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May 2010 Hey guys! So this is my last Eagle’s Eyes entry! These past few days have been pretty fun. I turned in my last paper on Friday, so I was carefree for the weekend! Friday night was the Senior Lock-in—a party from 10pm to 2 or 7am (depending on your sleep deprivation tolerance). All of the seniors gathered in the courtyard to play volleyball, play with sidewalk chalk, and make s’mores. The weather was kind of freaky, but that was alright with us! At midnight, we went into the gym to play board games or Halo. My friend Anna Tan and I got some jump ropes and a lot of people came and played all of those games from elementary school. It was a lot of fun! Nobody brought their laptops or iPods, so we were playing kind of juvenile games, but getting to interact with each other uninterrupted. It was nice! I left at two, because I was falling over on my feet, but the time I got to spend with my friends was worth the missed bedtime. :) Today and tomorrow are my last days of classes at LSMSA EVER!!!!!! I can’t even imagine what life is like without these favorite teachers of mine, so it kind of just feels like another day. Hmmmmmm…. Once exams start, I’ll be busybusybusy, but then it’s time to graduate! I hope this blog has been able to give you some insight into LSMSA’s inner workings and help you to understand a student’s perspective on life here. I love this school, and even though I’m leaving in thirteen days, it and all of the people here will always be an important part of my life.
So, we’re down to the last full week of classes! HOORAY! We just had an extended weekend, but the past few breaks (Easter and Mardi Gras) were all ten days long, so I felt cheated when I only got to spend three days sleeping and eating at home. This week, I have a term paper due in my Arabic Literature and Culture class. I am writing about Arabic music, which has been a lot of fun to research. I’ve been downloading some Arabian classics and reading cool books. Once that paper is turned in, all that is left is finals week! I’ve been at LSMSA for three years, so after that initial shock of being at a new and so very different school, I settled in quite nicely, and it has been my home ever since. Now, things are kind of changing again, and it’s a little weird to have such a different perspective on my second home after two-and-a-half years of steadiness. I find myself being kind of sentimental about silly things, and it is harder and harder to kick my friends out of my room when we’re hanging out until the wee hours of the morning. Since this is the last time I be in this sort of intimate environment with these people (no one else is going to UA this year), I want to make the most of our time together. Well, I’ve just got to keep pushing until the end—I’ll sleep this summer.April 2010 ‘SUP! This week has been busy, busy, busy! Since the end of the semester is coming up, I have papers due and tests to take in all of my classes. Even with all of this work though, students are still finding time to lounge in the sun and enjoy the remaining weeks with their classmates. We also just had Blue and Gold Weekend. Friday night we were required to go to a presentation of our choice: a piano concert, a lecture of nuclear disarmament, a play put on by Theater Rep (the senior theater class at LSMSA), or a lecture about the Center for Preservation and Technology. I chose the piano concert. Everyone was heading to their chosen destination around seven, and by 7:15, the piano concert was almost full!! Northwestern hosts an International Piano series, and the guest pianist for their finale concert was Philipe Bianconi from France. I love going to recitals at NSU because they tend to invite exceptionally high caliber musicians, and Friday was no exception. Philipe Bianconi was AMAZING! I have seen some really good piano concerts and been impressed by wonderful music at NSU many times, but Bianconi was even better! The way that he approached playing the piano seemed so different than everyone else, and I was entranced for the entire performance. It was mind-blowing! What was really cool is that after the performance, he came out to the reception, and I got to meet him!!!!! Besides being the best pianist I have ever seen, he was also the nicest and most humble person I have ever met! HE WAS SOO AWESOME! Saturday, the students who worked on a Distinction, which is a special project that takes a lot of time and work that they do BESIDES all of their other schoolwork, had a chance to present. There were people presenting projects in math, science, literature, history and art. My favorite was my best friend Beth’s presentation (I am not biased at all!). Beth collected data on words in the English language, and then analyzed it to see how, like a computer code, our language seems to be becoming more efficient. Her project was based on the work of some professional linguist/mathematicians, but the database she created was almost fifty times the size of theirs, so her work was much more in depth. I was so impressed! The rest of the weekend flew by, and there are only 24 days left until I graduate, so things are getting crazy! I’ll include a link to Philipe Bianconi—he is worth watching. Also, he will be opening the season for the Baton Rouge Symphony-Orchestra, and everyone should go see him September 16 (I’ve already bought my tickets!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWHjg0rGQbw April 2010
Over the break, I had the opportunity to visit University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for the first time, and I LOVED IT!
April 2010 This weekend was pretty action-packed! We started the weekend with one of my favorite biannual events: Open Mic Nite!! Student Activities Board takes over Caddo lobby and decorates it to give it a more comfortable kind-of-coffee-house vibe. They borrow art from students to cover the coke machines, use everybody’s lamps instead of the regular florescent lighting, and set up sofas and beanbag chairs around a small stage area in the front. Anybody can do anything onstage: tell jokes, sing a song, play an instrument, dance. My personal favorites are the musical acts because I am always pleasantly surprised by my fellow students. All sorts of musicians come out of the woodwork with crazy guitar skills or a secret piano talent, and it is so awesome to see them perform. I love learning new things about my peers! My friend, Laura, and I LOOOOOVE Open Mic Nite! We have, without fail, performed one or two songs every single time. We usually hang out for about an hour, decide we need to do a song, run to the computer labs to look up lyrics, practice for ten minutes, run and sign up to go onstage, then sing our hearts out, and decide to do another. It’s a nice cycle. Open Mic Nite is a cool way to spend a Friday night. Hanging out with my friends, eating cupcakes and pretzels, watching my classmates perform: not half bad, eh? It was kind of sentimental because this was our last Open Mic Nite as students, but since we both have siblings coming to LSMSA next year, maybe that doesn’t need to be the end of mine and Laura’s involvement…. ~Watch out Open Mic 2010-2011! Laura and I are coming back!
This week is looking like its going to be lovely! The weather is finally warming up (it will get up to 70 every day!!!), and I have nothing but time on my hands! Kind of. I still have homework and tests, but for the past few weeks, I have had intensive euphonium practicing in anticipation of my senior recital, and now that I have performed, I feel like I’ve added an extra 15 hours to my week. It was really cool that I got to use the new recital hall! We have fancy-pants recording equipment, so I arrived an hour early so I could do a sound check and help set up the microphones. I warmed up with my accompanist, the LSMSA piano teacher, Dr. Jones, and then it was time to begin! I had managed to stay relaxed all weekend, but those few minutes before I began were nerve-wracking. I could hear the audience, but I did not realize how many of my friends and teachers had come to support me until I walked onto the stage. Seeing all of those people sitting in the audience was the most wonderful experience: I realized the endless amount of love and support the people at LSMSA have to offer. Before I could believe it, the concert was over. It went by so quickly! My family had come up in the morning to help set up everything for the reception in the Center for Performance and Technology’s big lobby. It was awesome! There were all of these delicious cookies my younger sister and mom had baked, and the company could not have been beat! It was so great seeing friends that had graduated last year and my family and the faculty members that had turned out. A lot of work went into my recital, but it was TOTALLY worth it! I had so much support throughout the entire process from my friends and family but especially my music teachers. Having such a wonderful experience with my senior recital is greatly due in part to the work of my teachers, but I don’t think there is a more supportive group of people anywhere else in the world. I love this school! February 2010 This past month has been really exciting! The day before we got out for our Mardi Gras break, it snowed!!! Not just a few little flakes, but the real deal! At one point, we measured TWELVE INCHES!! I applied for a scholarship that would pay for me to go to Egypt this summer and was chosen to be a semifinalist. The next step in the process was an interview over the phone, so I was in my room Thursday night when it started snowing heavily. People kept knocking on my window and pointing to the snow, but it had kind of been snowing/raining all day, so I just waved them away. At the end of my interview, I got up and looked out my window where I saw AN INCH OF SNOW!!!!!!!!! As soon as I hung up, I put on a few jackets, some fuzzy socks as mittens and my raincoat and ran outside to frolic with everyone else in the snow. Everywhere I looked there were students experiencing the magical weather: people built their first snowmen, had their first snowball fights, made their first snow angels. I played at Caddo for a while, but then decided to head over to Prudhomme to meet up with some other friends. On the way, I called my parents and gave them a play-by-play of my walk to the boys’ dorm. “Mom! There is snow everywhere! Even the dumpsters look immaculate and beautiful! Mom! I just ate snow off of a tree! Dad! All of the cars have two inches of snow! Dad! I can wipe the snow off the cars and when it lands ‘poof'! Mom! I just threw a snowball at a tree! Dad! I am walking in snow! WOW! It’s so amazing!” This was my first time ever seeing real snow, and I was incredulous. My parents laughed because they lived in Pittsburg before I was born, so they knew what it was like, but I could not believe my eyes. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen! When I got to Prudhomme the friends I had gone to meet were wet, cold and ready for a break, so I ran to the backyard of the dorms to play with whoever else was out there. Together, we built my first snowman, knocked over our first snowman, and then built a snowdog that looked more like a snowcat. The snow was falling pretty heavily, so even though we would run all over the ground and make the snow muddy, a few minutes later, it would be pristine white again. The next morning, I woke up early to go walk around campus with a friend, so we were tramping around the backyard and around the campus “Ooh-ing and Ah-ing” all that we saw. It was glorious. Happy New Year! It is so nice to be getting back into the swing of school! We started classes this Tuesday, the twelfth, and I am really enjoying my new schedule. During this last semester at LSMSA, I am taking all sorts of fun classes. My first class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is economics. It is taught by a Northwestern State University professor, and is shaping up to be a really interesting class. Instead of a mathematical approach to macroeconomics, Dr. Picht is teaching a more easily applicable sort of class, moving a more liberal arts sort of direction. We’ll be studying a number of topics and all the while publishing a column on The New York Times online edition. I am so excited to participate in such a cool class! I am also taking my first visual arts class at LSMSA. It is taught by a fairly recent addition to the faculty, Mr. King. Even though we have only had two days of class, I am already so psyched about the semester! Mr. King is so in love with art and his enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. He has promised to give us the “art skills” we need by the end of the semester, but until then, I need to keep working on making my spheres a little more spherical. All in all, it should be an awesome semester! |
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