Having been lost in band camp hysteria (okay, not really hysteria) for the last few days, I wake up this morning and know two things:

1. That I don’t know all the lyrics to “Can’t Touch This.”
2. I am still moving in about a week and I still don’t have all my stuff taken care of.

So it will be address changes and trying to contact someone to clean my apartment for me. I’m about where I was before I left for camp: I’m ready to be done with it all. Let’s review all the moves I’ve made in the last 6 years.

-Moved from home to college, taking two car loads of stuff with me.
-Moved back home for Christmas, with only one car load.
-Returned to college with same said car load to complete the second semester.
-Took all my stuff home to spend the summer back in New Mexico and work.
-Returned to school for my sophomore year, two car loads.
-Back home for Christmas.
-Back to the dorms.
-Into an apartment for the summer, which involved moving a super-dense TV made of lead and steel, but which was free. Summer classes abounding.
-Moved out of the apartment, back to the dorms.
-Home for Christmas and help my mom move to Texas with my brother.
-Back to the dorms.
-Moved back to New Mexico to live with my then best friend and his wife. A lack-luster summer, overall.
-Back to college.
-Instead of going home from the dorms, convinced my mother to let me get an apartment with her help. Saw her at Christmas, but took my stuff to a half-ass apartment shortly after that.
-Lived in the dorms for a year and a half until I moved in with Hat Boy at even more half-ass apartment (quarter-assed…).
-Moved to New Mexico in a slap-dash touch and go job with only 4 hours of sleep from the week before.

Sixteen moves, and I think I forgot a year in there. All this brings us to present day. This is not including the times I helped my mother move, twice, and when I helped family friends move. I’m sick of carrying heavy things. Oh well. It will be over soon enough.

The other RA’s are a hodge-podge of people, including one Mr. Bartelli, who claims to hail from south Texas, but maintains a very distinct and stereotypical Italian accent. It’s a point of comedy for me the Mr. Gonzales, who is working the same dorm as me.

Mr. Gonzales is a fraternity brother and a friend for the last several years. He’s hilarious, and I seem to get a good connection out of him that I don’t get out of many of the people I went to school with. We connect somehow. The best I can explain this is that we laugh at the same stuff and have the same intolerance for the same bullshit. We’ve been hanging out this camp, and its a good thing.

A good portion of band camp is revisiting old faces that I used to spend everyday with. Back then, when I was being a moody son of a bitch, I hated a good deal of these people. Some I have tolerated, and many I have come to regard with polite respect. A few have become friends. I suppose this is what maturity bears. I have met a few more people, and things are looking up for our socially awkward hero.

Band camp is about memories to some extent, as I have spent some of this week avoiding and freaking out over the Ex of Horrors for no known reason. I’m smiling at people, and generally avoiding making senseless small talk. I have little patience for it.

My mood is not improving. End transmission.

I managed to get up to town and check out my office. It’s messy up there and there are many things I don’t know what they do. All in good time, I’m sure. Lots of notebooks and drawers to go through to figure out what is what. But the big highlight was buying French for Dummies.

I took a year of french back in my junior year of high school, which was eight years ago, and needless to say, I’m rusty on my vegetables and basic conjugation. Hat Boy, having taken multiple years of French in high school and college, is a bit of a language fanatic, and has agreed to help me brush back up. He also wants to hone is skills. Sooner or later, I’d like to be able to hold entire conversations in French with him, and possibly with others.

I remember some years ago, when I was dating the doctor-to-be, he leaned in close to me one night and just whispered a long string of French in my ear, and like a middle-aged and recently divorced tourist, I fell for him. It was one of our more romantic moments, which, over four months, there were many.

Hopefully, in one or two years, I can get proficient enough in French to move on to other languages. Hat Boy wants me to learn Russian. I’m not opposed to it.

There are two boys in my care here that have never been to band camp before. Both, very sweet boys. Brothers. They are rooming together. It is obvious, just by watching them, that music and athletics are both important to them. One of them is apparently allergic to cedar.

There is a cedar tree just outside their window, and last night, with the fan sucking in fresh tree pollens, his chest seized up and he stopped breathing well. Nothing threatening, but scary. He didn’t even know he was allergic to cedar.

He was moved to a hotel for the night, just so he could calm down. Lucky, his father is attending the camp as a visiting director. He’s very fortunate. They had intended to move him to the other boys’ dorm, making him a very tall high schooler in the middle of a bunch of junior high kids, but he managed to get some allergy medicine that would calm things down. Again, fortunate.

Nice boys, the two of them. Genuinely excited about the music they are playing in their brass ensemble and, since one of them, at least, made All-State Band, genuinely enthusiastic about music. One of them is coming to this university in the fall, I believe. I’m excited for him.

These are the kinds of kids I like dealing with. Not too terribly geeky, but very good and very excited about what they do, not to mention attentive, polite, and probably willing to help without much provocation. I think most band directors would agree. And their father is a band director.

We went to the local outdoor musical yesterday. In the canyon just 8 miles outside of town, there is an amphitheater that has put on a historical musical about the Texas Panhandle in the mid-1800s when families were moving out to the west, looking for a claim to stake, and where cattlemen ruled like kings. It’s been going on for some 50 years. Believe it or not, this musical is called “Texas.” If you didn’t know this by the advertisements and billboards, you’d know by such rousing numbers as “We Invite you all to Come (to Texas),” “Texas Forever” and “Texas, Texas, Texas.”

This used to be a world class performance considering how half the cast and crew is home-grown and usually pretty green. However, having just revived itself from another version of the musical that was less spectacular and less inviting, they had a new cast of actors and dancers. Before, when they ran the original musical and not the less loved “Texas Legacies,” there was a regular set of actors that could be counted on the portray the lovable and boisterous Uncle Henry and Aunt Anna, as well as other lead roles. The dancing was superb, the pyrotechnics were just right, and the music was just one step below amazing, but fun nonetheless.

Last night’s performance featured fresh actors with seemingly little experience. The main role, farmer Calvin Armstrong, has a tonal quality to his voice that led him to deliver lines in near sing-song with a slight upturning at the end of his phrases like question marks. Uncle Henry sounded nearly like a voice over. Elsie, the leading lady and love of Calvin Armstrong, was silly and flamboyant, where before she was proper and reserved, a fitting description of a character meant to have escaped the wilds of the west before, only to return after finding true love in hardship.

One of the local University’s professors, the very school I attended, played Aunt Anna. Dr. Cloyce Kuhnert, while being a very accomplished and deserving vocalist, sings in the mezzo-soprano range normally, and the solo she has about midway through the song has a low, heavy quality and timbre that I don’t find desirable in female vocals. It was a hard sell.

The dancers, while doing fine, and some of them probably being professionals, were lack luster, especially on the women’s side. No snap, as they might say. And the only thing that got great reactions from the audience were the hot kisses and the scene with a burly, bare-chested Calvin Armstrong, which evoked a few choking sounds as the lights came up from black.

Overall, this musical was not the highlight of this band camp day. I hope they improve upon it for next there.

There is no air conditioning in these dorms. We have fans, we have open windows, but the spaces where there is no active air flow is stifling at best. This is part of band camp. My mother often says that the two hottest weeks of the year are during this band camp. It’s no wonder. Why not? Pile 1,000 kids into unair-conditioned dorms and consider it a prime prize for Murphy’s Law.

That said, I sat and read my book in front of an air conditioner located in a distant lobby for some two hours. Good relaxing time. And now that night is here, it is even easier to get the temperature down.

Tomorrow, we begin classes. Today was just auditions, and it was a mostly empty day. Tomorrow, our business starts and the kids are going to be very busy. Idle hands, as they say.

If it wasn’t comforting enough to know that these kids have mostly been here before, I have a three kids that were in my dorms last year. This is good in two instances, where the kids were very manageable, polite, decent. In the third instance, we have a slight…oh well, he’s not so bad, I suppose. He’s one of those kids that gets caught up in the moment, caught up trying to have fun, and gets out of control. This type of teenager is referred to as a “boy.” Shocking, no?

I pulled him aside with parents present to discuss the events last year that got him so riled up. We agreed they would not happen again, and I trust him.

To explain, last year, this young man hung out with some unruly sorts who found great enjoyment in making me angry. Reminds me of my past percussion classes, thinking about it now. Anyway, this guy would get completely out of control and, before too long, we had to ban anyone else from going in his room at all. No one. It helped to some extent. For the most part, he really liked to stay up late and talk to his roommate who was also a friend from home. That boy isn’t here this year, but the guy that he’s rooming with now is one of the boys he hung out with last year. This years roommate is a good guy, and I trust that I can help reign in our subject person with his help.

I’m a year older and a year wiser. I’m ready.

When I was in college, there was a guy that I had developed a very strong crush over. He was genuinely nice, attractive, a worldly man, and very confident in his life. Or so it seems from where I was standing. He recently came out as gay. Many people suspected it for years, and out of respect, I refused to listen to the rumors. That’s just how I roll.

However, after hearing the rumors made real, I could do nothing but shake my head. I should be glad that he was able to be honest with himself and finally face all the people that had ridiculed him for years. I should be proud that he was able to do that. I should respect him for that. I don’t. I only have anger for him that it took him this long, as if it were my place to decide it.

I had confessed my care and concern for him a while back after a rather humiliating party incident where he was dared, drunkenly, to expose himself to me. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was, and I told him as much. I rarely talked to him after that. I couldn’t talk to him now. And I harbor so much hate for him given recent news…why? I don’t know… I just don’t know. As with so many things in my life, it is likely internal. That said, part of me still feels cheated.

I am not Australian. Surprise! However, digging around revealed that the Australian government is federative constitutional monarchy under a parliamentary democracy. English: It’s a lot like America in concept.

Today’s article at The Wild Hunt addresses World Youth Day, an annual event sponsored by the Catholic Church. It’s their version of a revival, though I’m sure there will be less hallelujahs and more alcohol. Well, maybe not.

The Australian government sets up some laws that dictate that no one is to do anything to “annoy” the people attending World Youth Day. Translation: Don’t pester the Catholics. Now, in a government based on some freedom concepts, they are told they can’t hold a protest or even be slightly derogatory. We’re talking thousands of dollars in fines being issues per instance. Hardly the situation we’d like to see in our country.

My best friend is Catholic. I laughed at an article from Homosecular Gaytheist earlier and he asked me to read it to him. Essentially, it bashed Catholics over the idea of transubstantiation, calling them stupid and ignorant and a slew of other words. First, while the author might be right in essence, calling names is wrong and he’s a jerk for doing it.

Anyway, my friend was a bit offended about the article, and rightly so. However, despite his belonging to a mainstream religion and despite him being my best friend, I don’t think the Catholic church deserves special treatment here or anywhere. You want to protest something, that should be your right. Hell, it’s Homosecular Gaytheist’s right to be so outwardly spoken, and its Hat Boy’s right to be rude right back. No fists swinging: all’s well.

Protest on, Aussies!

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity has probably picked up on the fact that I’m a rather social person. Wait, no that’s not right. Call me a player. Wait, that’s not it either. Promiscuious? Well…

Okay, how about: prolific. My dating/”private life” has been pretty prolific this last year. That is what it is, and there is no really explaining the why. I consider myself lucky just to be getting the sex I’m getting, cause who wants less sex? I mean really?

I recently went out with this guy I was dating for a while about a year ago. N is a great guy, an special education teacher where I’m gonna be working in the Texas Panhandle, and we had hit it off before. Unfortunately, alcohol was involved at one point before, and I’ll just let you figure out what happened next. After that, we stopped talking for reasons I don’t think either of us know. It was mutual.

We went to lunch at Applebee’s, had a good conversation, very friendly, very pleasant. I will definitely be keeping his number around for a while longer. I’d like to see where it goes.

It’s just interesting to think that I could end up spending more time with him while I’m sleeping with this other guy in town. I imagine I’ll pick on or the other, naturally. No need creating a fuss. Then there was the reporter who seemed like he’s like to take me out sometime. For years I’ve wanted to find a nice guy, blah blah blah, but when it comes down to actually being around that guy for very long, I get caught up in the details and end up telling him goodbye. It’s an imperfect system, but I wouldn’t have shared a lovely morning romp in the sheets yesterday before my lunch date it it hadn’t been for this little disposition of mine. (Look at me downplay my commitment issues!)

I spent some time today catching up with a friend, where she told me her house had flooded twice this summer, leading to major repairs both times. My little dating problem is a pleasant problem to have by comparison.