College (pt1)
Left-Brain
A Fading Reality
Throughout my couple years in college, I became more and more disinterested in the heavy-duty engineering side of electronics. Where the instructor would draw a simple circuit diagram on the board on Monday and by Friday, we'd have spent all week analyzing, ad infinitum, all the gory details of the passive, capacitive and reactive loads present in a piece of wire or a blade of grass.
And all that math! Are you kidding me?!
Yikes...I just wanted to hook up a couple car speakers in the back of my '64 Dodge Dart and blast out Chicago Transit Authority as loud as humanly possible!
Color Blindness
I also struggled during labs when it came to identifying the color coded bands on resistors. I had all the colors perfectly memorized but just couldn't tell the difference between some of colors (like red, green, brown).
But the silver lining in this was that it taught me an early lesson in cooperation. I buddy'd up with a lab partner who struggled remembering the color codes - but, could see all the colors just fine.
We made a great team and aced all of our lab assignments in short order.
Right-Brain
So Use Both
After a fateful meeting with my advisor in college (telling me to "drop all those music classes"), I was forced to do some real soul searching and, honestly, it left me a little puzzled.
So, during a weekly one-on-one lesson with my trumpet professor, I mentioned my conundrum. To which he pondered for a moment (as all good college professors tend to do) and then--sort of just off the cuff--said, "What about something like audio recording? That's technical and musical, right?"
And that was it. That was ground-zero as they say. After that, I could see that my life was destined to travel these 2 diverse paths. One side, always leaning toward pragmatism and what "had" to be done. Taking care of the family and our emerging household. Being the responsible one.
While the other side, my creative side, ran amok. Writing, playing, designing, while enriching my soul doing the same with other creative folks. And being the irresponsible one.
At one time or another during my 2 years at State Cloud State, I was in as many as 3 Jazz Bands, the Symphony Band, Pep Band, Marching Band. Jeez, if they'd had a kazoo band I'd probably have joined that too!
These clips are from one of the Jazz Ensemble II concerts. (I'm the one playing the loudest - and highest)
