Not a whole lot been happening on the ‘ol quality-low these days. I sometimes contemplate taking this site down. I definitely need to find a way to re-invent it. I am becoming a little bored with the blogging process.
Next week I start my last week at unnamed technical college. I cannot say that I am excited to be graduating because I don’t have anything lined up yet. I will be happy when I walk out of those doors and never return, though. It has been a mostly unhappy experience attending unnamed technical college, and anyone who has read this site knows that already so I won’t go into any more detail.
When I enrolled I had some lofty ambitions that now seem kind of impossible. I don’t know if I will ever afford moving out of Virginia, but at the moment I can only hope that I can manage to survive and pay my student loans. I have to figure out a way to pay them off that doesn’t involve me working myself to death. There has got to be a way, I can’t be the only one experiencing this. (Any Berklee grads out there with student loans that would like to share with me their methods of survival?)
I know I have said all of this before in one way or another but I trace back all of these mistakes I’ve made and they all lead to how ill-prepared I was in high school. School in any form, does not work for me. If I ever have kids I don’t know if I can honestly look them in the eye and say you have to go to college, you have to get a degree and you have to do this right after high school. I have seen little indication that my degrees or the degrees held by my friends and colleagues have done anything for them. My music degree is the reason I am severely in debt, and therefor the reason I am pursuing a career in the IT field, which is a distraction from what I really have wanted to be doing the whole time– which is music. I know of private instructors in this area that are doing exactly what I was doing and they are now making more profit because they don’t have these loans. You don’t need a degree in the music industry. Most of the best players around here have other gigs and I find it almost humorous that my full-time pursuit of the discipline has forced me to a lifestyle in which I barely touch my instrument. I would have been better off attending Berklee for a year or two, finding a teacher I really loved and studying with him and playing in bands while I worked a 9 to 5.
There is a student at the GSA who is attending Berklee next year and, through cumulative scholarship awards, he is getting three years for free. Three years! That’s unbelievable. This probably doesn’t cover room and board, but that is one chunk of change he doesn’t have to worry about. Now this kid has oodles of talent I didn’t have, but he also has a lot more guidance than I ever did. If there is one thing I needed at that age it was someone (with a music background) to tell me what I needed to be working on and how I needed to be going about accomplishing it. I didn’t have it. I think I still need it! My high school guidance counselor told me Berklee would be a mistake (ironic) and that I would never get in anyway. That’s the extend of the advice I received.
When I think about how the reason some of my good friends are more musically successful than I am is that their parents just happen to make more money than mine do and could afford to pay for their educations out of pocket, it kind of bums me out. God knows those guys deserve to be successful because they work hard for what they get and they could just as easily have done nothing after graduation, but, without that major obstacle they were able to jump right in the game and kinda do whatever was necessary to make their dreams happen. In two years I will be thirty and with no major accomplishments to show since I graduated college. Music moves further backseat every day, and it breaks my heart that it’s all because of this debilitating student loan debt.
Then again, maybe it’s a choice. I really want to start taking lessons again because I feel like I need some really hardcore Anthony Vitti / Whit Browne type to just kick my ass and make me work on the bass again. Whit always told me I think too much. He’s absolutely right. I think too much. This stupid website is a testament to that. Music should be about having a good time. It shouldn’t be work. I need to be playing.
0 Responses to “Nothing New”