I am.
Music is my talent, but that is not what I am studying.
I am studying something I enjoy, well, something that I enjoy more than say, trudging through Microsoft software.
Nevertheless, music is the activity that comes so naturally, I don't have to practice it for almost a year and I can still pour out my soul.
To some extent, it just happens.
Give me a set of chords and a beat and I'll make a melody.
Stick me in a blues band and I'll open my soul and pour out feeling.
I'm not even thinking.  Simply doing; another appendage of my body to swing around gracefully.
Although, sometimes I am thinking, but only for a bit, maybe to think of something new, and then run with it.  Doing.

When I was in the school band here, I did not practice outside of the class because I learned it during class time.  I stayed in the band because it kept me practicing, until I couldn't stand it anymore.  The pieces we played were crap, and the director never taught anything. 


<rant>
Recently, the director let me know that he has been forced to teach people how to improvise
I responded, with the word "good", and thought to myself "finally; did it take my leaving to invoke that, or how long would it have taken for that to happen anyway?".
</rant>

I was in that band for a couple of years before I left.  Afterwards, I did not practice due to lack of time and that left over animosity that came with leaving the band.

This ease and talent is troubling me.  Music is very difficult for some people.  Should I have focused on this?  Should I have left computer science in the dust and sharpened my talent?  It may be late to ask these questions, but they still reside within me and I cannot ignore them.

I chose computer science for a practical reason.  I'm not fantastically "good" at it, like those who attend MIT or some technical school.  People are not running after me for my talents in this field.

I chose it because I grew up from a family of musicians, and have observed hardship, audiences with a lack of appreciation, and a discrepancy between pay and ability.  I never observed success, in terms of fame or recognition; the way most people see success.  It is possible that is not relevant.  Success may be simply enjoying the performance, since that much has definitely been achieved.  Though, I didn't want to be stuck with that life.  So I chose something that I enjoyed enough so I can do it every day; but since music is my talent, I have to keep it around.

And here I sit with three giant emotions, all fighting for my chemical balance: sadness, blistering joy, and the absence of anything; that empty feeling.
I could be feeling this way because I just haven't let these emotions out.  I haven't practiced today, instead, I have been re-re-reading material for one class (mostly understood now) and doing a lab for another.

I feel this joy because I recently started practicing again.  Greg Ayers invited me to play with him and I have now jumped at the opportunity.  I always have enjoyed playing live in a small band setting.  It is an opportunity that I cannot pass up now, and it may lead me somewhere interesting.
I'm not quite sure why I'm feeling sadness, but something is wrong or left undone or left unsaid or something is not complete somewhere, and it is effecting me.  I feel empty because of what I am studying.  There is no emotion, though it may require creativity and may be construed as art and be elegant, it is devoid of feeling.

Part of that sadness and joy is being here, not graduating and such.  However, some recent events and realizations have steered me from those specific feelings.  There is definitely something that has a plan for me.  Most people refer to it as that male figure, God (why is it He anyway?). 

This plan has a very interesting theme of second chances, all stemming from the event of not graduating.  He provided a job and money over the summer.  He provided a fairly portable surround sound speaker that works nicely with my CD-ROM drive.  He provided me with the unwillingness to sell back any of my books, hence not needing to buy books for class, or notebooks for that matter.  He provided a second chance with the quite important classes, Databases and The Theory of Computation, a second chance with a friend, a second chance with programming a website, and a second chance with music.

Ultimately, I have no idea what is going on or what is going to happen or where I'm going to end up.  For some reason, it is a bit scary now, it was not before.  I'm not sure what changed.
I just needed to get that out, and now I don't feel so lost.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.