Better being busy

Now that 2011’s semester 1 exams are over (history, english, and science), I thought I’d have some time to relax and write. I should have taken the hint a few months ago when I said the same thing after the musical, new year’s eve concert, and summative projects.

Though I have very little work from school, I have an entire shelf of post-its reminding me to run these errands, finish those tasks, and complete some other assignment I gave myself. Among them are writing quite a few original songs for the band, making time to write on the blog(s), and working on two programming projects I’ve started but never got to for some reason. Add to that various school endeavours (composing a score for the SEARS festival), juggling my job as a guitar teacher, and worrying about my finances (or lack thereof), and that’s some serious stress considering it’s barely the second week of semester two.

But that’s not a bad thing, see. If anything I like a challenge, and keeping so many items on my things to do list keeps me on my toes. It’s better to be cluttered than clean and bored, because eventually I’ll end up somewhat more responsible and with a higher degree of satisfaction from what I can do. And heaven knows I need some satisfaction.

Still perhaps the biggest chunk of my time is devoted to music, more so than homework, geekery, or even sleeping in a lot of cases. Yesterday I managed to commit to ditching Jazz and Junior band (the former lacked style and the latter challenge), and I have turned down an invitation to Vocal Jazz and a little performance, though that was made up by singing “Blue Day” for the school this weekend at camp. I guess I’m slowly learning to do few things and do them well, rather than being jack of all trades and master of none. But who says a guitarist can’t be a violinist, or bassist at the same time? I play them all and then some, so no wonder that I have so much on my plate.

The terrors of being unemployed

Okay, lets face it. I may not be the most mature kid on the block. I may be fifteen (so most of what I write about won’t apply anyway), and my parents might argue that I already have all that I could want, but what’s been nagging me for a while now is the lack of a job.

If I could get one thing straight, it’s that the times that I act mature, I am more mature than my age. Yes, I plan for university and things like where I’ll live and what I’ll do already, and I prefer the company of adults over little children (painful memories). So when my grandparents asked me if I want to work over the summer, be it at a McDonalds or a shoe store, you can imagine that it caused a landslide of questions and doubts in my life.

First of all, there is next to no chance I’ll work in the summer; Summer is for R&R, after all. And given that I visit my both grandparents who are about an hour and some apart, I won’t have the luxury of being near my place of employment every day. Not to mention that this year I spent more time on the road than sitting at home or at McDonald’s (and I don’t plan to change that next year), so potential employers will be disturbed, to say the least, by my noticeable absence not only during the school year when I go back to Canada but during the summer when I travel around Europe every second week. This year I managed to visit Amsterdam, Paris, Bulgaria, the heart of Slovakia, and a trip to Vienna is in order for this week.

So while I discovered my love for travel and expensive things, one can infer that I’ll need a lot of money to travel a lot and buy expensive things. Paris wasn’t cheap, but that was nothing. I do not plan to leave Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, or even the South Pole undiscovered. I will stand on Mount Everest. I will climb the Andes. I will see the Okavango delta, and I will learn to speak Aussie, if finances permit.

Not only travel; I have an extensive list of things I do not already have that I would like. In it are things like guitars, music, motorized vehicles, desktop computers, video games, and gold bullion. I do not plan to leave these hanging on store shelves (and in some cases Fort Knox), but only if finances permit.

But what terrifies me is that I’m not sure if those things can be realized.

Which brings me to employment, or lack thereof. I am motivated and I am capable of working in many fields already, albeit on an internship level. According to my grandparents, I can earn more over the summer from a job than I get from them as charity money (and that says a lot). But what sets me back are things like travel and school, which ruin an otherwise potentially successful life.

Wow, that was a world-class contradiction.

Jokes aside, I realize the value of education and that I can earn more from a good job than from cashiering of waitressing, so I suppose employment will have to wait. Until then, sorry Mom and Dad, I’ll remain just another drain on your credit bill.

5 signs exams are coming soon…

Now that it’s almost exam time for me, I thought that it might be fit to write about some happenings in my classes, especially those that hint that we have exams in two or three weeks.

Your classmates use “whom” in during English.

I’ve never heard them use the word, even in front of the teacher, whom, by coincidence, is easily bribed this time of year. Of course, I use “whom” properly (and I know for a fact that others know as well, we avoid it to prevent being shunned by the normal folk), but to hear everyone dropping the W bomb in front of the teacher with the spoken equivalent of italics still make me chuckle. Follow it up with a “Boy, am I proficient at my spoken tongue!” and you instantly get a two percent bonus.

You still have not received your summative projects.

Okay, I got one. But it’s the kind you spend the entire half semester on, the kind that is split into three to five parts, with each being about the size of a summative project alone. And there is still about half to get done.

Fine, I’ll grant that one summative project isn’t (it’s actually the mathematics EQAO, and that is a school board requirement), but I’m still in the dark for the rest of them. And when I have three out of four to do in about a week and I still have to study for exams (of which I have four out of four), I worry about time. Although I suppose the latency of summative projects in an exam subject is a fairly accurate measure of a teacher’s level of sadism, for future reference.

You are not getting homework.

I found that the few weeks before summative projects are oddly quiet. I now have very little work to do outside of school, but I suspect that it will chance during the course of the week. They say its always calmest before a storm (though the same people also say that it’s always darkest before sunrise), I wonder if that applies here.

Even sometime in the middle of the semester I struggled to keep up with tests, essays, reflection questions and related uslessnesses. Now, however, I’m second-guessing my sheer amount of free time and my ability to write down my tasks.

Mr. Principal shaves his head.

He is always after that angry bouncer look while strolling down the aisle of desks, full of distressed students. He also does not shave.

In general, people start to get more stressed (not students). Teachers to take more frequent absences, actually talk to each other (inside joke), coaches trip over their own feet during the big game, and janitors pile bodies in the corners. The atmosphere is completely different right before exam week – it’s tenser, darker, moodier, and full of substitute profs.

Exam schedules are posted everywhere.

In the fountains. Next to the urinals. On people’s backs (they also say “kick me”). The last thing we, as the students of high schools need, is to be reminded of the thing we’ve been dreading the entire year. And especially when the abundance of flyers makes the good ‘ol “I forgot the date” excuse meaningless. Though, considering that some kids I know won’t even consider taking exams unless they’re manhandled into their seats and nailed in place, perhaps it’s not that bad. I’ll enjoy watching my meager class-skipping classmates fail while I ace the English exam in tribute to my cunning uses of whoms and semicolons.

The Bieber Fever

It’s not the good kind.

He makes Lady Gaga sound like Imogen Heap (a good thing).

I’m sick of Justin Bieber.

Is he talented? Absolutely… not. Nor is Lady Gaga, Simple Plan, or any of the other crap my sister listens to. I fail to see any distinction, any subtle sign that they are worthy of my respect. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lady Gaga dresses in next to nothing on stage (why girls are interested in her for this is beyond me), Simple Plan is incapable of being original, and don’t even get me started on Bieber. He is a 16-year-old narcissist who writes bad lyrics:

That should be me holding your hand

That should be me

This is so sad

?

Worst lyrics I’ve ever heard to a song.

I’m not against pop, by any means. I do enjoy the occasional Madonna, Jackson, or Timberlake, but the crap they air on the radio these days is ridiculous. Why? It’s a money ploy, of course! If you prey on children’s vulnerability and convince them that not buying a Bieber CD will make them a social outcast, who do you think will top sales charts for the next few months? Don’t pretend that this isn’t the truth – if I advertised Fall Out Boy enough, people would buy them (they’re better than JB at any rate). The big picture? This is a crime, a form of blackmail, social threats, a way to control a person. Do you think Bieber would have sold as many CDs on skill alone?

Of course, I respect Bieber’s work in that he’s entitled to be heard (it’s a free country, after all), but, Bieber, if you’re reading this, beaver! Beaver! You’re Canadian, dammit, and no sane person can pronounce Bieber without severe cramps, for crying out loud! BEAVER!!!

Farmville

I’m ashamed to say that I have recently tried out Farmville.

It started out as trying to read through Twilight to see what the hype was about. In my humble opinion, it is about nothing. It’s not poorly written, I just see it as another book that fails to deliver a “WOW!” factor (read: like Harry Potter does). The girls in my class are all obsessed in a fictitious guy that might as well look like Quasimodo and his  made-up relationship with an imaginary girl who Does It with monsters (read: …I got nothing).

Wow, I just got half of the world’s population ticked off at me!

The objective of Farmville is to raise a farm with strawberries and animals and strawberries and more strawberries. Then you sell them. That’s about it. I managed to grow a prosperous farm based on these two principles alone.

On the other hand, Sim City does the same with.. well… residential/commercial/industrial zones, but also utilities like power plants, water systems, schools, universities, tornadoes and UFOs. Really, has our civilization degraded so much that all they can do is plant seeds into a monitor?  Sim City, and don’t you deny this, certainly takes a mind of a higher caliber. It frightens me that Farmville has a larger user base than Sim City. And SC also provides more options too: you can not only choose what you build and where, you can make your city a police state or a teacher state, overfund the Fire Department and cause unnecessary flooding, or underfund the medical sector and distribute straw beds and Advils (Okay, not the Advils, but that is probably implied by the number of Wal-mart pharmacies in my current city). Not to mention that Sim City is a full-fledged game instead of a modest browser app, and it doesn’t take a fool to see which one has the technical advantage.

It’s not even that Farmville is a good game, it’s because it is a Facebook game. I’d bet anything short of Sim City that if it was featured on Facebook (whether it is I have no idea) and marketed like that, it would be the top app and no one would even glance at Farmville. Implication: people are too stupid (especially the Facebook-type people) to do their comparison shopping and instead buy any damn thing they see featured on their Wall.

True story: a (friend) of mine once compared typing a document in OpenOffice to typing in Command Prompt. Actually, he argued that the latter is superior. I won’t argue, because:

1. OpenOffice is free (both as in free speech and free beer), so I am the more politically correct person not to complain (and I actually contribute to the project).
2. OpenOffice has exactly the same feature set as Word. They type documents. They insert pictures. They print. Really, if you need some uber-complex feature that Word, by chance, has that OpenOffice doesn’t, you wouldn’t be in High School but working at Microsoft.
3. Word costs money. For every five hundred dollars he wastes on Microsoft Office, I am five hundred dollars richer. Many times, in fact, because I have OOo on all of my machines and he has to purchase licences for every one of his many computers.

No, Farmville does not cost money, but that’s beside the point. I am not angry at all at the over 82.4 million active [Farmville] users (Wikipedia), I am among the mentally elite that plays Sim City and has the ability to be able to eat the damn strawberries I produce.

Now that I got the rest of the world pointing fingers at me, I’ll just go hide in a corner until my next post.

EDIT: I should also mention that I do play Farmville, not because it’s a good game, but because it’s nice to play when I have time to waste and when I’m not around my beloved copy of Sim City. All things considered, though, all Farmville gamers should play Sim City 🙂

I’m Musical

Complicated? Ridiculously awesome?

I bought my Digitech RP355 on October 31st, 2009 (I remember since it’s my dad’s birthday), and I spend a good few months fooling around with it, pretending to be a Kirk Hammett of sorts in my basement. It worked, and just two days ago I leveled up my guitar prowess just shy of 9000, but the next step up for me was to compose my own pieces, not spend days pouring over printouts of Metallica tabs.

Unfortunately, I’ve reached the level where tinkering with my effects processor and creating cool new sounds will not amuse me for more than an hour at most, so I happily dug up some good ‘ol recording software to keep me busy.

Enter Cubase LE4 (see screenshot). It’s a damn complicated piece of software (and I’ve yet to find out why no pro audio software on Earth has a native look and feel), so it took me a while reading the Getting Started manual, but I successfully recorded my first solo, written by myself, on my second day.

Granted, it’s not a very good piece of music, and I took the rhythm parts from Metallica’s Until it Sleeps, but it sounds so different you would never guess that it’s the same.

So I’ll be occupied for a few weeks at the very least, writing and recording, and encouraging you to pick up that ukulele in your basement and start jamming!