Week 8: The end of the beginning

Well, the first round of classes have now ended. I guess I’m not new to this anymore. After a final day of performance class, and some bowling with some classmates afterwards, I am trying to have a new outlook on how I go about my new life here. I cannot live it the way I lived my previous life, otherwise I will find myself trapped in a box of nostalgia. During this first round, I have (hopefully) made some new friends, gained some new views on the world and myself, and learned which voices in my head to listen to primarily. I have seen that my fellow cinema majors are a lot like me in many ways, some that I wasn’t prepared for. However, we are still individuals, each with different styles and backgrounds, yet we have all ended up here. Our roads leading here are very different, yet we meet here at this intersection for however short a time, and hope to pick up some set of skills which will guide us on the rest of our travels. Not all those skills can be learned in a classroom. Some come to us in the form of experiences. Experiences like talking to a classmate about hard drive failures for twenty minutes straight, or walking out of your room on a Saturday night to find a floormate cooking bacon in a George Foreman, or when you go on a McDonalds run late at night with some people and they play music with the dirtiest lyrics they could find, and then immediately play Jesus music to “cleanse themselves”.

Moving forward, I must attempt to have these experiences without getting pushed back by how I used to be and how I want things to be. Opening my mind is one of the greater challenges of college life, something that a community college cannot give you. This is a challenge I accept going forward. A new life awaits me. It’s here now. Time to embrace it.

Nostalgia is a Trap – Performance 3

The plan outline and score: outline

The documentation: https://youtu.be/AcaLt8XX-uc

The projected video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sbmM3g9CghUuwA4P9

This was by far my favorite project, because I got to put so much of myself into it. I spent hours digitizing old tapes and looking through already digitized footage to find the right clips to include. I thought about how I felt this past year, when I realized that much of my home life has gone away, and that it was time for me to start over. I also looked back on the blog entries to think about how to show how I really felt. With autism, I have difficulty expressing myself to others, because I know my mind is different, but I can never know how different. While the class evaluated my performance, I was pleased that they picked up on the more subtle details of the message I was trying to convey. Some even brought up points that I hadn’t even thought of.

Week 7: Nostalgia is a trap

As I prepare my final presentation, I am looking through old tapes of mine from my childhood. This led me to think about the days gone by, and how I often long to go back there. I saw footage of me with my grandma and my best friend Tyler, both deceased. I looked at myself at times of which I am quite embarrassed at the way I used to behave. Through the years, it seems that only the positive memories have stood the test of time.

Last weekend, I went home to record a local production of The Rocky Horror Show. While I was there, I put up the same Halloween decorations at my house that I have put up for most of my life. Not much has changed with the appearance of my house in October. Some stuff has been added, but not much has been removed. I suppose it keeps me feeling young, when there was still some magic left in the holiday. With the numerous young kids in our neighborhood, I like knowing that I can give that magic to the current generation.

However, looking at all of this today paints a slightly different picture. The orange paint has faded off of many of the plastic pumpkins that line our yard, and the inflatable Frankenstein that stands in front of our door is now worthy of that name due to the number of homemade replacement parts needed to keep it running. It sags now, with not enough air blowing from the weak motor to compensate for the holes that have been ripped in the fabric. Times have changed, and so have I. I don’t like to think that though. I am not good with change. I suppose this is as good a year as any to embrace a new life, especially since not much remains of my old life. My friends have either died or moved away, the activities I once knew are no longer available. Even my high school was renovated this year, and most of the faculty I knew well there have either retired or transferred, so nothing remains of the life I lived just two short years ago. I can’t go back, and truthfully, I shouldn’t want to. This is the message I hope to convey with my next presentation. Due to my love for nostalgia, I often feel the need to cling to the past, but what I have really done is trap myself in a box of memories, that don’t allow the freedom to change everything and create new ones. It is difficult to start over when you can’t let go of the past.

Week 6: Family Weekend Perspectives

This past weekend was Family Weekend, and my parents made the drive to campus on Friday and stayed until Sunday. A lot happened that weekend, even though most of the scheduled events were not properly advertised. By now, my life here is pretty well established. However, I have only been seeing it from my point of view. This past weekend, I got to see my parents’ view on my college life.

On Friday, I took them to Fazoli’s, a fast food style Italian restaurant on the other side of town. My goal was to show my parents my favorite places to eat on and around campus, and try out a few new ones with them. After this, we went to the stadium for a screening of Incredibles 2, which started 15 minutes ahead of the advertised time. My mom was upset by this, as was I that the start time was improperly advertised.

Saturday was game day. I had been given the opportunity to prepare a video to be shown on the big screen at halftime during the marching band performance. The video was a tribute to Aretha Franklin, to accompany the band’s playing of Respect and Think. I was thrilled at this opportunity, and also quite nervous, since big chances like this have usually had something go wrong along the way. After the morning band rehearsal I took my parents to the Greek Sing competition, not knowing what to expect. What we saw was a quite entertaining series of performances from the various fraternities and sororities on campus. It was clear that they were not vocally trained, but some of them had some cool moves. Then, we went to Bandana’s Barbecue, where I tried all six of the barbecue sauce flavors they had at the table. After this, we stopped by the comic con at the student center, but none of us were very interested in that. I am not that into comic books, and my parents did not understand what was happening around them. It was alright, because it was almost time for me to leave to get on my uniform and get ready for the game.

Halftime came and it was time for my video to be shown to the entire stadium. I didn’t get to see it myself because I was marching on the field, but I could see most of the audience looking at the screen instead of at us. I was quite pleased, because that is what I was going for. After the game, my parents and I went to Quatros, and my dad told me that my video lined up perfectly with the band’s performance. It still doesn’t feel like that really happened, since I didn’t see it first hand. It all feels like a dream.

At last Sunday came, and after a brunch at Lentz, my parents left for home. I was relieved that the madness of Family Weekend was finally over, but also it was a new experience for both me and my parents. Showing them my college life allowed me to think about it in terms of my previous life, and compare and contrast the two. Things for me are very different here, but I embrace the change. Next week, I will go home for a shoot at a local theater, and I can put myself on the other end of the comparison.

Week 5: A Different Side of Things

It occurs to me that in these blogs, I have mostly been talking about social anxiety. However, that is only one of the many things that I am experiencing while here. This week, I want to bring things towards a different topic: exploring my surroundings.

One thing that gives me great peace is wandering around the buildings on campus, especially outside of peak hours. My favorite of course is Faner, with its many corridors and tricky floor plan. The building has a new surprise around every corner. There’s a museum, a courtyard on the second floor, and endless narrow hallways and winding staircases overlooking the rest of campus. It is easy to get lost in there, and this can be disorienting. When you exit a stairway, sometimes you don’t know where you’ll end up. I hope to master navigating that building before I graduate.

Many people, while wandering the Student Center, forget that it is actually a five story building. The first floor is home to the bookstore, the food court, and the bowling alley. However, after my wandering, I discovered a craft room in the basement, the conference rooms on the second and third floors, and another student run radio network on the fourth floor. Some may not be surprised to find this out, but I found it particularly interesting for some reason.

The campus does not only consist of buildings. As I write this, I am sitting out by the lake near Thompson Point. The lake is surrounded completely by the campus, and can be seen from most of the West Campus residence halls. The lake along with the Thompson Woods to the east are areas of campus make you forget that you are on a college campus. They offer an escape to nature and a way to escape the often fast paced college life.