thanks, pete.

today marks an annual occurrence that i started doing when i was probably six. the actual event that i've been attending has actually been going on since 1994. so i guess i've been doing it almost the entire time it's been an event.

today was pete johnston.

that means absolutely nothing to you.

pete johnston is a summer swimming invitational held every june at park forest pool. it has mixed gender relays and an oddity called a crescendo relay that i absolutely loved when i was little. pete johnston was always a ridiculous amount of fun because i saw all of my friends on all the other summer teams. when i was little, i was actually a good swimmer, (something happened when i started to swim in college) and i had hopes of winning medals. it was all day. and the pool is right behind my best friend jacob's house and every once in a while, he'd come outside to watch me swim.

my parents hated pete johnston. as a young, naive swimmer who couldn't put on her own swim cap, i never understood why.

now that i am twenty years old and have been coaching a summer team for three years, i can understand with perfect clarity why my parents hate the memorial invitational that is pete johnston.

this morning, after i'd been dreading the meet all week, i pulled into park forest's parking lot at five forty-five in the morning. i was the first person at the meet, so i contented to sit in my car, sip my starbucks, and chastise myself for having only gotten four hours of sleep.

every year i know that pete johnston is long. and hot. and early. but i nonetheless get less than five hours of sleep. consistently.

once people began to arrive, then it was putting up the tent. then it was getting a heat sheet. then it was bending over the heat sheet and highlighting every single autumn ridge swimmer. and then it was actually dealing with the kids. kids that were as excited as i used to be when i was their age.

by seven, it was still chilly. i was still running on the caffeine of my starbucks. i hadn't felt my mosquito bites yet. i had energy to jump and yell and cheer and scream and be SUPER COACH EMILY.

by ten thirty in the morning, two and a half hours into the meet, it was ninety degrees. i was starving. my left arm was considerably tanner than my right arm. my voice was hoarse from screaming for my kids to swim faster. my hand was sore from giving high fives. i had accidentally written on myself with heat-scratching pen at least five times. i was dehydrated and i didn't have enough time between my kids' swims to actually go apply sunscreen. i had to pee. my feet hurt because i'd been standing for four hours.

i can see why my parents absolutely hated pete johnston.

but despite that pete johnston starts at six in the morning and usually runs until three in the afternoon and it's just constant standing and screaming in the intense glare of the june sun, it's fun. doing it from a coaching perspective is so much different that from a swimmer's perspective.

i truly love every single kid that i coach. i coach 141 of them, and i do not know all of their names, but i love them all. i love them for deciding to be swimmers, for coming to practice, for smiling at me, for doing what i ask of them. i love them for having team spirit and i love them for making me laugh. i even love them for my making my job an absolute living hell.

so it's hard to hate a gigantic meet like pete johnston where i see other coaches just like me loving their swimmers the way that i love mine. it's worth the sunburns, uneven tanlines, mosquito bites, the hunger, the foot pain, and the absolute no sleep followed by extreme exhaustion. everything is worth it.

no matter how much i bitch about pete johnston beforehand, during the actual spectacle, and after i get home and i'm drenched in sweat and my hair is curling in eight different directions, i love it.

i love it because i love my job, and i love my kids.

you know, at the beginning of this blog, i was possibly going for something funny and entertaining, but all i really got was sentimentality. i really gotta work on this blogging thing.

(this blog is dedicated to pete johnston, swimmer and friend, may 10th, 1974 to june 17th, 1993. thanks for making the world of swimming a better place.)

paging the doctor, you have a patient.

hello, my name is emily, and i'm addicted to being too busy.

addicted isn't the right word.

it's more like... i'm just constantly busy. i could call it superwoman syndrome if i wanted, because i tell myself that i can do everything. like be a resident assistant, be on the swim team, take ALL of my classes on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, manage to watch chuck and criminal minds, have forty hours of placement in alma's public high school, get all of my school work done, spend my mandatory six hours in the library a week, and still manage to sleep.

i can do that. i think.

so superwoman syndrome has gotten me into the busiest summer of my life. i struggled and struggled until my father brought home a GIGANTIC planner from our credit union and said, "happy belated birthday."

there is something written down for every single day in june. most days have four or five things.

for today, june seventeenth, i have written down "jacob comes at 7:30!!! coach's meeting 10 am. ONE appointment 1:30 pm."

that last thing is what this blog is really about. possibly. maybe. it's going to try to be. i think i can manage to stay on topic.

at my first ONE appointment for my back, they gave me a back brace, three prescription pills, and a number to call for physical therapy. before i left, i managed to get the guy molding the plaster of my brace to sign his kids up for my swim team. i felt productive.

i was assigned to see dr. jenkinson. the guy i talked to for almost half an hour about my agonizing back pain was a man named kevin something or other, and the entire appointment, i thought he was dr. jenkinson. i realized i was wrong later while i was waiting for my back brace to be ready when the actual dr. jenkinson came in, tried to shake my hand, and told me that i didn't have to sleep in my brace. then he left.

today, at one thirty, was my follow up appointment. i had high hopes for this appointment. i always have really high hopes for doctor's appointments. not so much with the dentist, but i expect a decent amount out of a serious appointment like this one.

in the waiting room, i tried not to stare at the kid who had a cast from his wrist to his shoulder. i didn't want to contemplate exactly what he'd broken and how much it had hurt, and exactly how long he was going to be in physical therapy to have it work right again, if it ever did. i focused on the television and how terrible we are with closed captioning. CNN's story of the day: conspiracy theories about whether president obama is building a golf course behind the white house.

i kid you not.

i waited a painstakingly long time alone in patient room one. even with a back brace, if i'm sitting in a chair that doesn't have a back, my back is not strong enough to support itself for long. i couldn't lean against the wall because there was a gigantic framed poster of knee injuries. and because my back is beautiful and always in pain, i didn't even have the luxury of twisting around to look at it and be fascinated by the mechanics of the knee and what i could do to it to render me incapable of walking for a long time.

i was visited by kevin something or other again. he told me that i could get an MRI and some gigantic needle put in my back, or we could wait for another six weeks to see what happened. with my fear of needles, you can guess which option i chose. besides, MRI's are expensive, noisy, and claustrophobic. the one i had on my feet when i was seventeen was bad enough.

kevin something or other told me that i did not need a special x-ray like my physical therapist had suggested to me the other day. i suspect she won't be happy when i alert her of this at my next appointment. tonight, it's very possible i'm going to lie in bed and have an terrific vision of her and kevin something or other yelling over the phone about whether or not i have spondylolisthesis (say that five times fast). i feel like my physical therapist is going to win. she's pretty hardcore.

after kevin something or other left after telling me that he'd see me again in six weeks to see where my back was, i was escorted to check out by a nice lady who had a chart with my name on it. the lady behind the check out counter was even nicer, gave me a gigantic calendar to look at so i could figure out when my appointment would be, and how i could work it into my entirely too busy summer. we picked a date. it's written down in my gigantic planner.

halfway home, while i was sitting at a red light, i realized i didn't see dr. jenkinson at all.

i reported this to my father, who frowned and voiced exactly what i had been thinking the rest of the drive home: what exactly do orthopaedic doctor's do if they don't see patients?

i really think i'm one of those people who expects too much out of an appointment. i was extremely disappointed that i'm stuck in the back brace for another six weeks (it ruins cute sundresses and is extremely hot during my outside job), but i figured that i wasn't out of the woods with it yet. i was disappointed that i had to keep taking my scary drugs that induce my rather psychedelic dreams, and i was terrifically disappointed that i had not seen my actual orthopaedic doctor.

i'm not sure what he looks like. if i remember correctly, it's possible that he's bald.

dr. jenkinson, if you're out there, you have a patient named emily hollenberg with back pain and a back brace who'd like to meet you.

it's not fun without an explosion.

i like to bake.

don't get confused by thinking that i'm good at baking. because i'm not. in fact, i'm terrible. and i'm afraid of ovens. straight up.

it's always sad when you love to do things that you're terrible at. but it's also kind of terrific because you work at it and work at it and eventually, you'll get good.

i'm hoping that's what happens to me with baking at any rate. so far i haven't improved much.

today's task: blueberry muffins.

my mother, like most mothers, is an excellent baker. my mother is just about good at everything she does. she bakes, cooks, and sews. i had the BEST halloween costumes when i was little. and she used to sew us matching dresses for easter sunday. we were that cool. but anyway. my mother  has recipes piled up on recipes which are piled up on more recipes, and she's the only one who can figure out her filing system. today, she pulled out a small, aged, water spotted notecard with my great grandmother's handwriting on it and said, "follow the recipe, we'll be home before you leave for your swim meet."

and she left me alone in the kitchen.

this is perfect for me, because when i bake, i need to bake alone. i can't have other people in the kitchen. in fact, i can't have other people on the same floor. the entire first floor of my house is open and has about... two doors. so i absolutely cannot permit anyone to be within sight of me. thus, i shun them to the basement.



my "going away to college" cake. it looks edible, right?

 under normal circumstances, i bake cookies and cakes. i really enjoy baking cakes and cupcakes, and i can actually bake a decent looking cake. i've been working on frosting for a long time now, and i really think i've reached the point where my cakes look edible. but i'd never made muffins before. there was no muffin mix. this was all me. and that gigantic bag of frozen blueberries i had thawing in the sink.

i encountered my first problem trying to read the tiny notecard. perhaps this just runs on my mother's side of the family, but our handwriting is tiny. MY handwriting is absolutely gigantic, but my mother writes in miniscule cursive. so does her mother. and so did her mother, the writer of this recipe.

i squinted. i picked up the card. i turned it this way and that. i squinted some more. a water stain had almost completely obliterated the second line of directions, and there was one stubborn ingredient i simply couldn't read. i figured it out by process of elemintation; there was no mention of butter anywhere else in the recipe. butter it was.

so i began to add ingredients to my mixing bowl (thinking that i'd blog about this) and i began to mix up the sugar and butter. this made the sugar explode everywhere, i had to do some intense stabbing with my spatula, and then go back to squinting at the ingredients. i couldn't figure out how to get the teaspoon spoon off of the ring with the other measuring spoons, so i ended up using it with the other spoons dangling uselessly and getting needlessly dirty.

when i added the last ingredient, milk, and turned on the mixer, there was a rather colossal explosion of milk and dough.

by the time i'd finished wiping that up from off of... well, everywhere, i had another problem on my hands. the recipe said to fold in the blueberries.

at one point in my life, when i was fourteen, i knew a lot about cooking terminology. i had ended up getting shunted into home ec class with ms. knipp, and god did i hate listening to her voice. she sounded like a chicken with a headcold. but she knew what she was talking about. she taught me to sew on a button (don't ask me how, i have no idea anymore) and how to sew, all the parts of a sewing machine (our test was to label a diagram) and how to navigate my way around the kitchen. i actually made hard candy in her class, and i must say, it was rather delicious. so at one point in her class, i knew what folding was.

but while i was standing there with my gigantic mixing bowl of a double recipe of blueberry muffin dough, i did not know how to fold.

luckily for me, my mother chose this moment to come home from her shopping spree at half price books and she told me to just dump the blueberries in and stir it carefully with my spatula.

so i did. and i fretted when a few blueberries exploded and some of their color leaked into the dough. my mother's muffins are always perfectly white with blueberries in the middle. my blueberry muffins are probably going to turn out purple. at least they haven't exploded in the oven yet while i write this.

my mother's baking weapon of choice is our melon baller. it's used for just about anything that needs to be in a dollop. so this means muffins, small cookies, and cupcakes: prepare to get balled. i find the melon baller to be quite nice; just dip, turn over into the muffin tin, and squeeze. everything comes out nice and clean and you're not shaking a spoon uselessly over a pan, trying to get the dough to come off and land where you want it. my new baking weapon of choice (after the ever present and always authentic spatula) is the muffin baller. like mother, like daughter.

while i was balling the dough into my muffin tins, my mother went over to the mixer and asked me what had happened. this was after i had cleaned up all of my explosions.

one day, i will be good at baking. hopefully this time comes before i live on my own. that time is coming faster and faster.

but no matter how terrible i am at baking, i still absolutely LOVE it.

tweet.

on may thirty-first, i joined twitter.

there were a few reasons for this. and i am not ashamed to list them on my blog.

1. my best friend jacob has a twitter, and he constantly tells me that it's better than facebook.

2. i could shamelessly follow matthew gray gubler. (don't judge. this is what twitter is for... right?)

3. my cousin spent an entire evening tweeting and it drove me insane. (enough to get one...)

4. i have an absolute and debilitating OCD with my facebook statuses.

on the evening of may thirty-first, probably around ten, i was frequenting matthewgraygubler.com (don't visit it if you're afraid of tim burton movies. trust me.) and there was a nice little button that said @gublernation. so i clicked on it was and was instantly transported to the twitter universe. once i was on there, i had access to every tweet that matthew gray gubler had ever posted and quickly realized that if i had one of these, i could keep up with him, and post anything that i wanted to.

from there, i spent ten minutes fretting at the 'sign up for twitter' page before finally doing it. i made an e. e. cummings based email address just for twitter because i knew that it would email me shamelessly, and i can't have that kind of inbox number. i'm one of those people who lets their inbox fill up to over  a thousand emails and then spends hours deleting them and being a grump about it when i know it's my fault for being lazy. so...

i finally nodded, bit my lip, stopped chewing my nails, and made a twitter. @emilyyxh, if you're into tweeting and think that my life is cool enough for you to follow. you are reading this, so that's saying something.

i began to follow matthew gray gubler and jacob, and then i slowly began to find more people that i knew. and then i realized that twitter was incredibly freeing.

in middle school, i ate a fairly decent bowl of OCD cereal. back then, it was bad enough that i would line up food by color and variety, count them, and eat them one at a time. this made fruit snacks less enjoyable and lunch extra long. i've gotten most of it under control, but when it comes to facebook statuses, well...

i absolutely have to have my name, emily hollenberg, be the beginning part of the sentence. it must fit grammatically with the sentence, so if i refer to myself, i'm not i or me, i'm her or she. the sentence has to be grammatically correct in all ways, shapes, and forms, and only rarely does it actually describe what i'm doing.

my status always has to be at the top of my profile. if i post a status and someone writes on my wall within the next hour, i'll delete the status and repost it to put it at the top. if enough posts are posted to my wall during the day, i'll permit myself to post another status, but i generally stick to one a day.

i absolutely cannot have two statuses right next to each other. i will wait as long as i can to post one so something else can cover my latest status. i'll do a variety of things on facebook that will show up on my wall so it will have 'recent activities' at the top to get pushed between my old status and the new one.

i'm also very particular about what i post. my college job monitors my facebook and i cannot disgrace the college in any way, shape, or form, and that goes for what other people put on my wall as well. i try not to post things that i'm doing about my day because generally nobody cares. and honestly, if at least one person doesn't like it or comment on it, i feel like a little bit of a failure.

so yes, i have some facebook status stipulations. i am not ashamed to admit them in front of you, my valued reader. believe me, i have way worse idiosyncrasies than facebook status craziness.

suddenly, with twitter, i could post whatever i wanted, whenever i wanted (almost, but soon!) and not care who read it, saw it, or cared about it. if you care about me enough to follow me, then you get to read my tweet. my tweets didn't have to fit with my name. they didn't have to be a perfect sentence. it didn't have to be weird obscure song lyrics to try to describe how i was feeling. i could tweet whatever and feel good about it.

and that's when the addiction set in.

twitter makes me forget that i have email and makes me forget that i have a facebook. i tweet entirely too much (at least eight times a day) and when i tweet something, it makes me never want to post a facebook status. for about a day, i had these two nice little folders in my brain: a tweet folder, and a facebook status folder. now all i have is a gigantic tweet folder, and i sit on facebook, thinking of a status, and realizing that all i want to do is tweet.

i've gotten a lot of strange feedback on announcing that i have a twitter. my parents think i'm crazy. my best friend thinks i'm awesome and seeing the light (i do enjoy twitter more than facebook). a lot of people simply ask me why i joined twitter, and i mostly say that i got one to follow matthew gray gubler because that's just one hundred percent true. a lot of people say, "OMG I HAVE ONE TOO FOLLOW ME."

considering the fact that i'm addicted to twitter, i tweet too much, and i talk about twitter like it's my newborn child, i'm still a little cynical. i do feel like a major creep every time matthew gray gubler posts something that he's doing and i get excited. when i tweet things like, "lunch time!" and "i love my job, now it's time to eat some cheerios" i worry that this is the most pointless thing i could be doing with my time.

and i'm pretty sure it is.

i'm proud to say that i'm one of the few people who don't have twitter mobile. twitter is driven from phones, and i don't have mobile internet access. every time i tweet, i actually have to go to twitter.com and type up a tweet. this does allow me to post these blogs to twitter easily enough, and i do enjoy doing that.

so now i'm all savvy in the online world. i've got my four year old facebook with my charming 600 friends. i've got my twitter with my beautiful thirteen followers (thank you for liking me enough to at least read that i'm eating a bagel) and i have my blog. look at me, taking the internet by storm.

my tweet if blogspot were twitter: getting ready for work! :)



post script: if tim burton DOESN'T freak you out and you like matthew gray gubler or dr. spencer reid or that one nerdy guy in 500 days of summer, click right here for gublerland. the drawings are all his. and i warned you.

congratulations, you've found the perfect speed.

i've come to the conclusion that every driver except for you is a bad driver.

there was a comedian who did a comedy sketch on this. i'm not entirely sure who it was, but it was a long time ago. i agree with that comedian.

if somebody's driving too slowly, they're an old man.

if somebody's driving too fast, they're a maniac.

that means that you alone are going the perfect speed. congratulations on finding the perfect speed! but that person who passed you, you're an old man to them. and that guy you just passed? yeah, he's calling you a maniac. he's going the perfect speed too. congratulate him.

i take morning spanish classes at IPFW. on a good day, i can drive home in about fifteen minutes. usually the radio sucks because during the noon hour, deejays decide that the public absolutely craves to hear bad eighties music while they eat. so i was jamming to death cab for cutie with the window down, getting excited to pull into my garage, enter my house, head straight upstairs, and shower. because sitting through mi clase de espanol without showering is gross. (it's not my fault, though, it's my job's.)

i was cruising down clinton where the speed limit is a decent forty-five. for about half of the population, myself included, this means that driving at fifty is acceptable and common. there are those who decide that driving exactly the speed limit is the way to be, and then there are those (like the motorcycle who flew by me this morning) who decide that sixty, if not seventy, is cool. that motorcycle was going at LEAST sixty-five.

but anyway. i was going down clinton behind some form of lincoln town car that wasn't quite the size of my grandpa's town car boat. from what i could see, the driver appeared to be a young man with a small afro and glasses. he looked like he was probably heading home from IPFW.

normally, people my age don't really like speed limits. i will be the first to admit that i go about five over as a general rule and allow myself seven on the highway. on auburn road i've occasioned to go fifteen over, but usually i keep to eight or nine. i am terrified of being pulled over.

i'm assuming that this guy was my age because he looked about twenty. he, however, was not among his age group norm; he was going five under.

i wasn't too troubled by this. i wasn't in a super hurry to get home because class had gotten out twenty minutes early. i could wait an extra five minutes to shower and eat a cheese bagel and blog. that was perfectly fine with me. besides, roaring around someone while city driving is rude (save that for the highway, kids) and the right lane had lots of cars doing the normal fifty so i couldn't safely pass him anyway.

the one thing i was not okay with was the fact that this guy, in his nice little lincoln, had better things to do other than drive.

texting and driving is probably my biggest pet peeve. i don't mean to sound crass or anything, but if you text and drive and die, i'll be sad. but i won't be surprised and i certainly won't blame it on anyone but yourself. texting and driving scares the HELL out of me. when you text and drive, you're endangering my life as much as yours. i will definitely be pissed if i die because you smashed into my car telling your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're coming home from shoe shopping. i'm sorry, but my life is worth more than your text, and yours is too.

so i'm driving down clinton and i'm watching the guy in front of me text and look up, text and look up. maybe he thought that was safe, but we all know it's not. together, we pulled into a left hand turn lane, and i sat behind him, still jamming to death cab for cutie, and i watched like the creeper i am. he put his phone away and then became very busy with something in the passenger seat that required him to lean way over and not look at the road at all. he was extremely preoccupied with something majorly important in that seat.

the green arrow turned, well, green, and the line of cars began to move up. we were pretty far in the back and probably wouldn't have had a chance to make the arrow anyway, but when the minivan in front of him started to move forward, mr. lincoln was still doing whatever he was doing in that seat. the way he was concentrated and the way he was facing, he looked like he was changing a diaper. so i waited for him to move up or at least notice that he was sitting in traffic on a busy street. but no, he was doing more important things than driving.

i'm not a horn person. i don't like to use my horn. but he still hadn't moved, so i put my hand on the horn. i was about to press it when he moved his car forward- without looking up at all. his car swerved straight into the lane next to us. THEN he looked up, hovered between both lanes for almost the entire length of the turn lane, and finally decided that yes, he was going to turn, now that all the traffic in front of us had gone and the light went back to being red. i consider him to be extremely fortunate. while driving on one of the busiest roads in fort wayne, he had singlehandedly NOT moved at all in a turn lane when the light turned green, had then swerved into the other lane without noticing, and then had hung out in two lanes for a while before finaly veering back to turn left. all of this happened without him hitting a single car.

well, we had another light to sit through. i checked my hair in the review mirror and went back to creeping on him. whatever he was doing, it was sure gosh darn important, because he kept at it. he was now the first in line to turn left when the light finally turned green, and i rested my hand on where the horn would be. if he hadn't moved before, i wasn't holding out much hope that he'd be alert enough to notice that the light had turned green. and i had a row of cars behind me who wouldn't be as nice as me when it came to honking.

he managed to realize that he was (oh my goodness!) driving, and went right when the light turned green. lucky for me, he turned left at the three way stop when i went straight so i didn't have to deal with him. and when i drove away after he turned, i thought, by golly, i'll blog about this.

the first rule we learned in drivers' ed was this: pretend that every single driver on the road is ten times stupider than you.

sometimes, i really feel like they are. (which is unfair of me in the extreme, i know.)

but that guy that just passed me, well, to him an old man. and to me, he's a maniac. congratulations on finding that perfect speed. just like everybody else.


to learn more about don't text and drive from parkview hospital, click here.

practice makes perfect.

this is what USED to happen in my house, back in the days of middle school.

my brother and i would walk home together from school. i'd spend half an hour practicing my horrendous tuba. (i know. don't judge.) then my brother would spend half an hour on the saxophone. after that i'd spend a good ten minutes doing something useless on my trumpet that i tried to pass off as practicing, and around this time my parents would get home. once that happened, my mom would play on the piano and my dad would whistle and sing songs. usually disney because my dad is awesome.

then i'd pretend to have other things to do before swim practice so that i didn't have to practice the piano. or i'd just straight up lie and say that i already did. this worked because my brother and i have been lying for each other since we knew what lying was.

unless you are generally one hundred percent invested and in love with your instrument, you don't want to practice. it's a forced habit. it's dreaded. sure, you want to get better and be some awesome child prodigy at the mandolin, but you just can't bring yourself to practice.

i know EXACTLY what this is like.

i started piano lessons when i was five. that's fifteen years ago. the best and worst part about piano lessons was this: my mother was my teacher.

when i was in grade school my mom gave piano lessons at our house every tuesday evening. for half an hour each, kids i didn't know would come to my house and my mom would give them piano lessons. i vividly remember one boy not wanting to practice so badly that he hid his piano books in our side garden. i found them the next day trying to climb a tree. after the last kid had left and it was eight o'clock, it was time for MY piano lesson. my brother had piano lessons too, but he didn't enjoy it as much as i did, and i honestly don't remember what time his were. but mine were on tuesdays at eight. when my mother stopped giving lessons around fourth grade, they bumped down to seven.



this one kind of looks like the one at my house?

 if you think it's bad when your mother tells you to practice the piano, try having her as your teacher. when she tells you to practice, she knows exactly what you have to practice and exactly what you have to work on. and every single lesson, she'll know what you did and didn't do. every damn time.

i knew i was destined to be in middle school band when i was in third grade. i was going to play two instruments, and that second one was going to be the flute. yessir, the flute. i had visions (i always have visions in these blogs, don't i?) of wearing a little black dress at my first band concert, sitting in the front row, and playing the flute. it was going to be so terrific.

when i got to sixth grade and i picked up a flute, i couldn't make a peep out of it. my dreams were crushed. now i had to go try other instruments. i had an intense yearning to learn the cello or upright bass, but like so many other things in my life, that was ruined by allergies. i was allergic to the bow.

you know in the first harry potter movie when harry chooses the right wand? the world lights up, epic wind blows, and harry is like, OMG THIS IS MY WAND.

that happened to me when i picked up and played trumpet for the first time.

in sixth grade band, they teach you how to read music. i'd been reading music for seven years already. learning the trumpet was the easiest thing in the world, despite having braces. i was one step ahead of every one else because i could read treble clef AND bass clef. and of course, at the same time. oh, i also have perfect pitch. that helped a lot, too.

in sixth grade i played the trumpet, and for one concert, played the tuba. in middle school i walked to school every day, and my gigantic tuba didn't have a case. i was short back then, so i imagine i looked pretty hilarious walking to school carrying a straight up tuba. i remember the crossing guard staring at me. i never liked my crossing guard.

in ninth grade, when i went to high school band, i'd finished piano lessons. those stopped in eighth grade when my mother and i simply got too busy. i still played around so i didn't forget everything i'd learned over the past ten years, but i had no actual instruction. i played the tuba a little bit in band, i plucked around decently on a harp, and mostly stuck to trumpet. i was happy to be second chair; i didn't need the pressure of first chair. and high school music, at least for trumpet, was challenging. this was new for me.



for the musically challenged: this is a marimba.

 by eleventh grade i was so sick of my trumpet i honestly wanted to sell it. i'd given up tuba, and there was still no piano instruction in sight. i'd joined the marching band, but with my intense swimming schedule, i could only be in the pit. this allowed me to pick up marimba. it was just like piano... but with mallets. i absolutely loved it.

my senior year i rented a cello, told my allergies to suck it, and fell in love. i'd always wanted to play the cello, and finally, i was playing one! it turned out that the bow didn't bother my allergies at all, and on bad days, i would sit with my cello, fuming that i hadn't been able to play this for the past seven years like i had my trumpet. by this time i'd given up trumpet officially; i packed it away in its case, stuck it in the back with my brother's saxophone (he'd left for college) and ditched band for orchestra. orchestra was by far the most fun i'd had playing an instrument besides marching band, and i was so in love with my cello (i named it astaire after fred astaire) that i rented it the summer before i left for college even after i wasn't supposed to.

when i live on my own, i WILL have a cello. and a piano. piano is my first love and always will be.

my freshman year of college i had absolutely no music instruction whatsoever. i had no ensemble to be in, no instrument to take with me and store under my roommate's bed. i could audition to have private cello or piano lessons, and i almost did the piano lessons, but once again, being an athlete had made this almost impossible and i didn't own a cello to audition with. the entire time i've been a musician (which is a hell of a long time) i've been an athlete as well. i'm pretty sure i was one of the only people to graduate high school with a athletic letter, an academic letter, AND a music letter. so now i was in college without a cello (trumpet or marimba, for that matter), and the only piano i had access to was the out of tune one in the lobby of my dorm building. i took piano music with me to alma, and i got it out and played, but most of the time i had to contend with people studying.

nobody likes to be studying and have some freshman girl banging on the piano, even if she's decently good.

now i'm home for the summer, and we have our piano next to the stairs. i haven't had my mother give me a piano lessons since i was fifteen, so now i'm giving myself lessons. if my mother had continued to give me lessons i'm sure i could almost be as good as her (she'll never admit she's phenomenal), but now i have to struggle through it myself. i don't want to practice. but i want to get better, so i'm sucking it up and getting it done. every day i sit down and play this terrible mozart song called rondo alla turca (i guarantee you've heard it before) and play it. the parts i don't get right, i do them over and over again. i have been and will continue to keep drilling myself all summer.

practice makes perfect, right?

post script: i'm allowed to rent that cello this summer against school policy because my orchestra director is just. that. cool. and i am so excited i can hardly breathe.

post post script: this is rondo alla turca. if you're interested.

it's nice to reread.

today is june twelfth, two thousand and eleven.

exactly one year ago today, i graduated from high school.

i'm one of those odd people who absolutely adored high school. honestly. i can say that i loved high school. even though it didn't really start out that way.

i was one of those people who went to high school out of district, so i showed up my first day of high school knowing absolutely no one except for my brother. i was also one of those cool kids who packed a lunch every day. (i went through all four years without a single school lunch.) this meant i got to the cafeteria early and i had absolutely nobody to sit with. that lasted about two weeks, and it was the longest two weeks of my life.

my freshman year was awkward. i think all of our freshman years are awkward when we look back on them. but i made a lot of friends. i was freshman star of the swim team. i had a decent spot in the band. i went to football games to watch the marching band because i couldn't be in it. i had fun.

by the time i left high school, i'd had the time of my life. i'd spent four years on the swim team and my senior year as captain, i'd taken seven science classes and two separate foreign languages, i'd spent two years on the canstruction building team, i'd given the morning announcements numerous times. i spent two years in the marching band and had an absolute blast, i'd become proficient at two new instruments, and had joined the orchestra as well as the band. i'd been in the school musical and all four staff/student talent shows. i'd conquered my laureate project, worked two jazz festivals for up to thirteen hours each, got inducted into national honor society, gotten a rather prestigious writing award at the senior honors banquet, and had gone to prom three times.

i'd graduated nineteenth out of four hundred and ninety-two.

high school had been terrific.

the last month of high school, i itched to leave just like every senior did. i had a small countdown going on in my brain until the last day of school. i figured that month of may would drag by, but it was the exact opposite. may FLEW by with supersonic speed. two weeks of AP exams. then it was senior prom. then it was the senior honors banquet. then it was senior awards night. then it was my last ever orchestra concert (we played pirates of the caribbean, which is actually rather difficult on the cello). then it was my nineteenth birthday at the beginning of june, and then quite abruptly, nine days later, i was standing at the coliseum in my graduation robes, holding my graduation cap, suddenly wondering what the hell had happened.

i was one of the smart people who didn't wear heels to commencement. i knew that we would be standing on that godforsaken concrete ramp for up to an hour waiting to march in with our perfect "corners" like we'd practiced the day before. i stood across from zak and we nervously swayed back and forth, realizing that this was the absolute last time that we would all be together in one place, because nobody ever goes to all those high school class reunions.

i walked with my perfect corners. i shook my principal's hand. my mother took pictures of me being handed my diploma. once i had it, i sat down and watched as everybody else got to graduate from high school. with a high school as large as mine, there were people i had never seen before in my entire four years of high school. and i mean entire four years. i only missed one day of high school.

now i'm a sophomore in college (technically) and i've moved onto bigger and better things. i've moved onto dorms, college professors, college internships, majors and minors. i've moved onto the future. this is where my life really takes off, where i decide what i want to do for the rest of my life and how i'm going to achieve this. high school is slowly becoming a blur.

but every once in a while, i miss the swim team i captained. i miss driving to school in the dark and stopping for coffee at the gas station. i miss having a locker, i miss the periods, i miss the bells. i miss the people, i miss the teachers. i miss i miss i miss.

this is the new chapter. but every once in a while, it's nice to reread.

graduation. :)