Erin’s blog

I've solved the problem of Joie and Heather and everyone else awesome leaving me next year. Drum roll please Nick...

I'm going to leave the country! (See what you two have driven me to?) I talked to the registrar today and she told me to find a program I liked and they would fix it so I could do a semester abroad next spring. I'm really excited! London is the place I'm looking into. How convenient, I'm going there in May, so I can scout out where the school would be and cool stuff like that. So somewhere in the midst of College Night and my senior recital I'll be planning my escape from the US to the UK.

On an unrelated note, I suddenly really want to move to the west coast when I graduate. For no apparent reason. I just want to. Once this London thing is secure maybe I'll start looking into that. I want to take a road trip out west to check it out. Come with me!

I went to Alex's (my half brother) 5th grade Christmas party today. He got up in front of the class to introduce Ben and me. He introduced me as "This is Erin and her favorite band is The Beatles." The entire class clapped, and I heard shouts of "Yeah, The Beatles are awesome!" and "Me too!". These kids were not born before 1997. It was really funny to get that kind of reaction and to realize that an entire class of 10-11 year olds think I'm cool for loving a band that was around in the 60s. One boy piped up with "I used to be one! Then I got a hair cut." It was the cutest thing ever and reaffirmed my decision to have at least four boys of my own. I'm sorry female species, I just don't enjoy you as much.

Later on tonight I was telling my dad and step-mom about movies I'd seen recently. I told them about I Am Legend and then I said that The Golden Compass was good. Alex turned to me and said with all his 11 year old seriousness "Erin, there's something you need to know about that movie. The Golden Compass is an anti-Christ movie." And then he gave me an "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner so as to prevent you from seeing it" look. It was such a weird moment. Here's this kid with half of my blood running through his veins and he's making such a close-minded blanketed statement without having read the series for himself, or even bothering to accept it for what it is - fiction. He will never have anything to do with it because it's "anti-Christ". Stuff like that just makes me really sad. It also makes me appreciate being raised mostly be my democratic feminist mother who encouraged me to think for myself and make my own decisions about what I wanted to read and believe in.

Ready for it?

Ready for it?

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users as of 9/30/07. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but didn't finish, and underline what you watched the movie of but didn't actually read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and prejudice
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler's wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels and demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The sound and the fury
Angela's ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

How are all the Jane Austen books on here? What do people read now?

My beautiful one year old professional line clarinet has a crack in the upper joint and is now unplayable.

I picked out my recital music today! We're thinking of a January date, so everyone keep January open.

It amazes me how a man who obviously has no drive or desire to teach has landed a position as Head of Instrumental Education. There was so much that was wrong, in my opinion, about what he told us in Wind Ensemble today. Starting with his opening line "I'm not here to teach you, I'm here to rehearse," and ending with "I don't expect all the notes to be right, but you should come in here at least knowing the rhythm." First of all, I can play every damn note on my horn. There, notes are all out of the way. By the third week of school there should be no wrong notes. Now, I'm really good at rhythm, but those couple of measures in Ghost Train had me cross-eyed. Literally. It does me no good to sit and practice a rhythm wrong on my own and come into class playing it wrong. That's where you come in, Dr. Cochran, with the "teaching" part that you despise so much. This is my fourth year in college, and I was having trouble. So what do you do with freshmen who have just come from a weak high school program? Get frustrated and yell and make them feel stupid? Because that's what happened. Someone tell me how that's productive?

When I look back at my college years (in two years) and try to remember everything I need to know to start my first job as a music educator, how come I have the feeling that Dr. Packwood is going to be the first person I think of? Shouldn't it be my actual education teacher? Heaven forbid.

I'm really a lot angrier than I sound, but you guys don't really need to hear my bitching. Back to my comfort zone: ice cream, wine, and America's Next Top Model.

I've finally decided to branch out from livejournal so woohoo, welcome to my Vox! Ok, so I really just wanted to keep up with Heather's life, and she's too cool for livejournal now. Catch you on the flip side! (Who says that anymore?)