What I've Learned The Past Few Days

Marion, South Dakota is a very mysterious place. As it seems to me, the town is a place where innocent people are trapped until either they fade away into oblivion (like mom’s grandma, who got a sailor's mouth in her old age, according to my uncle), serve some sort of purpose (like ‘grandpa Charlie’ who was ‘the saint to guide her’ and lived to be almost a hundred), or the town decides to dispose of on it’s own (all the people who’ve died in various explosions and mysterious deaths). The town seems to attract the sort of occurrences that one would only expect in the Bermuda triangle, like the entire sewage line exploding, an entire farm being sucked up in a tornado, and how all the old records burned in the newspaper fire. My cousin and I discussed how much fun it would be to send the whole pack of cousins down next summer to investigate the town as a whole. The whole expedition could become a movie that is sort of Paper Heart meets Letters to Juliet with a hint of Ghost Hunters.

I have created yet another definition for art; anything man-made that upon observation takes you somewhere. So music is the most obvious example; duh, listening to a Strauss waltz makes you feel like you’re in Vienna three hundred years ago. Art can work the same way; you look at a Monet and you can just imagine the sound of the water rippling as goldfish swish through it. Fashion is an art in that you judge people based on what they’re wearing; I see a vintage dress and I can imagine both the hipster lifestyle of the emaciated trendsetter wearing it and Audrey Hepburn as it’s original owner. When you take this definition at its full value, one could also consider sports an art because of the emotion spectators get from watching their favorite team win the World Cup.

Engineers are on such a different wavelength that they make jazz boys look more like cellists. Math/Science-minded people (lets call them M/Sers for the sake of shorthand) are all of the mindset that there is one right answer (and most of the time it is theirs). These people are impossible to argue (or sometimes even converse with) because of their inability to empathize or even begin to hear out any other perspectives or ideas. My brother will be an M/S major someday. That was snotty, I'm having a hard time empathizing today...

I don’t care what people say or think, I love vintage clothes. I have always loved to wear things that other people might not exactly want to wear themselves. I mean there were the cowboy boots and leggings in ninth grade (wayyy before you could find leggings in stores…I had to buy long underwear!), the toothpaste tights and matching sweater in tenth grade (for those of you that didn’t have the pleasure of witnessing this fashion masterpiece, let’s just say the ensemble, which is somewhere between aquamarine and teal, was recycled for a Halloween costume (toothpaste, of course) two years later…), the solid-sequins dresses in eleventh grade (which my mother gave to the thrift store while I was away at orchestra camp), and finally wearing brightly colored patterned tank tops under plaid lumberjack shirts my senior year (which is quite the style nowadays, don’tcha know?)…I’m really just ahead of my time! Just wait until you see the new frocks I bought this week, I expect more than a few keyboards will need to be de-drool-ed.

There is no such thing as ‘normal’. The ‘N’ word is relative to individuals. I’d say I’m a pretty normal person, but how many 19-year-olds can honestly say that they expect to release a CD in their lifetimes? How many kids my age get paid to do what was usually their free time in high school? How many kids can actually say that they are more excited for their career than they are for Christmas? Me. Also it’s not like I spend twelve hours a day locked up alone in a practice room…I probably have more fun than you, too…just sayin'. On another note, my family is from the aforementioned Marion, South Dakota, where slavery may or may not exist and children are named after zoo animals...

On that note...happy August everyone! Enjoy the last moments of summer!

(All photos from Google)