I’m not sure why I even maintain this site. Honestly, I seldom write entries here. These personal websites for nobody’s like me seem to no longer be needed, what with facebook and myspace and twitter and all the other devices given us by the WEB gods to maintain contact and communication with people. However, when occasion permits, I still enjoy writing a few tidbits from time to time. In fact, here is one now!

Here is my quick life update. The semester is drawing to a close and I am behind, as usual, with my homework. I have two major projects that I need to be working on that I haven’t had much time for until now. I have to design a set for the play Playboy of the Western World as well as design the sound for a scene from a play of my choice.  For my sound project I have chosen a script called A Moon for the Misbegotten.  I’ll be honest, I have never heard of the play previously and I’m not sure why I chose it except that the summary sounded interesting.  I wish I were more familiar with many different plays but as it stands all I am aware of are the big broadway hits.  On top of that I have to finish several smaller projects for my drawing class.  

Besides all of the work I need to do in the next 2 weeks, I just finished my first show, Ring Round the Moon. It was a blast to work on and design. It was kind of a bitch at times because I had no idea what I was doing but in the end I think it turned out very well.  At the beginning of the semester Joe Payne, my sound design teacher and resident sound designer for the Pioneer Memorial Theatre, offered me the project and I jumped at it.  The show closed this past Sunday and seemed to be pretty successful.  If anyone would like the soundtrack to the show you can download it here below…

Here are the tracks. You can click on them to download them individually or you can click ‘entire soundtrack’.

entire soundtrack – 178 mb

1 – preshow – 83.6 mb
2 – preshow_fadein – 0.2 mb
3 – morning_birds – 0.9 mb
4 – dinner_gong_backup – 0.1 mb
5 – dinner_gong_backup – 0.1 mb
6 – lousien_waltz_0 – 2.2 mb
7 – orchestra_tuning – 0.8 mb
8 – coletta_walzer_1 – 5.1 mb
9 – voices_waltz_2 – 4.1 mb
10 – handle_2step_1 – 7.7 mb
11 – roses_waltz_3_long – 4.4 mb
12 – el_choclo_tango – 8.0 mb
13 – lousien_waltz_0_long – 8.4 mb
14 – waltz_5 – 1.3 mb
15 – roses_waltz_6 – 2.3 mb
16 – dance_2step_2 – 7.3 mb
17 – georginen_polka_1 – 3.4 mb
18 – lancier_lancers_1 – 6.2 mb
19 – voices_waltz_2_long – 7.1 mb
20 – coletta_walzer_8_end_act_ii – 1.9 mb
21 – roses_waltz_3 – 3.5 mb
22 – grandfather_clock – 0.5 mb
23 – liebeswalzer_waltz_9 – 7.5 mb
24 – waltz_5 – 1.3 mb
25 – orpheus_lancers_2 – 4.7 mb
26 – fireworks_solo_shot_1 – 0.3 mb
27 – fireworks_solo_shot_2 – 0.3 mb
28 – fireworks_solo_shot_4 – 0.3 mb
29 – fireworks_solo_shot_3 – 0.3 mb
30 – fireworks_solo_shot_2 – 0.3 mb
31 – fireworks_finale_fade_end – 1.5 mb
32 – emperor_waltz_11 – 4.0 mb
Track Listing – 0.7 mb

So I found something fun today… I exist as a town in Western Sweden.

View Larger Map

I even have my own website to talk about myself as a town in Western Sweden! -> ME!

29 Jan 2009 – Thursday

This morning I woke up to my cat running through the kitchen. She was super hyper and wouldn’t stop. She loves to go run around outside but she HATES the cold so she’s been stuck inside all winter. I heard her paws slapping the floor along with the sound of her claws scraping the floor as she tried to get a grip on the linoleum. At one point it sounded like she had lost control taking a turn too quickly and slid across the floor into the wall. Then a bunch of dishes hit the floor cuz she jumped on the counter and knocked the dish drying rack to the floor.

27 Jan 2009 – Tuesday

This is gonna be a really simple entry. I woke up and, while it’s not exactly something new, I heard my brother snoring in his room. It was funny though cuz even though he does snore on occasion, I can’t ever hear it in my room. His snoring started off soft but it slowly would get louder and louder then he’d kinda half wake himself up and it would get quiet for a few minutes then the entire process would start over.

22 Jan 2009 – Thursday

I was again walking downtown late at night and this time I was walking near the library.  While I was standing on the sidewalk between The Leonardo and the library I saw a cat huddling next to the building trying to keep warm. I stopped to pet it and that was when I very faintly heard what sounded like two people talking in the courtyard. I walked toward the sound and it got louder and louder until I realized it was too loud. Upon futher investigation, I found that there is a talk radio station that broadcasts out of a little shop in the library’s outdoor courtyard and they keep a speaker on just outside their door so that all can listen to their broadcast. Having discovered the source of the sound, I walked on letting the sound of the radio station and the cat fade away behind me.

- Air Quality

Last weekend it was cold and cloudy and the air was fine and clear.  Last Monday night as I prepared for bed, I all of a sudden felt that small tickle in the back and top of my throat that very quickly turned into a dry soreness.  My eyes started to burn and my nose started to become stuffed up.  I knew I was getting sick.  I pumped myself full of vitiman c and zinc, ate a banana and downed a glass of water then went to bed.  I hoped that that would head the sickness off at the pass.  Unfortunately I was wrong.  I woke up the next morning feeling awful.  I couldn’t breathe and I felt stiff and feverish.  My eyes burned, my head pounded and I couldn’t breathe through my nose.  I decided to skip my first full day of classes rather than force myself to walk around for 9 hours in the cold and potentially make it a whole lot worse.  I had made that mistake last semester and ended up in the doctors office and missing an entire week of classes.  Well come that Wednesday, I was feeling much better, except for my throat and nose.  I drank some water and showered and felt much better, my nose unplugged and my throat stopped hurting.  I figured I was still getting over the illness.  Well come this morning, a week later, I still wake up every morning with a sore throat that is full of crap and a stuffed up nose.  I have also noticed that ever since last Tuesday, the Salt Lake valley has had an especially bad inversion.  The “inversion” is when all this cold air gets stuck in the basin that is the Salt Lake valley because of an area of high pressure that holds it down.  This high pressure keeps the cold air in the valley along with all the smog and smoke and pollution that would otherwise be dispersed by the wind or by naturally rising into the upper atmosphere.  It has gotten so bad that the last few days, you can’t see for more than a mile or two in any direction.  All you see is this dense white cloud, almost like fog that consumes the entire valley.  At some places in the valley it feels like you’re in a very dusty room breathing in the dust particles.  It is disgusting.  The worse it gets the more I notice my nose and throat problems getting worse.  It is disgusting and the only relief seems to be to take a few hours out of your day and drive up one of the canyons until you are high enough to be above the inversion and you can finally breathe clean and clear.  However, who has a few hours to spare just to go breathe?

As disgusting as it is, the only way to get rid of it seems to be to stay indoors with air purifiers, head to the mountains or wait for a powerful enough storm to bring in the winds and the snow to push the high pressure off the top and let the crap rise and float away.

20 Jan 2009 – Tuesday

Late at night, or early in the morning depending on your perspective, I like to go walk the streets. Tonight I went downtown to listen to Salt Lake City sleep. As I walked along the mostly deserted and icy sidewalk, I could hear my footsteps in four distinct parts. First the sound of the toe then the heel following and then the echo of each. I could hear the echo of the toe overlap the sound of my heel hitting the concrete. As I walked along listening to this, I heard, faintly in the distance behind me, the same pattern. Another lost soul pacing the streets at night. He was moving quicker than I was and I could hear that pattern get louder and louder as he approached me from behind. I slowed down and allowed him to overtake me and continue on. As he did so, I listened to that same pattern fade away.

I continued my walk. It was nearing 1 am as I rounded a corner out of an alley way when the sound of violins caught my ear. It was very faint and distant. The sound echoed off the buildings and made it hard to initially follow. I walked on trying to find the source. As I moved north it got louder until I came around another corner and saw across the street an old woman, bundled up in a dirty coat and what looked like rags for a scarf and hat. She was standing in the doorway of a shop playing a cello. The instrument was scratched and chipped, the spike held on with duct tape. The bow was frayed and the dreary notes that resonated from the device seemed to tell her sad story. As she played, I could here her raspy voice sing the melody aloud. Her cello case open on the ground in front of her to collect donations. She seemed to be waiting for a Sundance premier to let out so that she could earn a few dollars for her talent. She would stop playing and continue to sing the melody as she walked around the square in front of the theater. While she sang and walked, she would pause briefly and talk to herself in Russian or possibly one of the other slavic languages. If she saw someone coming towards her she would scurry back over to her cello and resume right where she had left off. Watching her performance reminded of cold nights in Chicago.

I have started my new major this last week.  I finally decided to pursue a BFA in Performing Arts Design through the Theatre Department at the U.  I am emphasizing in Sound Design.  It has been better than I had expected so far and things only are looking up for the months to come.  I have very unexpectedly been given an opportunity to design the sound for an upcoming production called Ring Around The Moon by Jean Anouilh.  I am so excited to be able to work with the head sound designer for the Pioneer Theatre Company, Joe Payne.  He is also one of my professors.  I have nothing but great things about Joe from everyone I’ve talked to and I can’t wait to start absorbing all he has to teach me.  As part of my sound design class, Joe has asked us to keep a sound journal.  I happened to miss the day that he explained this idea in detail because I was sick but from what I gather, he wants us to listen to the world around us and keep a bi-weekly log of interesting sounds that we hear, how the sounds make us feel and how one would go about re-creating the sound.  Since each entry will be relatively small, I will be keeping the journal right here on my blog under the category ‘Sound Journal’.

I’m excited for this semester and this new year.  I hope that 2009 is a much better year than the last 2 1/2 have been.

Something has been bothering me for a while now.  I wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was until yesterday but it’s been in the back of my mind since the end of last spring semester.

My family got our first computer back when I was about 10 or 11.  I remember being mystified by it.  It was amazing.  My life had been such up to that point that I really wasn’t sure exactly what it was or what you could do with it.  All I really remember is turning it on and seeing a black screen with a letter, a colon and a slash (c:\).  I had no idea what to do.  I started typing… “start”, “on”, “go”… finally I had to wait for my dad to get home so I could ask him how to make it work.  He said, “type ‘win’ and hit the enter key”.  I ran off eager to try out my new found knowledge.  I remember typing it and striking the enter key with all the vigor of a young boy transfixed by some new toy.  It sprang to life.  At least back then it seemed to have “sprung”.  Windows 3.1 came up and I started playing around.  I remember seeing a program called Prodigy.  My father came over to me to see what I was doing and saw that I was trying to make it work.  He said, “Don’t use that program; it costs money for every minute you use it”.  It was at that moment that I had the distinct thought flash through my brain, “That is so incredibly stupid. Why should I have to pay for every minute that I use a program?”  Little did I know that I had, at that moment, had my first brush with the mighty Internet! At any rate, I was hooked.  I played on that computer all the time and as they became more and more powerful and less and less expensive I was able to use them more and more.  I would break them, on accident, and try to fix them and usually had no problem getting them to work again.  I enjoyed spending my time trying to understand how they worked.

As life progressed on into high school, I enrolled in classes that would teach me more and more about computers.  It was in my sophomore year at Stevenson HS in the north-west suburbs of Chicago that my subconscious had made a decision, unbeknownst to me, that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  However, over the next 2 – 3 years, before my conscious had figured out what my subconscious already had, I made quite a few bad decisions that hindered my progress in this field.  Namely, moving to Alabama with my family.  As far as I am aware, most Alabamian’s still believe that a computer is a mythical machine that was made up by the ‘Yanks’ in order to further oppress the southern way of life.

As my senior year approached its end, I had decided that I was going to study computer science at any university that would take me and see where that path would lead.  I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do career-wise after college but I figured that I would have plenty of opportunities to make that decision over those next four years.  Having made that decision, I never researched any other options or alternatives.  There was no need.  I figured that that was the plan and I’d stick to it.  I enjoyed learning about computers and I had an ability to understand how they worked.  I had fun solving problems with computers and I enjoyed the thought of spending a lifetime in the computer field.

After eventually graduating from high school in the summer of 2001 (that’s another long story for another time), I moved to Orem, UT to attend UVSC (now UVU) to pursue my CS degree.  After a year, and finally feeling like a free man for the first time in a long time, I decided it would be best to put my education on hold and serve a two year mission for my church.  When I got back from my mission, I transferred to the University of Utah and at the age of 23 I would try to get back on track.  I started back in where I had left off. Looking back now I can see that it was at this point that what I wanted in life had started to drift toward other things.  Her name was Lorna.

I dated Lorna for a little over a year while I was doing mostly my general education and pre-major requirements at the U.  While I still enjoyed my chosen path, I could tell it wasn’t really as important to me as it had been before the mission.  I was taking a few final classes before I would officially be accepted to the Computer Science Major when Lorna was killed and it all fell apart.  I had to withdraw from the current semester.  After Christmas, I tried to go back but I just couldn’t do it and so I withdrew again.  I took a class over that summer and was determined to start back on track in the 2007 fall semester.  Things just weren’t the same.  I had lost interest in most everything I had once enjoyed including computers.  I had been dealing with depression among other issues.  I just kept on the path I was on before the fall of 2006 and figured that when I came out of this dark tunnel I would be on the same road as before.

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  Usually events that people tag with this phrase are given a specific name; ‘Life-Altering’.  While it is true that any event in life will alter that life in some way, the notion that an event with the power to take that life and is unable to seems to warrant the use of such a title.  With that said, it can be concluded that no person can experience such an event without having their life altered.

As the fog and clouds of absolute loss and heart-ache start to subside and I now finally begin to emerge from that lonely abyss, I can feel parts of me slowly being restored.  Not all at once and not in the same condition as they were when they were taken from me but they are being restored.  Some of those parts have changed for the better but some have changed for the worse.  As these new parts combine they can’t help but create a new person.  I am having to learn who I am all over again.  I am slowly learning that I enjoy some things that I used to not care for and some of the things that I used to enjoy, well, you get the picture.

As I go through each day, I realize that I am not the same person I was two years ago.  It is true that nobody is exactly who they were two years ago.  We all change and grow as we move through life.  That is the purpose of our existence.  However, when I look in the mirror I hardly recognize myself.  I feel so awkward in my own skin.  My thoughts and even words in many cases aren’t mine.  I have been continuing blindly down a path based on decisions I had made over two years ago and haven’t questioned since.  I haven’t had the energy to question them but as this fog dissipates, I am finding that I do have the energy, little by little, and I am starting to understand.  I still don’t fully understand but the Lord has blessed me with a little insight into these matters and I intend to use this new knowledge in a way that allows Him to show me more and more.

The way I have always seen life, even as a child, is that there are three major decisions that a person will have to make.  In order they are one, higher education; two, career; and three, family.  All three of these decisions typically are made between the ages of 18 and 25.  Unfortunately, my 18-25 years were littered with bad decisions and tragedy and so here I am 26 and having to seriously look at all three of these decisions again with new eyes.  At first, I was incredibly upset and depressed by these thoughts.  I am 26 and starting over.  I have lost everything.  I don’t know who I am or what I to do.  Then the thought came to me out of the blue; ‘this is a blessing’.  This is a chance, an opportunity to start over.  I started thinking about how many people I have heard say they wish they could just start over or go back to before a time in their life and do it over.  I thought about how many times I’ve said or even thought those exact words.  I am a different person than before.  I have been torn apart and put back together.  I am no longer bound by the chains of my past.  The feeling that I have the power to do anything I want is slowly returning.

Now, amidst all this self-realization, I woke up in class yesterday and realized I didn’t want to be there.  The teacher was discussing the ins and outs of programming code in assembly language and how to map and store binary and hex memory addresses between function calls.  I found myself almost saying out loud, “I don’t care” and “this is stupid” and actually meaning it.  Not just saying those phrases as an expression of frustration because of the difficulty of the material.  I don’t want to learn about computers anymore.  I found myself revisiting a wish I have had for this entire past year only this time with the clarity of understanding.  I wish I knew nothing more about computers than 90% of people out there.  I wish all I knew was how to use MS Word, check my email, look at my facebook and vote for hotties on hot or not.  I had previously chalked this desire up to the fog and apathy I have experienced since Lorna died.  But now it was clear.  This is a real feeling.  I don’t know why but I don’t want to be a computer scientist anymore and it feels good to actually know something about what I want and don’t want.  It has been so long.

Wow.  Ok when I embarked on this blog entry like an hour and a half ago I only intended to write a paragraph or two about how I had decided to change my major.  I didn’t mean to put down my entire life story.  I guess it is just as well though.  Half these thoughts I didn’t know I had until I had started typing.

So the long and short of it is that I have decided that I am no longer going to pursue a BS in CS.  I don’t know what I want to study yet but since it is too late to drop my CS classes this semester I have until Jan. to figure it out.  The good thing I guess is that after this semester I’ll only be one class away from a CS minor and so it wasn’t all for not.