Ramblings

::**NOTE**::
I needed to write this and share it with my friends to help sort out my thoughts, and hopefully to receive some guidance. By the time I was done writing out my thoughts it had become a short novel, so please don't feel pressured to read this unless you really just want to know what's in my brain and keeping me from sleeping! I love you all :)
::**NOTE::**

I was about ready to pass out, until I actually, you know, tried to go to sleep.

Lying in bed my brain has been going nuts. I'm not the type to generally release his sentiments and thoughts out in to the blogosphere, as it were, but for some reason I just feel it will slow down my thoughts a bit.

I'm almost done being a kid. People have been calling me mature all my life, but I have not lived an incredibly mature life. I've never been a driven individual. In elementary school I would ace everything done in class, and I would hide my home work in piles so my parents didn't know I wasn't doing it. I didn't do this because homework was hard, or even really because I had better things to do. I just wasn't driven, I never felt the desire to excel in school that some people feel, even though I enjoyed getting good grades and learning. I think part of the fun of it for me was that I could pull it off while still slacking so much. I could start researching for a Kael Research Paper four days before it was due and still get a better grade than most of my class-mates. I finally started to notice that I enjoyed this towards the end of high school. Part of it was because I never focussed on anything, and when I put off assignments till the last minute it FORCED me to focus on that assignment and only that assignment, whereas if I left myself time I couldn't get myself to focus like that.

My first career aspiration was to play basketball in the NBA. When I realized I was going to be far too short to play in the NBA my dad told me I should get an MBA. I decided I wanted to be a business-man just like my dad. When asked why my answer has always been simple, "I want to be rich". From a young age my brain deduced that if I was a successful businessman I would get rich, get a hot wife, have wonderful children in a nice house and live happily ever after. I've always been relatively good at math, speaking, writing, and leadership skills, so I should do OK in business. But I know a lot of people much better at math. I know more charismatic people, I know better writers... my claim has always been that while individuals excel in certain areas, I am special because of my abilities in all of these areas, making me a jack-of-all-trades type with the propensity to lead the specialists.

Then I got to BCC. By the time I got to BCC I was already a little ways in to my well-planned Business Associates. It just so happened that in that first Fall Quarter I ended up in a Music Theory class with a Professor Julie Denninghoff. Julie told everyone in her class they should join the Concert Choir. I had always sung in my church choir, and well before I was 16 men old enough to be my father wanted to sit next to me so that they could follow me on their part, I had gotten bored of it. After my first day of Concert Choir I was excited. At church I was the best male voice that reliably showed up, and in Concert Choir I felt I was one of the least prepared students there, it felt like everyone there was better than me and that energized me. Then I sat next to Justin Reeves and Todd Sittig. They were both amazing, I wanted to get as good as they were.

It was then that I started my voice lessons, towards the end of that first fall quarter I started private instruction for the first time with Kent Banton. When I went to Banton I thought I knew how to sing. I thought my range was pretty good. I was an idiot :) Again, I was not driven. I went to my weekly voice lessons, but never practiced anything he gave me in between the lessons, but even then he managed to teach me a lot. Then Kent started asking me about my career plans. I told him I planned to go in to business. He told me that he didn't want to change my life plans, but he strongly encouraged me to pursue a career in music. He's had several students who wanted to go in to music who he has told to have back up plans or look in to other options because they weren't very good. According to him I was one of the fastest learning students he had ever taught. I would instantly pick up things that he would spend weeks teaching to other people. I found this neat and it made me happy, but it still didn't REALLY grab my attention.

The first song Kent gave me that I actually practiced was a Broadway style song. For some reason the style just clicked with me in a way that the classical, madrigal, jazz, and folk songs just hadn't. It was fun, I could get in to the character and really feel the song. Then Spring Quarter came up, and I auditioned for a Disney solo. After my audition Tom asked me about my plans for the next year and encouraged me to audition for Celebration. As I left the room I overheard him saying to Julie "He has a nice voice", exciting words come from the "all-mighty" Tom the director. Over the course of the year I had become friends with many of the kids in Celebration, but there is always a gulf between celebration kids and non-celebration kids. They practically live together, it can't be helped, but I wanted that. I wanted to be part of a group like that. Having gone to my tiny public school I had a couple friends, but I had never in my life been part of a close knit group like Celebration was.

I asked my parents what they thought. I would be turning 19 in December of the next year, during Winter Quarter. I would be finishing my degree in Fall Quarter. My idea was to do celebration, finish my degree in Fall, and then take some more theory classes and learn more about music for the rest of the year. My parents didn't want me to put off my mission, and told me I probably shouldn't.

I almost did it anyway. I almost auditioned. Then my dad told me that he was putting a company together, and it would be taking off RIGHT in the spring of 2010, and that I needed to leave in January so I could be back in January and work in this new company. And because of that I should not do Jazz choir. So I didn't audition.

By the time the next school year had started this company that had kept me from joining celebration had already disappeared in to smoke. I thought the new chamber choir would be a replacement. I thought it would be challenging and we'd be a close group and work on hard stuff. The music was easy. The audition was a sham, every one got in, and none of us got to know each other. I was disappointed and I was angry, and I felt resentment towards my mission. I had given up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of an award winning jazz choir that competes all over the nation instead of pushing my mission a stupid 5 months. And this anger is the primary reason I didn't leave in January, because I resented the mission and I was not ready to go on it yet, so I stayed. Winter quarter was pretty boring, with more resentment that I wasn't in Celebration.

Then spring quarter came along, and I heard that Julie thought I should audition to be in the Musical. I had never done a musical in my life before, but I knew that Musical Theater music was my favorite kind to sing, and I had been in plays when I was younger, so I decided to give it a shot.

The beginning of Night Music was like the beginning of Concert Choir. It was that same shift from me feeling like one of the best to me feeling like one of the worst. Everyone in the cast knew each other from before the show, and I felt like an outsider trying to step in. I remember the first thing Brittany said to me, on our first read-through, she said "So I hear you can sing". Within a week I knew that that didn't mean a thing. I watched Cady and Lindsay and so many of the other cast in awe as they acted, and I got that feeling again of "I want to be that good" I felt driven. My voice teacher was amazed at how much my voice started improving all of a sudden, since I started working and working. Over the course of Night Music I lost 10 pounds, 2 inches off my waist, and my highest note went from F or F# to a belted Ab, as well as my entire upper range increasing in strength. When Night Music started I was a baritone, who would rather stay down low. Now that night music is over I was given the Jesus solo in our Concert Choir's Godspell show, a rather tenor part, and I will soon be Pippin, another (second) tenor part. For the first time a couple things happened to me. I felt very driven to get better and work on something, and by the end of the show I felt like I was part of a group.

Then I had some people working on the show who know what they're talking about pull me aside and say, essentially, "Ted, we don't say this to many people, but you should really think about going in to Musical Theater. You're a natural on stage and it's been very fun to watch you in this show". My voice teacher had been telling me all along that I should be pursuing a career in music, and now some other very honest and trusted people were telling me more specifically that I should look in to musical theater, the only genre of music that had ever grabbed my interest like this. I started to wonder where I should be going with my life. I've always assumed I would need to be rich to be happy, but I know a lot of people with a lot less money who are a lot more happy. How much do I really need to be happy? I need a car that works, a house that's comfortable, probably a computer for some games and eventually a healthy happy family. Do I really need to be rich to get that? No.

This year I've gotten to know even more of the Celebration kids than last year. I've become friends with the majority of the group, and Megan even called me an "honorary member", which means a lot to me. But I'm still an outsider. I didn't eat breathe and sleep the pieces that they worked on together all year long, or go on the trips or sing in the concerts, and I'm still here. I could've done it, and I see no problem with when I am leaving on my mission now. I bitterly regret not auditioning for jazz choir, and that scares me. I don't want to regret something this way again. If I keep on "the course" and go to school, and get my desk job, and spend the rest of my life slaving away on contracts, what if I feel this regret when I think about what might've happened if I had pursued the first thing in my life that has driven me to work my hardest. I don't want that to happen.

Then I went to go see Aida. I've never seen a real show before, this was my first. After the show Justin and Cady were talking about how it did not make them feel inadequate in the least as actors, Cady saying she could out-act them, Justin that he could out-act and out-sing them.

I felt EXACTLY the opposite. When I watched Aida I just got this feeling of "I want to be able to do that! I want to be able to sing like that! I want to be able to dance like that! I want to be good enough to be on that stage, in front of this sold out house and get paid for it!" Before I went to Aida I felt like without going in to Musical Theater I would be able to work at local theaters like village... but the entire cast had huge resumes, most from all over the country. I'm not at a level right now where I could compete with those people. I feel like I'm capable of it, but I would have to dedicate myself to it. I also feel like it's the only thing I've found so far in life that I COULD dedicate myself to like that.

I can't undo my life up to this point. I am extremely grateful that I did not leave in January, that I have had this opportunity to do Night Music and Pippin, to discover something that not only do I find extremely fun and fulfilling, but I also feel like I'm actually GOOD at! The issue is when I come home. When I come home from my mission is when I need to choose the course of my life, it's when I need to choose where I'm going to school and what kind of degree I want to get. While I'm on my mission I shouldn't be thinking about this too much, so it falls to my brain now to think about it, and thus I can not sleep.