I Just Can't Find the Words

This was the title of a continuing education session that I attended this afternoon as part of my professional development required by the college for which I work. It was the creepiest, most insulting fifty minutes of time I've endured in recent memory. Let me describe the scene.

The speaker's style was breathy and flowery, full of tangential anecdotes that made no sense. He would frequently pause for a few seconds before inhaling deeply and proclaiming "Oh boy," for no apparent reason. He would also take up to thirty seconds to study a piece of paper while the room, thirty colleagues full, sat in silence politely waiting for him to collect his thoughts and continue his presentation.

Style aside, if the presentation was worthwhile, we should overlook these quirks in the delivery method, right? It wasn't. He spent fifteen minutes introducing himself, talking about his youth in Queens, every place he went to college in his entire life, and why he ended up in Omaha. Now, as an Omaha transplant, I understand the need to explain yourself if you've somehow found yourself residing here after coming from, say, New York or Chicago, but the classroom probably isn't the place for that.

He then began a thirty minute stream-of-consciousness ramble about politicians who spoke without considering the ramifications of their words and why that upset him. However, he gave no solutions about how to go about prevent such atrocities of communication in our own interactions. Also part of the thirty minute poetry slam were descriptions of emails with colleagues in which someone said something he didn't like or used a word that he didn't feel was appropriate. Of course, no examples of that behavior were left without a complicated, tangent-filled rant about how he responded to the attack. No one in the room, including me, had the heart to ask him to consider why people reacted to him they way that they did.

Following the descriptions of emails that probably should have remained private, he then began to rail on contemporary mediums of communication like email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. It was easy to understand how much he detests these things because every time he mentioned one of them he would intentionally mispronounce it, as if he were some kind of incredibly stupid Luddite who couldn't figure out that it's not pronounced "MyBook" or "TwitSpace." His reasoning for the contemptuous behavior? Everything in an electronic medium can be copied and printed, potentially ruining a reputation in the process. I found myself thinking that I could understand why this would be threatening to him.

At one point, he even told an incredibly insulting story about a conversation with a garbage man, which I paraphrase here in his voice:

I don't mean to insult anyone in the garbage collection profession, here, but listen to this story. A garbage man was emptying my recycle bin and mentioned something about the can 'not being able to withstand such an excessive impact'. I was impressed that he used such big words for someone without a lot of higher education.

Then he paused and continued, "But it's the recession so I guess we all have to do what we can," implying that the only reason the man knew such big words in the first place was because he had to take a job below his normal stature because of the poor economy.

At the end of his lecture, he asked the standard question, "Does anyone have any questions?" Of course nobody did because not only were some of his comments, in an unexpected twist of irony, completely inappropriate, but his thought process was so broken, so twisted in its logic, that I don't think any of us in the room could have even begun to decipher exactly what the hell his point really was in the first place.

As people filed out of the room, I felt like I was the only one who found his presentation completely insulting and worthless but as I discovered, everyone else was similarly disgusted by what they'd just witnessed. Thinking back to the event, I wish I'd had a recording to device to capture the insanity I'm attempting to describe. When it comes to describing it in this medium, I just can't find the words.

Iowegian

I've now been living in Iowa for two weeks. And I have somehow not gained 200 pounds by eating corn. ;) It's been a long couple of weeks, though. I moved most of what little I brought up to my apartment on Friday, August 1st while Amy had an interview for a job. She and Nick left early Saturday morning and I've been on my own ever since. That weekend was the hardest because I had nothing pressing to do, but once work began that next Monday, the pace picked up significantly and it hasn't slowed yet.

Unfortunately, I either was simply so upset that it made me sick or I contracted a bug from the water not long after I arrived which made that first week one of the roughest I've ever experienced at a new job. I spent much of my first Saturday in the bathroom and by Sunday I could barely sit down. If I managed to do that, I would double over in pain and lie moaning on the floor once I was done. My throat then started feeling a little scratchy. By Tuesday, my second day of work, my initial digestive problems were subsiding, but a full-blown cold had reared its head. Being wary of the water, I made friends with the local Walgreens employees after I started showing up there every morning to buy water and orange juice.

As for work, I've been busier than I've ever been in the last five years. There's a lot to know, a new confusing building system to navigate, and of course, the fear of getting up in front of a room full of people on a daily basis to conquer. I'm pretty familiar with most of the material that's being taught in all my classes. There are a few dark and dusty corners of information that I haven't used in a while that I will need to brush up on, but otherwise I know what I need to know. However, I still wonder if the day will come when the dean comes to my classroom and calls me out as a complete fraud.

I've been working long hours for about twelve days straight now and I am tired. I have one more day of meetings and instructional sessions to attend tomorrow and then Monday we're off to the races. I can't help but think of what my adviser in graduate school, Virgil, told me one semester, "All of my work is heaped at the beginning of the semester, while yours is heaped at the end. Our workloads are about even at midterm." I hope his experience will mirror my own.

Stage Fright: The Hal Galper Story

I'd never heard of Hal Galper before. But he was coming to my university to give a jazz clinic. For the uninitiated, a clinic is a performance that is interrupted by tips for the other musicians in the audience. They're intended for students and amateurs in order to learn more about performance techniques. I had, however, heard of the other two musicians in his trio, the aptly named "The Hal Galper Trio". The drummer, Akira Tana is relatively famous in the jazz world and the bassist, Rufus Reid, is a freaking legend. When Terry, my private instructor, told me I would be performing with them in the clinic, my knees almost buckled.

For the couple of weeks after I knew that my head was going to be put on the chopping block, I practiced every chance I could, trying to memorize and play every jazz standard I knew in multiple keys. I was also practicing for a senior recital. It was, shall we say, stressful. Adding to the stress was knowing that my partner in pain would be none other than Matt Blostein. Matt was six years younger than me but he had always been a prodigy and could play better than me by leaps and bounds. I was sure that I was about to be humiliated but Terry, as he usually did, reassured me that things would be just fine.

On the day of the clinic, I arrived in the music hall early, removed my sax from its case, and began warming up. I was so nervous I could barely play scales. Matt showed up and just as nervous as I was. These were his idols as much as they were mine. But it was little comfort. The kid was better than me and it was going to be obvious to everyone there. I was still prepared for the worst.

Finally, I met the band and the clinic started. They asked me for a song to play to start the show with. I chose an easy blues-based tune I knew like the back of my hand, Now's The Time, by Charlie Parker. Things were going quite well until we started trading fours. Matt took the first four bars, Galper took the second, Reid took the third, Tana took the fourth, and I brought up the rear. Trading fours in a blues tune was usually not a problem. I could hang. But I was so nervous that while the drummer took four (and did some crazy things in those four bars), I committed the ultimate sin: I lost count.

When he hit a crash to bring me in, I froze. The music stopped. I hadn't been that embarrassed since a similar thing happened to me in high school. But that was me at 15, new to jazz and not a very good improviser. But here I was 23 and still losing count. I could feel my cheeks flush as they all started to tease me a little. I think most of it was good natured, but I was having trouble feeling good about my mistake.

At that point, Hal Galper got up from the piano. He was a giant man, probably at least 6' 5" and obese. Plus, his left eye is glass so when he looked at you, the left eye was always stuck in the same position. He lumbered toward Matt and I. His glass eye was pointing hard right away but the good one was fixed right on me. He looked at Matt then. I heaved a sigh of relief.

"Play a scale with a jazz articulation," he said. Matt played it.

"Now play it without your tongue." Matt played that too.

He looked at me and requested the same. I played the first scale fine, but for whatever reason, I could not disengage my tongue from the reed to play the scale with a jazz feel. This part I will never forget. Galper got right up in my face and seemed like he was yelling.

"Don't use your tongue!"

I tried again and failed. He gave up and started dispensing advice to Matt. "You're very good, but it sounds like you've practiced too much with play-along CDs." Of course, he was right. There weren't many opportunities to go to good jazz jam sessions in rural Pennsylvania.

I don't remember what he told me, to be honest, but I do remember that it was much more critical than what he said to Matt. I think it was something about needing a lot more practice before I thought about playing in an environment like that again. I think I almost peed myself. All I remember well was leaving the hall after the clinic was over and thinking that I would never play the saxophone again. And I didn't for a whole week. It stayed in its case, stashed in my locker. When I showed up for my next weekly lesson, Terry was not surprised that I hadn't practiced. He also apologized for how Galper treated us on stage. It was some comfort to know that he, too, thought the man unnecessarily rude.

Unfortunately, the damage was done. It was that day that I acquired my stage fright. I was never again able to confidently take the stage without some significant preparation of my nerves. I won't lie and say that it was all Hal Galper's fault. But he did contribute to my issue and I have yet to figure out how to undo my fears. Maybe I should give Hal a call.

Lasting Impressions

After undergraduate school, I could never understand why so many people had a negative opinion about those who chose academia as their profession. Apparently, some people that I spoke to had experienced a disconnect between themselves and the faculty that I had not. It was graduate school that finally exposed me to the disconnect, but I still held some faith that it was diminished slightly for graduate students because there were only about ten of us and we really only had significant contact with three or four professors at a maximum.

However, a few weeks ago I was fully witness to this disconcerting disconnect and I can now understand why the opinion of university faculty can be so low. But before I tell the story, I must relate a brief history of my undergraduate years to fully explain why I was blind to this phenomenon. As a student of the performing arts, specifically music, I was part of a rather cloistered lot at a small college in Pennsylvania. There were less than 100 students in the music department that were being instructed by a faculty of approximately twenty full and part time professors. With nearly one professor for every five students, it was guaranteed that most of them would remember your name after four, or in some cases, five years.

In addition to those positive statistics, I was also a student of one of the best teachers that I have ever met, Terry Steele. He was really more of a mentor than a teacher to most of his students. Eight years later, he remembers who I am and we still exchange email once in a while. I could go on quite a bit about many of his superlative qualities, but I will save that for another time. Suffice to say, Terry was a unique person and I consider myself lucky to have studied under him.

Returning to the present day, Amy and I stopped at Mt. Everest Restaurant in Evanston for dinner during a weekend toward the end of May. As our meal was served, two men were seated at the table next to us. It didn't take me long to recognize the voice of Gary Kendall coming from the adjacent table. He was with one of the newer doctoral candidates that I did not know. As I looked over at him, I got his attention and said hello. He asked me how and what I was doing and I asked him how he was. After the initial pleasantries, there was a short silence and, not wanting to be rude, I told them to enjoy their dinner, and Amy and I returned to our own conversations. As we left the restaurant, though, Amy brought something to my attention that I hadn't realized. She said, "He didn't remember your name."

"How could you tell?", I replied.

"He never introduced you," she said frankly.

I realized she couldn't have been more correct. It explained the awkward silence certainly. It was at that moment that I could understand why others have had such poor opinions of certain professors. In my attempts to grasp the realities of our brief exchange, I have wrestled with both sides of the argument. On one hand, Northwestern University is a much bigger school than Slippery Rock University and many, many more students enter and exit its revolving doors. I imagine that after twenty years in such a highly populated, high-turnaround environment, some forgetfulness is to be expected. On the other hand, I was one of a very small group of students and have only been away from the program for three years. I even returned in 2004 as a guest speaker, a session which Gary had attended.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. I got what I needed from Northwestern and it certainly got what it needed from me. I may not look back on my time there quite as fondly as I do my undergraduate years (although co-opting a Linux server IP over spring break to play Serious Sam: The Second Encounter only to later discover that one of the doctoral students was trying to access the server without success deserves fond mention) but I did make a couple of new friends and, really, what more could one hope for?

Six Years is Candy

Last Thursday night after work, Amy and I launched our anniversary getaway trip to Whitewater, Wisconsin. It was a relatively short trip across the border and we arrived at our destination, the Hamilton House, in under two hours. The house is within walking distanct of the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater and that evening we fell asleep to the shrieks of drunken revelry that were spilling from the three fraternity houses that surround the Hamilton. The next day, we were informed by Jim, one of our hosts, that the branch university is a suitcase college, meaning the students party on Thursday night and then retreat to Mommy and Daddy's residence for the remainder of the weekend. Being a graduate of Slippery Rock University, I was all too familiar with this phenomenon.

As it turns out, the house's history is inextricably tied to the university. It has apparently been many things since its construction including office space, a doll museum, and of course, a private residence. But it seems that the Hamilton House most often filled the role of fraternity/sorority house just as its present neighbors for a healthy (perhaps more apt, unhealthy) portion of its existence. Apparently the house's most famous ties are to one John Belushi who was a student at the university for a very short period of time before dropping out and returning to Chicago to persue a career as a drug-addled actor. According to the story, as told to us by Kathleen the hostess, after dropping out of school, John and friends would return to the house on weekends to party due to the drinking age, which remained at a spry 18 in Wisconsin. It was events from those parties that were extracted for some of the memorable scenes in the film Animal House, perhaps most notably the motorcycle being driven up the stairs. However, in real life, the fraternity's charter was revoked and the brotherhood dissolved.

Despite the raucous history of the house, Amy and I lived a very relaxing four days in warmth and comfort. We did a lot of reading. We played lots of board games and other parlor games including chess, checkers, chinese checkers, Othello, mancala, Boggle, Scrabble, and Monopoly. After reading the list of games, its hard to imagine having time for much else, but we made plenty of time for getting out and about as well. We visited the surrounding area including Fort Atkinson and Lake Geneva on two different days, stopping in all kinds of shops to peruse their wares, but of course, not buying anything at all.

It was quite difficult to return to our regular lives after those four days, but back we are with only our expectations for next year to hold. It's been six very good years and I am personally looking forward to number seven very much.

Truncated Speech

Yesterday, I returned to Northwestern University where I received my Master's degree as a guest speaker at a music technology colloquium. The speech went alright, but I wasn't able to show my game mod because their only PC couldn't support it. Last year, I completed an audio-only mod of the Star Trek: Elite Force 2 demo and the entire second half of my presentation was based on playing through the demo and giving a brief post-mortem on it. While the presentation wasn't entirely perfect, I realized, that while I enjoyed my stay at NU when I was there, it is certainly a relief to be out of school. It was kind of fun to be back inside the creaky old music building with leaning staircases, ivy, and cracking paint, but I almost felt trapped, as if my reverie was luring me to wish that I could stay. But a lesson I have learned and learned well is that pleasant memories are best left to be just what they are. The truth is that I don't wish to return to any past times of fond memory, but only to hold onto them for as long I can.

For any curious people, I am a sound designer for a publisher of children's books, toys, and other multimedia products. Yes, I am responsible for the noises that annoy thousands of parents across the country on a daily basis. It's enjoyable work and a welcome change from the usual office drone and blue collar slave positions I've held in the past. I am emphatically thankful to do something so fun and enjoyable and make a living at it as well.