D-String, Doughnut Sweater, Demi Plié

Tuesday: February 3, 2015

I began my morning at a solid 8 A.M. by practicing my cello for a little over an hour, hoping that tonight I will be able to come back to complete another hour or more. Currently, I'm halfway through the Cello Essential Elements Book I and just started Suzuki Book 1,exercise 2: French Folk Song. I mainly worked on the highest 2 strings the A and D string in first position and most of the "pieces", if one would like to honor a snip-bit of "Frere Jacques" as a piece, are pretty much on the D-string, hence that portion of my title.

After packing up my cello into its case, I head downstairs to grab breakfast which included Red Berry Cereal and a glass of water while reading the 5th TOUCH novel, taking my time to enjoy my morning routine.

I, then, rush back up to my room where I change into dark blue jeans, old faded converse, and a doughnut sweater with a vibrant turquoise colored shirt underneath. Promptly deciding that I did not want to wear my boot any more primarily because it wasn't exactly protecting my toe and since I was doing so much walking it was actually hurting a lot more than helping.

Anyway, I help my mom with lunch, an oven-cooked meal of pepper steak with vegetable rice, and quickly eat at 11:30 to be out the door by 12. My first class, American History, starts at 12:45 and the first topic we cover is a our service project field trip taking place this Thursday at the Public Library. My professor starts his lecture where he left off last time, at Cornelius Vanderbilt involved with Railroads and continue to discuss Industrialization. Although this semester I have a different professor, I do enjoy his class, but I truly miss my last professor who was a phenomenal teacher and lecturer.

Regardless, I finish my class at 2:10, find my mom in the parking lot, and drive over to Starbucks to get a much needed Venti Vanilla Latte (a must-try for the coffee drinkers that enjoy just a bit of sweetness to their coffee but aren't exactly in the mood for a White Chocolate Mocha). Thankfully, my mom also drives me to my English class which is coincidentally in the Art Building, where I had a majority of my classes during Watauga Arts Academy this past summer. I wholeheartedly adore my new English teacher at Middle College, she is utterly phenomenal and I pretty much love her to death since I first sat in her class a month ago. At the moment, we have a student-teacher, Ms.Flowers, who is also very sweet and actually a pretty good teacher too. We've been doing a lot of interpretation of stories or poems, last week with Steinbeck and this week poems by e.e. cummings. We began our class with a "warmer", a term Mrs.Flowers uses, as a beginning activity of our class to introduce us to pretty much what we will be doing through the rest of class. Our warmer today was a picture of two signs, one stating "Hunters Please Use Cation When Hunting Pedestrians Using Walk Trails" and the other "Attention The Toilet is Only For Disabled Elderly Pregnant Children THANK YOU for shopping with us!!!!!!" and we had to rewrite the phrase with punctuation while still maintaining the concept of it being a sign, not sentences, and then state how punctuation could change the entire meaning of a text. Then we were split into groups to analyze, annotate, discuss, and answer questions of several e.e.cummings' poems and for homework, we were assigned to create a concrete poem (a poem that takes shape of the message of the poem) and to mimic cummings' style.

After English, which ended at 4:35, I had my Ballet class that began at 5 in the Dance Building. I changed into a lavender colored camisole and black cashmere shorts printed with red and pink flowers. Because my foot is still wrapped, I did not wear my ballet slippers because they restricted me from pointing my foot. We warmed up with bar-work then moved the bars to be able to do a combination, followed by across the floor work (a fancy term meaning that we just do a routine repeatedly from the corner of the room diagonally to the other). Since I hadn't eaten anything since 11:30 and had pretty much only coffee to keep me going since then as well, I was hungry and probably dehydrated so after Ballet, I walked to subway to grab a 6 inch, Spicy Italian on Italian Herbs and Cheese Bread, with pepper-jack cheese, jalapenos, and spicy brown mustard (ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS). Good ending to a good day :)

Katya Podkovyrodd

"The September Journalist"