Storm

Ororo Munroe was born in New York City as a Kenyan Tribal Princess to her mother the queen and her father an African American photographer. While living along the Suez Canal in Egypt her home was crashed into by a stray plane and her mother and father were killed. She was left buried for days under the rubble of the house and there she developed very intense claustrophobia. It is so intense that if left in a small room she will cower into the fetal position and have a breakdown. She is rescued by the theif lord Achmed, she becomes a very accomplished thief before moving to the Serengeti.
She becomes a member of a tribe in the Serengeti where she develops her powers to control the weather. She deveops these powers to a great exent and becomes worshiped as a rain goddess by the tribe. Then she becomes a member of the Xmen team.
She has the power to control all forms of weather over quite a large area of land and is known to use her powers when she gets quite emotional. Her power extends to catastrophic proportions and she can sometimes control entire ecosystems on a cosmic level. See controls temperature, all forms of precipitation, humidity, generate lightning and other electromagnetic phenomena. She also has quite a grasp over various atmospheric pressures. She incites forms of meteorologic tempests, like hurricanes, and tornados and she can also disipate weather.

She has also demonstrated the control over natural occurences such as solar winds, cosmic storms, ocean currents, and electromagnetic fields.

Storm becomes the deputy leader of the Xmen and Xaviers right hand. She is for a time outranked by Cyclops and for a time it portrays storm as being in love with Xavier but later is downplayed as a father daughter type relationship. After Xaviers death in the Xmen three movie, Cyclops has gone away because he is depressed over Jeans death, she then becomes the new leader of the Xmen school.

Iceman

The suave superhero we all ogle at in the xmen movies, iceman, is none other than Robert Drake. Also known as Bobby.
His mutant powers developed during his teenage years, he was on a date with his girlfriend when the school bully tries to ruin it by taking his girl. Bobby gets pushed in the chest so he pushes back and all of the sudden the other guy is frozen solid. After no way to explain how he did it, Bobby was taken down to the station where he was going to spend the night in a jail cell. He gets broken out by Scott and Professor X who then take him home. His parents decide that it would be best if he would go to the school for a while. That was the last time Bobby ever sees his parents.
Iceman has the power to dramatically lower the thermal energy of water vapor in his general area and thus it freezes into ice. He doesn't just create ice like people think and he can't conjure water he simple just lowers the energy of what is there. He can project an ice like armor around himself that he uses as defense against attacks.
During his time at the school Bobby falls for the mysterious and crazy Rogue. She can absorb someone else's power for a short amount of time, rendering them useless. There were many many problems during that relationship, arising from Bobby's fear to open up to anyone with Rogue's insecurities about touching people because it starts to take there ability to perform life functions.
Bobby during one of the rough patches in his relationship with Rogue, falls in love with Kitty and after seeing them ice skate together Rogue leaves the school and goes to get the mutant cure shot. Kitty and Bobby date for sometime before she finds out that he had started emailing Rogue again, then she dumps him. Rogue return to the school without her powers but with Gambits powers. They hook up now that they can further their relationship... they fall for each other again until Rogue's old powers return.
Iceman's biggest enemy is Pyro, a member of Magneto's team. Pyro has the power to control fire, though he can not conjure fire. They were previous best friends before they developed mutant powers and now they have conflicting interests. This a truly classical display of ice versus fire.

Nightcrawler

This is one of the coolest mutants of the x-men, he's blue and he's crazy.
Nightcrawlers actual name is Kurt Wagner and of course he didn't have any of his powers at the time, but he still had his blue appearance. He was found half-dead on the side of a street by his foster mother Margali Szardos, who turned out to be a sorceress and gypsy queen. His alleged father, Eric Wagner and mother where found a short distance away from him dead.
Later on in his life it was proven that his mother was none other than Raven Darkholme, aka Mystique, and his father was the warlord Azael. Mystique through Kurt into a river because a crowd had found out about him. He was saved by his father and given to the Margali, a lover of his fathers. Wagner was raised at the circus where his foster mother worked and was treated like a normal individual there despite his appearance.
He had a large amount of natural talent for acrobatics, and since his body was shaped in a way that he would be perfect he became the shows star acrobat. The people of the crowds loved him and assumed he was just a normal human in an acrobatic costume.
The circus came under new owner ship and the new owner hated Kurt, so he made him part of the circus' freak show where he was drugged in order to prevent escape. He escaped by the help of another mutant and went looking for his foster-brother who had gone insane. Kurt accidentally killed his foster brother while trying to stop his insane rage and was chased by a mob that blamed him for the recent killings of many children and women. Charles Xavier, leader of the X-men saved Kurt's life and asked him to join the X-men.
Kurt discovered that he had the ability to teleport. He practiced with his ability, and figured out that the larger distance he teleported the more tired he became and that he had to have a clear view of the spot he wanted to teleport in mind or he might end up teleporting inside a solid object and injuring or killing himself. When he teleported it left a small bang of air rushing into the rip that he had just created. With more and more practice he found out out that the teleporting drained less and less out of him.
Nightcrawler is an extremely religious man and a devout Catholic. Since he has blue colored skin that makes it really hard to attend masses without freaking everyone out. The x-men designed a tool that created a hologram that made him look like an actual normal human and he wears it when he attends church services. He wanted to become a priest but was denied a number of times.
Nightcrawler had two best friends in the mutant world, Kitty Pride, whom he used to date and Peter, also known as Colossus. Peter came out to Kurt in one of the later episodes and Kurt being uncomfortable with him being gay left for a time, but then returned and accepted him.

Sparring

For the first about nine months in your Tae Kwon Do life, your main goal is to learn the basics and be able to competently accomplish many of the various techniques the we use in Tae Kwon Do. You then set out on the journey of perfecting your technique. We are taught never to use our techniques on another person unless put in a life threatening situation or someone else is in need of our protection or help.

Sparring is one of my favorite Tae Kwon Do activities, there is nothing else like pushing yourself to the extremes. Finding out exactly how fast you are and how fast your opponent is. You learn to react off of your opponent so much quicker than you thought you could. Everything is a quick fluid moment. You must learn to relax in order to be the best that you can be.

You exchange kicks back and forth, like testing the waters. You need to learn about your opponents, find his flaws and see if he can find yours. You learn to counter off of him and you find out if he's as good as he says he is. When you finally sense a familiarity with his style, or he does with yours, that's when the battle finally begins.

You rush at him with all your might, hopeing to scare him with a show of your talent. If that doesn't work you try and try again, because if your opponent shows fear you've basically won the battle hands down. As you duck and dodge kicks, you might get kicked lightly but nothing to distract you from your goal. Bam, you get an opening in on him, you sense him losing track. You follow through with another kick and then another. He senses the battle is being leaned towards in your favorite, so he moves out of the way. Then it gets really dangerous because he starts to plot his revenge.

He at you know with not only technique and expertise, but with rage and other emotions. Hopefully he will over-do-it and let his emotions cloud his mind, but if not you had better get ready. You pinpoint the precise moment for you to make your move and as it comes, you lash out like a whip. Your feet tangle and it becomes a struggle for power and pride. The one that lasts the longest will win, and hopefully it will not be him. You see him tire a little and he sets his guard down a little. Suddenly he comes in with his last burst and then he's lost focus. You counter with some of your left over strength and then "Whack!" the match is won, you get your hand held high and you know that you still can play the game.

Everytime I spar, I learn more and more about myself and about how I can better myself. Not everytime is a winning time, and not everytime is a losing time. Sometimes the winner is actually the loser. When I lose I automatically motivate myself to try a lot harder the next time. I always take away something from my opponent and you will surely see me in class the next day trying to figure out what went wrong for me during that match, and I wil indefinately be improving on whatever I can, whenever I can.

Starfire

Starfire's true name is Koriand'r, she is a Princess of Tamaran, and is in line to become Queen. Her name Starfire is a translation from her true name. Her older sister, as an infant, developed a disease that did not allow her to develop her ability to harness solar energy and thus she lost her right to the throne. This harnessed her resentment for her sister and a very fierce sibling rivalry between the two. The two were sent off to be trained as fighters and during a sparring exercise Blackfire attempted to murder her sister and thus Blackfire was expelled from the school they attended. Blackfire then swore vengeance on Starfire.

Blackfire betrayed the Tamaran planet by telling of her her planets defenses to the Citadel, the Tamarans enemies. The Citadel crushed their planet and Starfire became her sisters slave. She ended up killing one of her captors and was ordered to be captured and executed, but fortunately her sister and her were captured and brought to a Psion research ship, where they were tortured as the slien scientists preformed numerous expirements on them. Starfire was able to escape from the ship, but she went back to save her sister even though her sister was trying to murder her. Her sister wasn't grateful at all and she attacked Starfire as soon as she was released. Thats when Starfire met up with the other members of the new teen titans and they helped her to kill off the people that were chasing her and trying to capture her.
Starfire also has a younger brother named Wildfire. During one of the episodes he was sent to Earth to live with Starfire, but kidnapped by Blackfire, she sent a villian in disguise as him to kill Starfire. Her parents died as a result of thinking that now they have lost both of their daughters.

In tv series Starfire is seen to have a crush on Robin, and their relationship is hinted at, especially when they kissed during one of the episodes. In the comic book series Starfire had already been married twice when Dick Grayson asked her to marry him. She agreed and they were set to be wed, but Raven, who was evil at this point murdered the priest on their wedding day and planted seeds of good in Starfire. Starfire was so overwhelmed by all of the bad she left Earth and broke up with Dick Grayson.

Raven

One of the most interesting characters of all of the Titans, she has to be my personal favorite Teen Titan. She was first introduced in the early 80's, she's an empath that can separate her soul self from herself and can control it with her emotions and mantra. Her life is broken into three different segments, her first life was spent on the temple Azarath, her second life she wore white robes and was known as white raven, her third life is her current life, where she has her young body back.

She is the half-breed demon daughter of a human mother, Arella, and the interdimensional demon Trigon, she grew up in an alternate dimension of Azarath. There she was taught to be a pacifist and to control her emotions, because if she showed any emotions her father would continue to gain influence over her. She formed a team called the new Titans, vowed to help her destroy her father before he could escape from his dimension to come over to hers. That was the whole point of the Titans, after a fall out with them her emotion ran ramped enough that her father was able to kidnap her and take her to his dimension. She was eventually rescued by the Titans and with the help of her mother was able to trap her father into an inter-dimensional prison where he has remained.

So she thought, Trigon was able to escape his prison and come to Earth where he then destroyed Azarath. Raven became posessed by Trigon, the Titans were then forced to kill her, but she was resurrected free of her fathers evil.

This became the era of White Raven, she was free of her fathers control and thus she began to use her emotions and she then learned that she had a certain amount of control over other peoples emotions, leading into a plot line of her seducing many of her lovers, including Dick Grayson and the evil Eric Forrester that was trying to use her soul self to regain his humanity. For a time she became posessed by her fathers old demon followers and she became evil, ruining the wedding of two of her friends, Starfire and her old lover Dick Grayson. She was then killed by the titans and her mother tried to create a new body for her.

In her current life, she was forced to leave the titans because of her messed up love for Beast Boy and she lied to the rest of the titans saying it was Beast Boy being not as good a leader as Nightwing.

Teen Titans

If you've seen the tv show "Teen Titans," you will see that dc has clearly been able to produce some well quality cartoons.

The tv series, that was started in 2003, was a huge hit amoungst kids in the US, it was based off of a string of comics back in the 80's. The series ran for five years but was cancelled at the end of the fifth season. There are two comic book spin offs of the series.

The series is based on the lives of five main superheros, Robins (Dick Grayson), Cyborg, Starfire, Raven, and Beast boy, and their was Tera for a season. The series is bascically about how the superheros deal with growing up and facing teenage issues and try to discover more things about themselves.

The Titans make base in the Titan Tower that is located off shore of some island. There they each have their own room and training area, plus a communitive dining facility and hq type area.

Allusions are made to many of the Titans identities, Robin is Dick Grayson, Cyborg is Victor Stone, Raven is Rachel Roth, Beast Boy is Garfield, and Starfire is Koriand'r. The names, while being tried to keep secret were slipped in a few episodes. The protection of their identities goes as far as them being seen sleeping with their costumes on. But they made very obvious allusions to the identities of Robin and Raven, such as the Trapeze scene of his families death being played over in the dreams of Robins and the fact that their has only been one person identified as Raven thus far.

In some episodes of Batman, when asked where Robin, or Dick Grayson was, Batman has replied, "With the Titans for some time."

In one of my favorite episodes of Teen Titans, when Starfire goes missing in another dimension, we see Robin break down and eventually become NightWing for some time. He tries with all his might to get Starfire back, he obviously has feelings for her and this plays a part in later episodes where allusions to a relationship between the two are made. Robin is not the only Titan that seems to have hooked up, many episodes are based on the pain beast boy has, when his "friend" Terra betrays him and the Titans to their enemy, Slade.

Nightwing

Robin and Nightwing, two of my favorite characters from all time. I've decided to do a sort of profile of both. The original Robin, Dick Grayson, was the sidekick of Batman for many years in the world of DC comics, before the character Robin was retired and later on Dick Grayson became Nightwing.

There have been multiple Robins over the course of the Batman series, my favorite being Dick Grayson, but the incarnations of this character afterwards were as follows, Jason Todd, who was murdered by the Joker, Tim Drake, retired, Stephanie Brown, the first female Robin, killed by the super villain, BlackMask, Tim Drake returns as Robin.

Dick Grayson and him family were originally acrobatic preformers that would travel city to city showing off their acrobatics talents. His talents were later used by him to assist the Batman as Robin. His family was brutally murdered but he was saved as a child by Batman and basically raised through all of his teen years by the Batman. His main goal was to avenge his family and help society better itself.

Nightwing branches off of the Dick Grayson line of Robin, after becoming more independent and rebellious towards Batman and not wanting to be a sidekick anymore, Dick Grayson exits the Bat Cave and becomes Nightwing, a very awesome looking character of the Batman family. He is probably my favorite of all of the superheros I've seen, though Green Lantern is up there.

Nightwing uses many different forms of marshal arts to fight bad guys, and many fighting techniques that he picked up from his mentor, Batman, he also uses long sticks which are called Kali sticks that have sheathes attached to the end of them. He is very sharp in the mind and is able to use his keen detective skills to get himself out of many traps.

Ya so basically i love cartoons too much to explain it, it might be actually abnormal. So I've decided to change the direction of my blog and make it so that I am focusing on one of the different sides of my life besides Tae Kwon Do and band, which get boring after a while. I'm going to post about my favorite cartoons/ superheros and do little many profiles of them.

Challenges

Last Monday we received the audition results and I am extremely unhappy where I am, not only because I did a lot crappier than last year, but also because I feel that I didn't do my personal best during my audition. It is very true that I could have done, much, much better, but how much better? I don't really know. I ended up getting placed second to last in the top band, Wind Symphony. Last year I was fifth out of ten flutes and this year I'm eight out of nine. I am definitely displeased with my drop of three places, and I feel that if I would have done better I would be sitting either third or fourth chair.
I finally decided that I was going to challenge up to where I thought I should be, after my lesson teacher convinced me that I should challenge up. I had premonitions that I was going to be hurting the three people that are in front of me's feelings and I still feel a little bit guilty about challenging them, but my lesson teacher says that it would be a lot better for everyone if I sat higher up. So I guess I going to challenge.
My band teacher personally walked up to me and handed me a challenge form on Tuesday, saying, "I think you will be needing this." I just smiled and nodded, then I walked over to Kelsey, the girl sitting one chair in front of me, I told her it was nothing personal and she signed the challenge form and walked with me over to the Band director who signed it and went to get us some etudes to study.
The music is really really easy and I am going to definitely kill Kelsey on it, I still feel really bad, but I don't want a freshman in front of me and I want to reclaim my spot in the top five, so I'm not going to dwell on peoples feelings too much. Like my lesson teacher said, if I really feel like I should be sitting higher then I should go for it. Then she secretly told me that I was going to crush everyone sitting in front of me except for the third chair, Lindsay, she said I was just going to have to work a little harder to beat her. Her saying that enboldened me to go and kick some butt, and I will tomorrow when I cream Kelsey in our challenge.

Working My Butt Off

My personal goal for this school year, pertaining to taekwondo, is to pass my testings in February and in June. My friend Austin having gone through this a year earlier has agreed to help me out on getting in shape. So for the last two weeks we have been getting together twice a week and working out like crazy.
We get really really sweaty and it's insane how tired we feel afterwards but it's definately worth it. We usually start out with a light warm up, stretching and doing some kicks, before we get into the serious stuff.
My form for this testing, is the second longest one our taekwondo club has, the only one that is longer is the 3rd decided form. Not only do I have to do the one form, I have to do a second form a long with the first one. These forms are not easy to accomplish either, as you go higher up in level the forms get increasingly difficult and this one definately is quite difficult. So for the second half hour we spend the whole time working our way through our forms two or three times each, commenting on how each other is doing a certain technique and questioning if we are doing something right or not.
Next it's time for the fun stuff, this is by far the hardest part, but it is definately fun. We get to jump over stuff until we are so tired we don't wanna pick up our feet. We start out with frog leaps up and down the forty foot room twice, then move on the bunny hops up and down the room.
Next we start jumping ove each other kinda like leap frog except we bunny hop over each other. We make our way down the room and then come back. Lastly we get out the pads that are about four feet high, and we jump over two of those spaced at about a six foot interval, we do this while kicking a pad that the other person holds.
The last thing we do before warm down, is the sparring. By this point we have to really push ourselves because we feel like we're gonna faint. We do five sparring matches each lasting about three minutes, then we start to warm down. I have definately gotten alot better at taekwondo since practicing this way for the past to weeks and I will hopefully be really ready for my testing in February.

November 1st Testing

I am currently a second degree black belt in taekwondo and last year I got my instructors certificate and recently I have started teaching taekwondo for the Marion Ymca about once a week and I absolutely love it.
Last weekend we held our annual testing at the Marion Ymca in the gym, testings are usually lots of fun and this one was no acception. We got to the Ymca around one in the afternoon and my instructor, my friend austin and I started to set up. Austin, a third decided black belt at our club, mentioned to me that he was going to judge for the testing today. This was a very big deal, judging is one of the highest honors that you can get while you are in taekwondo, usually you have to be a junior master to judge, meaning you are 4th decided or above, but they were not going to have enough people to judge at the testing, so he was the lucky one who was going to judge.
I on the other hand had to direct, that means I would call out names, send people to there spots, call them to attention, bow them in and tell them when to start their forms, one-steps, sparring, self denfense, and board breaks. Basically it's a lot of responsibility for one person to do.
So we got everything set, Austin and I changed into our dobaks, mine is gold and his is white, because I got my instructors degree already and he hasn't, but he will in february where I get my third decided black belt. After we were in our dobaks, we lined everybody up for the pictures and all the gold dobaked people grabbed chairs to sit in front of everyone else.
Testing turned out all right, I didn't have to yell at anyone too much, but I was still disapointed that I hadn't gotten to judge. I mean, I've been in taekwondo a year longer than him and I'm an instructor and he isn't. Besides he's only thirteen and way to young to be doing much. Eh I guess I don't have too much to complain about, i'll be judging in May anyways.
This is a video made of our testing last saturday.





This is a video made of our testing last saturday.

My personal audition

If I were to describe my audition this week it would be, "a complete disastor". I had been calling my lesson teacher for the last week and half leaving messages daily and I hadn't heard back from her at all yet. I was getting worried that I wouldn't get a lesson from her until midway through band on monday morning when she finally called me and told me that I could have a lesson that night at 4:30, this was much to my relief.
I had been extremely nervous about my audition because placings between the flutes are always tight. Last year I was placed fifth chair wind symphony, the top band at kennedy. That was a phenominal place for me to be, because I was one of two underclassmen in the wind symphony flute section which consisted of ten flutes. I was king of the section.
This year I feel it will be a different story though, I had hoped to get second chair this year, but I'm pretty sure that audition didn't go too well.
I am doing the most three octave scales of all the flutes, six in total, versus the average of 2 per person, Megan, our first chair from last year was only doing four three octaves and I was glad to be doing more than her. As it turns out in my audition I messed up on every single three octave scales of mine except for the hardest ones, D and E-flat, the one I was most worried about. I was nervous to begin with, because the flute three auditions previous to mine had screwed up the sign in sheet and we had to switch everyones names a place down one. Our band director was getting mad that no one had come in for a while, so she yelled at us and then I was basically pushed into the room before I was ready, that made me even more nervous, as did playing in front of the mean band director. So my scales pretty much sucked, but my etude was amazing, and I didn't mess up on my sightreading at all because it was in the key of B-flat major, the second favorite key of all flutes.
So I'm basically hoping I did okay and I get in the top five flutes again, but I'm no to sure I wil.

Audition Week

Last week was audition week, which is a nightmare for everyone who has to audition and a nightmare for our band directors and drum majors. For the first two days we had five auditioning rooms, three with our three drum majors in them and two with our two band directors in them. The drum majors start a tape recorder in the room and then they leave the room. For either the tape recorder or a band director, you play up to twelve scales, an etude, and a sight reading piece that you have never seen before.
We had twenty-nine flutes, and twenty-six clarents that would audition in room one. We had three days to get all of us done and needless to say it did not happen. The first day we got eight flutes done, the second day, when I auditioned, we got another eight flutes done. On friday, the third day, we added to more auditioning rooms with two members of the band council running the tape recorders in those rooms. We finally finished the flutes and we got through three clarinets. We were originally suposed to have the band listings done by lunch on friday, but since we still have almost all the clarinets left and all eight tubas left to go, it didn't happen. I believe that the earliest we will see the listings will be morning afternoon, but it might be even tuesday before we get to see.
My friend Kim, a drum major in our band, has the same second hour class as me and for the last three school days she hasn't gotten to class until about halfway through, because they were holding people back to audition and the drum majors were still having to run the tapes. I think this is completely ridiculous, we should have started auditions on monday like most other years we have, and we should have started out with seven stations like we did last year and the years before. It would have run so much smoother and stretching it over five days would give us more time to relax and do a better job during the auditions.
Not only is having to audition stressful for the band directors, it's stressful for us and it needs to be way more structured, i'm sure we could think of a much better way to make the audition process run smoothly.

Post INMBC

Like usual, our indoor marching band classic this year was a nightmare and I really didn't want to go because we basically play once, then sit around for five hours and watch the rest of the shows in the Cedar Rapids area. This year I didn't get hit by a flag, but we had to scrunch up enough that the whole right side of the field was basically of by a yard line.

Prior to us marching the show, our band director had warned our drummline not to cover up the band. But since they were drummline the indeed played as loud as they do outside, inside, while all the rest of us were playing softer.
We got the loudest applause of any band there, besides Iowa State, and I think our show went pretty well, though we sucked compared to how we normally do. The floor was slippery and basically no one was paying attention to the drill, because we were all trying avoid back marching into a solid concrete pillar. This is probably the worst location to have a marching band show and everyone hates it every year. It doesn't help that once you get near the end of the show, Iowa State comes on the floor and playing another freaking hour, then afterwards we all play a horrible rendition of "America the Beautiful" it sounds more like a mush of notes, because the cellular center is really boomy in the inside and echos. That brings me back to my last point of why it sucks, because the inside of the Cellular Center is really boomy, you can't listen to anyone, you have to watch the drum major, which is kind of hard to do since we are marching backwards for a while.
So basically the entire night sucked, it was hot and sweaty inside, we were all tired but we couldn't sleep, it was cold outside, and it took our buses another hour to get to the US Cellular Center after the show was over. So I got home at like 10:30, did my homework til 12:30 and had to wake up at six the next morning.

INMBC

The indoor marching band classic, a dread to all the people in the Cedar Rapids area that must play in it. We have to shrink down the show from a beautiful football field sized picture to a small distorted, chaotic mess. When you shrink a show down really small, it gets messy and dangerous, this year will be no exception. We have to make sure we don't march straight into humongous pillars that would hurt a lot if you hit them. When i say hurt a lot I mean hurt a lot! I ended up hitting one freshman year and I thought I got a concussion.
We have color guard in our band and there was this part in last years show where we had to walk straight through a line of them doing their routine. I've always been afraid of getting hit by them since they swing about two inches away from me on all sides. When we shrunk the show down, we were forced to march through them still and every single time we practiced the show I got hit. Twice in the arm, once in the side of the head and once on my leg. I was totally freaked out when the time for the actual show came, not just the practice. I knew I was going to get hit, but I didn't know how hard or where, so i was determined to keep that flag away from my vital areas. My heart was pounding and I was flipping, little did I know that the changed the flag part in the show and when it got to the time for the chaotic pass, i flinched back fearing the flags and took tentative steps forward. A flag came near me, but never touched me, I was so confused that I missed my closing spot and was out of the line by about four feet, but no one said anything to me so it was fine.
This year, we have a very similar pass and I am hoping very much that we change it, because I have been hit already this season, both times in the head, and I really don't want to get hit again.

Past marching band shows

I was on YouTube a few days ago and i was watching some of our old marching band show. I found some really old and also one from a few years ago. Chronometry was the name of the show. I watched it like four times and I realize how much better we have gotten since the past shows we have done.



Ya now that i'm thinking back to about the past shows that we've done I've decided tht we are so much better and more condifent. I knew this show a ton better than i knew my fresman year show, "Tempered Steel." I like my freshman year drill but not the music for tempered steel, it was kind of boring and left you say, "is this it?" Last years show was by far the best we have ever done. We did a Carimina Burana based show and it was amazing. It left me speechless when we watched it on the t.v. in our band room after the competitions. We had amazing tone and the style that we placed the music in made me have chills.
Saying that last years show was better than this years show is not at all because I think that this year's show was bad, because at ankeny we played like we had never played before. I'm just saying that this was a little slope down from last years show, but not at all as bad as tempered steel. Simply put, in my opinion Carimina Burana> Star Wars> Tempered Steel and that's how many of my friends feel as well.

Ankeny

The past two weekends the John F. Kennedy High School Marching band has gone to Ankeny and Des Moines and our last stop is at the indoor marching classic at our home town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I have my complaints about the indoor marching band classic but those complaints will be saved until and undetermined date. Our show at West Des Moines Valley, as I addressed earlier was not the best show that we have had and I was definately not satisfied by the results of our competition there.
This past weekend we went to Ankeny and everyone took this show seriously and I didn't say a word until our band director spoke. We knew that we had done a great job and the feeling that we would score quite high was definately a mutual one amoungst me and my fellow marching band friends. The show from my perspective was flawless and it was definately the best time that we had ever done it, except for a few flags that had trouble with the wind but that is quite unavoidable since the wind was blowing quite strong. I was just absolutely speechless at the end of the show and I don't think I took another breath until my band director spoke. Of course she had only good things to say and I was very pleased.
When it came down to that last moment where we all were waiting for our placing I had a bad feeling, that feeling started to ease as more and more places were announced. Suddenly they anounced Cedar Rapids... my heart jumped and i'm thingking no we got fourth this year, crap no! no! no! ... John F. Kennedy High School and everyones heart sank. We worked so hard and got so little from it.
All our band director said was, "We worked so hard..." and the feeling was the same through out the entire group.

My Final Season (Maybe)

Now that marching band is almost over it feels really weird. Since I'm considering this being my last year in band and thus might be my last year marching, I'm not sure whether to feel relieved or having feelings of regret for not giving my best efforts this year.


Last year after our big marching band competition at Valley, the feeling was extreme exuberance, everyone knew that we had done as well as we felt. It was almost like we were floating on clouds and we could never come back down. That feeling was the what I have decided to base all of my Valley experiences on. We ended up coming in 4th place, the highest we had ever gotten. I remember clearly many people crying and my best friend, who was a senior last year, was balling her eyes out also. But this year the story was quite different. As soon as we had gotten on the field and we started playing I felt like three different tempos going on. The rest of the show, besides the closer, was not that bad, but the opener was definitely horrible. We got off the field and our stupid drummline that we have this year wouldn't shut the hell up. They know that they are supposed to be absolutely quiet, or else our band director will beat the crap out of them. We all knew that we did horrible, well at least I did, until our band director came out and told us that we had all done a wonderful job this year and that we should expect a high score. Well obviously she was wrong, because we ended up scoring sixth place, yes it was out of fourteen bands, but I still knew that we were going to do horrible no matter what she said. I wasn't surprised at what we got as a score, but I was surprised at how badly we had done during our show, many people missed their spots and how so many people got out of step and totally lowered our marching score.
All I know is that this week we our going to have to work quite hard to get into the condition that we need to be in, or else I'm going to be very disappointed because I don't want my possible last marching show to be uterly crappy.