept that fact. 5) Music is a universal healer. Play it. Make it. Listen to it. 6) There is no happiness equal to that of finding a friend who you can spill your guts to only to realize you both share similar wavelengths. From there, you build a firm foundation upon which both of you can call a sanctuary. Keep these friends close. Always. 7) Defeat is exceptionally bitter when you have to surrender to a boy who writes haikus on desks for fun. Shake hands, accept defeat gracefully, and go back to the drawing board to create a better and harder hitting poem. 8) Life is what you make it, so make it count. 9) Poetry is a window to the soul. Go to all open mics hosted by Cafe Rio Blanco. (PS. They're one the THIRD Tuesday of each month, NOT THE SECOND.) 10) Picnics are fun, no more school is bliss, and the start of summer vacation is absolutely perfect for me right now. Live summer well! 11) Take a minute out of your day to remind those around you that you love them and their presence means the world to you. You never know when that person might not be there anymore. 12) There is honestly nothing more stressful than meeting deadlines for college applications...and then add to the fact that your stupid computer won't print the necessary forms. Just stuck it up and go buy a new computer...and go ahead and buy a printer that will actually do its job at 11 at night. 13) Just wait and listen--things will unfold in time and it sometimes turns out to have a pretty good result. 14) Beauty is on the inside. You're beautiful and don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. 15) When wondering and pondering the question "How should I presume?", take a step back, breathe, contemplate, and look to your past to see who you really are. Evidence of who you are is present in some small way in the objects you've kept from your past. Reminisce and remember. And then, decide. 16) Don't wish too far. 17) Don't plan out every aspect of your life. The best things in life are those that are unexpected. 18) Keep your head held high. It'll keep you moving forward when you want to stop to take a break. 19) There's always hope. Don't ever forget that. 20) Make a list. It helps :) There are so many messed up things in this world.
Chewed gum tossed to the ground for people to step in, fellow classmates cross-dressing for a womanless beauty pageant, or Pachelbel's Canon in D performed in Eb major just seems wrong right there, but playing Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride" in the middle of June for a student recital tops the cake of screwed up insanity. It's 81 degrees Fahrenheit at 8:30 pm and I have to ask myself, "Why of all pieces to play on the piano did I decide that Leroy Anderson's Christmas classic would be a good duet to perform in the month of June???" When my duet partner and I first picked the piece of music, we thought it would be humorous to play this traditional Christmas piece in the summertime. After I was given my copy of the music and told that this duet would be performed for the student recital in two weeks, all the color in my face drained as I turned the color of snow whooshed aside from a wild and crazy sleigh ride I had just gotten myself into. I was given five pages of first part crazy piano mess and told to have all of the notes of the piece down by next Wednesday. Wait a second--let me back up a little bit and say that I haven't had any formal piano training. I'm a completely self-taught pianist. I've grown up with the mentality that you can do anything you set your mind to. In eighth grade, I decided I would learn to play the dusty sixty year old piano sitting in the living room of my house. With many hours of practicing simplistic piano accompaniment to modern pop songs, I could kinda say that I played piano. Before this year, the biggest piano challenge I had ever faced was accompanying a friend of mine in a talent show (in which we surprisingly won second place). This year, "Sleigh Ride" seems to be the cursed piano piece that is haunting me. Sure, I'm up for a challenge, but you can't rush me! Two weeks until recital and I have barely learned the first two pages of music. God, it's certainly not easy keeping up with my piano partner who has studied piano privately since seventh grade. I've practiced so many hours on that piece this week that I have an aversive to that song now. I swear that after this recital I don't want to hear that Christmas song again until it's actually Christmas time. This summer is absolutely flying by at turbo speed for me. Before I know it, I'll be at my new home, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. As it is, I'm going up to my college (wow, that's so weird to say) on Monday and Tuesday of next week for summer orientation. Woohoo! It seems that I've known for a while that Furman was the right college for me. Exactly one year ago when I came to visit Furman for the first time, I saw the beautiful campus, the excellent academic reputation, and the friendliness of the people there at Furman and fell in love with the school. My mom unfortunately saw the price tag atttached with the school and said, "Wonderful school, but the answer's no." When my mom made up her mind that Furman was too expensive for me, I made up my mind that I would find and apply for any scholarship that would help me make Furman financially possible for me. I swear I did nothing but fill out two or more scholarship applications per week from mid-November until the very end of May. There are eighteen documents still saved on my computer that possess eighteen different scholarship essays on vastly different topics. In the week of my music scholarship audition for Furman, I must have put in at least 25 hours of practice for that one week. Throughout the year, I spent my life in my guidance counselor's office talking about colleges, applications, and more forms I needed to fill out to make Furman a possibility for me in my future. As it stands, I have a $15,000 music scholarship to Furman University, South Carolina Teaching Fellows Scholarship, Palmetto Fellows Scholarship, and many more scholarships that have made Furman financially possible for me. So there are three valuable lessons to be learned from my experiences: 1) Don't judge a college by its pricetag. 2) Work your tail off by filling out stacks of applications and scholarship forms because your hard work will pay off in time. 3) Go with your gut feeling about colleges. Believe me, you'll know it if it's the right one. "If you could play any instrument in the world, what would you choose to rock out on?" Most teenagers would probably answer "the drums" or "the guitar." I'd be the odd ball who'd answer "the violin."
No offense to guitar players, but the guitar never truly made sense to me. For me, the violin a lot more sense than the guitar ever did. Whoever said that guitar was easy, I'd call that person a liar to his or her face. Violin for beginners makes sense. On violin, you have four strings and you typically learn to play on one string at a time. Violinists have a bow with rosined horse hair that is pulled across the violin strings to produce a sound. You place your fingers on the fingerboard on the spots that accurately play the desired pitches you're attempting to play. Violin makes sense. Guitar doesn't. Period. Guitars have six strings that you can accidentally knock out of tune if you turn the peg the wrong way when your instructor screams, "You're miserably flat! Tune it up!" Those evil instruments also possess frets to show you where notes are and some people on their first day of guitar class are considered absolute dum dums because they thought you placed your fingers ON the frets, rather than BEHIND the frets. And seriously, what kind of instrument forces you to learn both major and minor chords on the first week of instruction??? My first experience playing guitar purely stunk. I wasn't taught how to read guitar notes or chord charts or even tabs on the guitar; instead, I was told where my fingers should go to make a chord and from there, chords were shouted to the entire class to play. I was having enough difficulty playing on one string, so who's insane idea was it to make me attempt to strum multiple strings at a time? That first year on guitar was rough, I'll admit. This year, I have a new instructor, a new instructional book for guitar, and a new start for me to relearn guitar THE CORRECT WAY. What can I say? Things are slowly looking up for me. I can now accurately play a G scale, I know the names of all my strings, and I can play "Aura Lee" (in two different key signatures, might I add) and I've only had one week of instruction so far! While I still struggle with the whole concept of guitar "strumming" versus violin "bowing," I'm perfectly optimistic that with some quality guitar bonding time and a fair amount of luck on this foreign instrument, I can learn and conquer this instrument challenge I've been given. While the guitar doesn't click to me as easily as the violin did, I'm confident I can do anything I set my mind to. While it's not necessarily easy to broaden one's horizons, it's possible when you have the right teacher and, perhaps, the right attitude toward the challenge at hand. |
AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
May 2015
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