The Blandfill Blog

Hello everybody. Lemme tell you a story.

Once upon a time, I played the saxophone a lot and got pretty good. (They even wrote a newspaper article about me: http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1209176704150210.xml&coll=7 ; tremendous apologies for the self-promotion.) Then my senior year of high school ended and I got lazy and stopped playing. Then my freshman year of college came, and I decided I wanted to focus on school more than music, so I didn’t join any music groups, and ultimately didn’t play my sax at all. In the end I left my horn completely unused for 15 months.

This summer, though, I realized that I’d given up a piece of my life that I’d really enjoyed, so I decided once I got back to school I’d get back in the groove. And — somehow — I’ve held to it! After fetching my sax out of summer storage last week, I started practicing again on Thursday. I even decided that I’d audition for the Jazz Band here. With only four days to prepare, I didn’t think I’d do all that great, but it couldn’t have hurt in any case.

A clip of what I sounded like on Saturday, day 3 of me “coming out of retirement”: sax_prax2

Today was my audition. I played significantly better than what you can hear in the audio file, but nothing terribly impressive. Still, I told my story to the band directors and they were quite sympathetic to my situation, saying that “you’re at the toughest point, getting back into it right now, but keep on playing; it’s great that you’re picking it up again”. It was really nice to hear that encouragement. And, even though I got an email from them at 6 PM telling me that “we are unable to offer you a regular playing opportunity”, I feel like I’m ready to get back into regular practice again. Perhaps that is all that matters.

Well, tomorrow morning Charles is taking us out to Dim Sum, woo! It’ll be my first time. And today we saw District 9, which is way cool. I’ll go shopping tomorrow for school-related stuff; I’ve gotta get some notebooks and maybe binders if I hope to keep organized this year. And maybe I’ll even finish up my CS project. Things are going decently well for a new year.