My two cent clarification: In defense of Carlynton High School and Small Education

Hang on, this is going to be a long one.

A warning: the following is an opinion. As a journalist, I don’t like having those. Understand that opinions change and evolve as time does, and please respect the place I was coming from whilst writing this. Also I use Oxford commas, don’t judge me. I do not advocate for any candidate or particular legislation or anything beyond dialogue. Want that to be clear before I proceed.

So last week I shared a post from a Carlynton alum that I attached some comments to. I was under the impression that the commentary was an assessment of the district I graduated from in the aim of opening a dialogue on the faults in the education system as a whole.

Boy was I wrong.

I completely own up to sharing it, and further to misrepresenting a blanket approval from me of this statement with added commentary. I thought it was (and, full disclosure, I didn’t read the whole thing that late at night) an attempt to open dialogue and I shared to push further the reach of that dialogue. I also did it as a way to promote someone I felt at the time should be heard by my reach. I recognize that the alum can stand behind what was said as an opinion, but I want to make it clear: that opinion expressed in the piece isn’t mine.

The fact of the matter is when you share across your stage or your platforms, the assumption is that anything you further share you agree with. I need to add the whole “RTs do not equal endorsements” bit to my Twitter for this reason, but I’m not here to preach about social media, I’m here to preach about what my views are on the education system and what I meant to say originally.

I graduated two years ago from the Carlynton School District. If you’re fairly new to my adventures, the Carlynton School District is a tiny (and I mean tiny – my graduating class was 92 strong) school district five miles outside Downtown Pittsburgh. I’m currently pursuing a B.A. Journalism degree at Point Park University, a subject I consider a passion and a school I consider the best decision I’ve made.

The original alum commented on apathy at my alma mater and said quite bluntly (and quoting an unnamed source) that “this place is a disease.” I won’t argue that apathy exists within the education system but I have to argue that the source misidentified the problem. This place – being Carlynton High School – is not the disease. It has the disease that comes along with being (against its own will) a part of a governmental system that puts numbers ahead of people and tests ahead of education.

I’ve said for years privately that the strength of the Carlynton School District lies in its faculty and students. Teachers (and I’m dear friends with some education majors, I count them here also) don’t get into such a cutthroat business without a passion or a drive to accomplish something greater. It’s a drive to change what they experienced, or to provide something greater than themselves to their students. If you don’t have a drive to change it or to affect some sort of change, you’re not going to last in education long. You. Burn. Out.

I want to challenge the original poster to think about what honestly was said: was the lack of challenge you described you had experienced your senior year a result of climbing an academic pinnacle as I had, or was it because of a chosen apathy on the part of the participant? You said you chose against taking Advanced Placement yet expected the same level challenge at a general level class, what did you expect? I am genuinely curious.

I’m not going to lie, by my senior year I wanted to get out of Carlynton but that was because by that point I felt I had outgrown it and I had a taste of the real world and college life and wanted to move forward beyond the K-12 system. It’s a system that I strongly believe is designed that way for a reason so you can make a clean cut when you walk across that stage and be ready mentally to take on the next step, whatever you determined that to be.

If I didn’t feel challenged in the classroom, I did this potentially self-destructive thing I do in college where I get CRAZY involved with stuff to challenge me further in a way outside the classroom and to challenge the ways I think and the means by which I communicate. I’m not saying it’s the best way of doing things, but I will say that the challenges I didn’t find in a classroom I found elsewhere through in-class resources.

I want to step back for a moment and talk about resources. Carlynton doesn’t have many because, well, it’s tiny and is not the wealthiest district. But isn’t that a shame to say? I mean, seriously. Should size even matter when you talk about resources for students? Why does the per-student cost to educate vary from district to district and why should resources be tied to standardized testing?

Further, why are we allocating resources with preference to certain groups? It’s a television trope to have schools buy new equipment every year for a football team while the band uses decades-old instruments. I’m not saying that is true within Carlynton, but I have heard stories along these lines at other schools.

Also, why is the education system still structured in the way it was during the Enlightenment where local government meant something? It makes NO sense to penalize a district’s funding because of standardized test results, frankly those that struggle should be given MORE resources to bring them up to speed in my humble opinion.

Single A designation should not be a death sentence, nor should it inspire any sort of victim situation. It doesn’t at Carlynton (with the only exception I can think of being an oddly specific school board meeting in 2013 or 2014 where the justification by the superintendent for class scheduling problems was “well, we’re a single-A school, you’re lucky you get to have electives) but I know it’s true in some other districts. Being small means more individualized and community-based education.

Parents pick a school for its resources, and I’m proud to say my family found a district whose nonphysical resources (teachers, programs, etc.) are incredibly abundant. We have fall plays and spring musicals and 19 sports. How could a school of less than a thousand do it except by having people who care and others who can stretch a dollar?

Am I saying Carlynton fell behind? No.

What I am saying is that as a whole the education system has fallen behind. Money that could have gone towards offering unique electives and challenging students’ ways of thinking is instead going toward mandated remediation on testing, diagnostic programs, and compliance with further regulated yet seemingly innumerable and indistinguishable revenue-sucking mandates. It’s not the Carlynton School Board or the principal deciding this, it’s someone at the federal and state level telling these people they have to.

Do you know how often I was given diagnostic testing ahead of the Keystone or PSSA exams? Nearly monthly. Imagine, that’s at least 10 days outside of the classroom every year. Don’t forget, several of these tests were multi-day, and you had to do some sort of buildup prep to the diagnostics, and then the build up to those tests...

This testing obsession is classroom time spent chasing your tail in an effort to save the school that you’re being set aside from. It’s circular and so, so wrong. And let’s not forget those diagnostic tests are expensive to use, and could go to, I don’t know, journalism books, or psychology books?

So where am I going with this? It’s no myth that the education system is broken (at least by my assessment) but it is a myth that the individual district is to blame. Do you feel trapped? Good, it’s the system that got you to the point where you can realize it. Challenge that system.

I was reminded recently that the successes I’ve had and the career I’ve chosen didn’t come from the classroom. I never once took a journalism class, and it wasn’t for lack of trying either. The teacher of the journalism course did pull me aside at one point and told me I wouldn’t have benefitted from the curriculum. Why? In part, it was out of date books and a lack of resources to do real journalism. But at the end of the day, it’s important to remember this positive: my love of radio stemmed from a gifted education teacher passing along the information for a program at WYEP.

Yeah, Carlynton didn’t teach me a lede from a nut graph but can you seriously blame the high school for that? There should be no reasonable expectation that every profession should have an offered elective that prepares you for that individual, specialized profession. It’s unreasonable.

What Carlynton did offer me was the access to that gifted teacher who shared the WYEP project, or to that band director who let me try my hand at announcing, or that English teacher who (and I still don’t understand how this happened) let me run a newspaper as a high school senior or the drama teacher who rescued me from hating theater after a bad experience and let me anchor the TV morning announcements after being a technical director there, and I could go on but hopefully you get the point.

Was I saying to myself junior year “dang I wish I could drop out and move on to college”? Of course. What teenager wants to be a cog in a politicized state-level machine that hasn’t been working well?

But why do you stick around? Two key reasons in my case: because your end goal is a diploma so you can keep moving on to that liberal arts school in the city, and you stay out of respect for how you came to that conclusion.

The reason you want to leave high school in the first place is because you discovered the ‘real world’ a teacher on the inside helped share with you. In other words, you can’t realistically wish to be a part of a different world if you had never heard of that other world in the first place.

So what was draining about Carlynton? The public school system. The helplessness you feel on a daily basis where the decisions are made for you in either a board meeting or some faraway marble castle in Harrisburg. It’s not some sort of deeply engrained lackadaisical work ethic in the teachers or administrative support staff, it’s an apathy at the extreme top that trickles its way down to resources at the feet of those who truly care.

If Carlynton didn’t challenge you, it’s you that failed. Not because it was supposed to consistently hit you with ridiculous workloads or whatever effort you expected of it but because you didn’t seek more. In the real world, people don’t work with you or for you. You have to seek out your own challenges or support for what it is you’re trying to do.

It’s a lesson I feel this alum missed. By choosing to enter and remain in this supposedly toxic environment (read: it isn’t) then complaining afterwards it didn’t help you, apparently you hadn’t sought those challenges out through the system? I don’t know, I can only guess your position, but from mine I feel like there is some action on the participant’s part that is missing here.

I know this much, however: the reason I got where I am is I sought out and sucked up every opportunity I could inside and outside the classroom. There isn’t any professor who asks you to become Editor-in-Chief of your campus newspaper your freshman year. It’s Josh Croup and your friends who you’ve surrounded yourself with who convince you to take that leap. It’s the professor who tells you you shouldn’t be doing it.

This is probably the longest post I’ve written in a long while but I wanted to make this incredibly clear: I can’t endorse the notion that Carlynton is some sort of wretched wasteland where dreams go to die or whatever yarn that you want to spin. It’s a wonderful place where teachers do the best they can with what they have. It’s a place where you have to find your own path because that’s how the real world works. It’s a place where you have to seek a challenge, you can’t expect it to be served to you because that’s not how the world works.

If there’s a problem, it’s the lack of resources allotted to these base-level programs because of a flawed administrative/governmental system. I’m not endorsing anarchy, I just want to start a responsible dialogue. Comment if you’d like, I only delete straight profanity.

Let's See How Far We've Come 2015: The Year in Review

I did this two years ago, and missed last year because my computer was consistently on the fritz, but that makes no difference. 

For a year where so much happened, I posted the least amount of things (this makes 19) that I have ever posted in a year. It's a paradox really: when you do so much, you have less time to document what you've done, and so on your blog it looks like you did nothing. But as usual I digress. 

I did write a Christmas letter this year, and if you're interested, here's a link to it. My problem with it is its brevity. I needed to write it to fit on a singular piece of paper in 11 point Georgia which limits a year to a mere five or six paragraphs. So here I expand my narrative. Sorry about the rest of my family, but this is my blog... Let's do this! Sorry in advance for how frickin long this is going to be.

January brought my Eagle Court of Honor, along with the Carnegie Talent Show. I don't have anything else on my calendar, and honestly don't have my Eagle COH on the calendar, so that shows you how my state of mind was at that time. I did my job shadow at KDKA. I was also working for The Cougar Times at that point prepping the January issue.

February brought my venture to Dormont for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I didn't give an annual Valentine's Day message (thank goodness. If memory serves me right, my then-girlfriend and I split that day anyways so....). I was in the midst of Senior Madness, which is what I'll call the first five months of the year. 

In March I bought an album (Hozier's self titled album which is still fantastic). I also went to a SHASDA dinner where we talked about the future of education. I was named to Trib Total Media's Top 50 Outstanding Youth Citizen list. Which is cool, but didn't come with a journalism job offer so... 

April brought with it my 18th birthday, as well as the Trib Total Media Top 50 OYC banquet. I went to the They Might Be Giants concert with Clay, and attended High School Musical the next day at Carlynton having sufficiently blown my eardrums out. I was also on the radio as a part of WESA's Life of Learning Education panel. And Troop 831's last ever Court of Honor. 

May brought a whole lot of school-related nonsense. I took my AP tests, and I went to Washington DC with the band. I also went to prom with some friends. And that was all fun. That whole whirlwind was reflected upon in a blog post linked below under "graduated form high school".

In June I graduated from high school. I also got my diploma. Along with it, I was awarded a $5,000 scholarship from Carlynton, which was pretty freaking awesome. I also began my journey at Point Park by attending the Pioneer Experience thingy.  I had my graduation party, and a lot of other stuff happened.

In July the world kinda stopped. I dropped off the face of the earth, and for a while was employed by GetGo. I'm not going to talk about that.

August began my new life. I went to the greatest city, Chicago, with my Aunt and mother. I had my wisdom teeth taken out, and a week later I moved into my new home in Thayer Hall with my fourth floor family. Later that month I started school, and was quite great!

There's a lot of stuff that happened in September. I started writing for the Globe, started a radio show on WPPJ, was elected to the United Student Government, and started working for the Post-Gazette. I also ended up emceeing the Carlynton Festival of Bands. Which was kinda great to get back in touch with my alma mater. There's no easy way to link blog posts, so here's the September archive: http://2015blogger.blogspot.com/2015_09_01_archive.html.

October continued September's new adventures. I kept working for the PG, and was hired on as an assistant news editor for the Globe. On Halloween I invited my floor to my house for a campfire and passing out candy and such. 

November was more of the September-October Blur. I broke momentarily for Thanksgiving, was a part of Rock-A-Thon for WPPJ, and attended the Eagle Scout Recognition Banquet, as well as spoke at it. 

In December I finished my first semester of college ever. And I reflected a bit on that. I also began Christmas Break after helping participate in a 24 hour film festival with some friends. Here's what I'll say about my fourth floor family, and I already wrote it once: 

Besides that, I'm going to live in Carnegie [again] for a little under a month. While I'm excited to see my family again, I will greatly miss my extended family - those 22 goofballs I live with on this floor - and I'm also aware my family all work during the day, so perhaps I'll start writing a novel or something. I don't need a pastime, but I do need to learn how to take a break because since August 24 I've been running at a consistent 100 miles an hour and now I have no more highways to speed on, I'm relegated to back roads for a while.

So with that, I'm easing my way into 2016. Since August I've been going a hundred miles an hour, and during the break I eased it to about 65. Still not technically legal on a highway, but entirely okay considering where I was. 

Here's to a 2016 just as full of adventures, and just as much insanity. Why post today and not tomorrow? Tomorrow I'm going on a hike and possibly attending a NYE party with my high school friends. We'll see. I just had the time now before my shift at the PG. 

This Has Been Alexander Popichak Speaking For The Carlynton Marching Band

Yesterday was the end of an era for me, it was Senior Night at Carlynton and with that, my last football game with the band.

Three years ago I signed up to be the announcer of the band. Since then, I've attended football games home and away, and more band festivals then I knew existed. It was a blast, honestly. What started as just something to do became a part of my life, and the gaining of a family I never expected. It was because of this that I was able to do three years of homecoming court bios, senior nights, a year of soccer, and emceeing three band festivals.

Last night I was given a gift by my section member (the section of the sectionless) Abbie (best friend to my girlfriend and all around amazing band manager) an awesome gift - a decorated hatbox for my crazy marching band helmet as well as a bag of Three Musketeers.

I again read (this time half) of senior night -  for my seniors, the class of 2015. Then it was my turn to have my name and biography read as I walked down the field. It was the first time I had ever walked down the middle of the field that I can remember, and I was met at the end by Mr. Obidowski, Mr. Loughren, and Mr. McAdoo. It was surreal to say the least. The band cheered, and then I was back to whatever it was I was doing. Back to the student section for one last time to cheer on one last Carlynton Loss.

We lost, but we cheered anyway. I hung by the band one last time with the people I had grown to appreciate, the people that had taken me in as their own.

I wrote two weeks ago about living in the moment, and about taking it in. I did, and it was fantastic. Nothing was different except the beginning and the end. I took along with me to the box Sara and Cassie. They had never been there, and I offered to any senior the chance to go. So I did my thing, and I added one thing to the end of my regular script:

"Thank you for supporting music in our schools, Thank you Mr. Obidowski and the entire Carlynton Marching Band for an amazing past three years as your announcer. This has been Alexander Popichak speaking for the Carlynton Golden Cougar Marching Band. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COUGARS!"

And that was it. They played Seven Nations' Army in the stands one last time, I must note, but that was the end of my band announcing (career?). Clay, Sara, Cassie, and I went to Kings and ran into a waitress that we had the night prior, and it was weird and surreal and wonderful.

I'm Gonna Fight Em Off, A Seven Nations' Army Couldn't Hold Me Back

It's a Friday Night and usually I don't post, but I found myself having enough time to do so. It's been a strange week, but a good one. I'm also wearing my duck shirt, so there's that.
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My favorite part about traveling week to week with the band over the past three years has been the music and the atmosphere. You really can't duplicate either, you're only in high school once and each game only happens once. I don't care that Carlynton is 0-6 on the season, they're still fun games.

Anytime they can, the marching band plays music - in between first downs, after kickoffs, after scores, quarter breaks - basically if there is a break in the action, there's music. By far my favorite stand tune is Seven Nation's army. It has this crazy deep bass riff, and, just listen to the song:

Anyway, I really like this song, and the band does it really well. Why am I telling you this? A while back, my senior adviser/WCHS adviser/Midsummer director/general advice-giver Ms. Longo told me when I was talking about realizing this is my senior football season to enjoy it, and take it in. She's right, there's no way to really capture these things (yes I have videoed the band playing Seven Nation). You can try your best to relive it, but in the end this is it, this is the time you need to own, and this is the time you need to live. So that's what I'm doing. 

I don't want to get sentimental, so I haven't done much to record it for that reason. I know that down the road I won't have anything to connect me to it, but I also remember what happened in NYC 2009. I was so focused on capturing it all that I didn't really live that moment. My exciting story comes from the thing I didn't capture: nightfall in Times Square. They say memory is unreliable, but I'd much rather have a memory to go off of where I lived and where I felt infinite than some passive documentary footage. And so it goes.

And I Would Drive One Hundred Miles...

[A note: I wrote this on 8/1/14, but for some reason (probably because it's disjointed) didn't post it. So here it is.]
Yeah, don't tell me, I know those aren't the lyrics. I don't care.

Recently I was going through my SD cards (the cards that I plug into the camera to take pictures onto) and realized that I take a lot of pictures. As a side effect, however, a lot of the pictures I take don't see the light of day. For the vast majority of them, it's perfectly fine -  I think I've taken something like eight or nine thousand pictures since the acquisition of the D90 - but for others it's kind of sad. I'm doing my best to take the ones I want to save, edit them, and post them to Flickr immediately.

When I post to Flickr, I inevitably get lost in the thousands and thousands of pictures up there, and I'm always inspired, and always wondering how do they do it? But that's another story for another time, how photographers make the pictures they post. Most of the time though it's Photoshop or Lightroom.

There's something satisfying about letting a creation free into the unknown as 'done'. So my updates to flickr and everything else are giving me that.

I've also been given creative license to write the script for this year's halftime show. It's the end of the two-week band camp already, and so I sat and wrote the script last week. It's very simple, and we follow the same pattern every year:
[Ladies and Gentleman please welcome the Carlynton Golden Cougar Marching Band!
The band is under the direction of...] and then I proceed to list everyone on staff. I've timed myself down to about 37 seconds last year with enunciating every director, section leader, dog, cat, and even me. It's an interesting process. Then I announce the drum majors, and finally what the show is.

Here's last year's: http://novelwithoutanending.tumblr.com/post/94064523221/alexanderpopichak-this-is-me-announcing-for-the

It donned on me in writing this script that, again, this is my senior year. I am writing the script for my last season. I'm trying to wrap my mind around it, but I don't think it'll hit me until the band festival, or maybe during the last game. Nevertheless, I don't want to dwell on it too much. I want senior year to come as it will: if it will be fast, so be it, if it will dilly-dally, then let's savor it.

This year's show is Batman, and in writing the script I have to explain the differences between the three batman themes (they sound different, but you can't just say 'Batman Theme' because in name they're the same, so I have to source it [TV series, Movie, New Movie]).

Good Morning Carlynton, it's Wednesday (Okay it isn't but just go with it.)

NOTE: The NYC pictures are up on Flickr! https://www.flickr.com/photos/alexanderpopichak/sets/72157644250348029/

These past few weeks have been, well, crazy. Mostly in a good way, but also in the oh-my-goodness-I-have-to-take-the-APUSH-test way. So I apologize that I took a two week hiatus there.

A week ago I was in New York. Well, I mean, it was technically New Jersey where I stayed, but that doesn't matter. I'm calling it New York. Deal with it.

I can't say it enough, I love New York City. I'll keep it to a minimum of moderately humorous anecdotes.

• My favorite part of the whole trip was probably when I got off the bus about two blocks away from Times Square and it was pouring rain. When you've brought along your DSLR you have to improvise some sort of cover. My weapon of choice? a cut-out Post-Gazette bag over the lens attached with a rubber band. I'm glad I did. (See right, click for larger)
• The whole trip began with a tour of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, it was foggy that morning so we didn't exactly get to see the city itself. It all worked out though, it came across like a sheet, and read pretty well on the pictures. We circled Liberty Island for a while and realized at the last minute we had pedestal tickets through the tour. So we essentially sprinted to the top of the pedestal, took a few(quick) pictures (we had to be back at the boat in 7 minutes), and then sprinted right back down. Sounded a lot simpler writing it out than it did doing it. Great view, so worth it.

• Fog made another appearance when we went to the top of the Empire State Building. A great view up there of - nothing. But then of course the fog cleared once we got to the bottom. Luckily, it was an elevator ride up and not a walk up. 
• We saw The Lion King in the Minskoff Theatre and it was all in all, a great time. 
• We spent a total of about 20 hours in New York. Not nearly enough, I want to go back sometime, but at least I have 800 something pictures of this adventure. More to come on Flickr and as I think of it.
• Before I go, I want to attach the "Taxi" picture:
  
• I did a lot of random photography - aimlessly hitting the shutter button without lining up the picture - which yielded a bunch of pictures of the side of Tyler Smith's face, some light poles, and this beautiful image. I took all of the colors except for that of the taxis. There are SO many taxis in NYC it's ridiculous, but I thought this would be cool. Want prints? contact me. 

So that's my New York Trip, and I know I left a lot of things out, and this isn't my usual post style, but this hasn't exactly been a usual week for me. 

But Hold on to What you Believe in the Light

Earlier today I was in my fifth period study hall reading through old post titles. It struck me just how much over the past year I've titled posts with music lyrics. Just a thought.

A note before the post starts: This is the week before midterms. I don't think I'm sane, but then again, when I am like this I can sometimes do my best work.

What I want to talk about is two things that may or may not be words: hypotheticality and intentions. Take that, for example. I wrote that non-word (my editor is giving me the magic red squiggles) in my weekly planner as a potential blog post. It seems anymore that we need something to strive for, or to have some path in place before we justify a destination.

It seems to me that spontaneity has gone from a desirable trait to something construed as irresponsible. Why does it seem this way to me? I live in a relatively self-contained bubble: my goals are set forth by some mythical curriculum committee of wizards or whatever for me to figure out in a calculated way. I understand how you arrive at an answer or destination or milestone or what have you is important. But does it lose its importance when it's carefully plotted out? When everything is expected, when everything is painstakingly explained, or planned?

I think it does. I think above the destination and above the specific route one takes to wherever they're going is what happens to stop that route.

I have four favorite photographers (they may argue with me, but I call them photographers) as of now who are: Dan Winter (Winner of ReimagiNATION 2013's Art Division), Brad Knabel (Carlynton Marching Band Resident Photographer), Dave DiCello (Pittsburgh Photographer; master of HDR) and Kate Kinley (really hard to describe. She does a lot of conceptual photography, and has a flickr and blog, both of which you should check out). The common thread between all four of them is that they take pictures of spontaneous life.

Life consists of those moments that aren't posed, that aren't the ones that you want to put in a resume, or on a college application. It's the stories of how you heard about that scholarship, or the parking ticket you got outside of that school, or that girl whose books you helped pick up in the hallway on the way to some class that make life move. I've never been fond of portrait photographers for this reason exactly. Life is more like an instagram picture than a school portrait.

I ask people (mainly at school, but elsewhere too) all the time what it is they plan on doing, where they are going, and more often than not do I get the response "someplace else". This troubles me a bit because they appear to think they have explored everything that is here (here being Pittsburgh). And I don't think that's true either. I want to explore things, and when I can't, I want to reexamine what I already know. I don't know, random thoughts.

If you are interested in checking out any of the photographers I mentioned above, here you go:

• Dan Winter: Flickr & Tumblog
• Brad Knabel: Flickr
• Dave DiCello: Flickr & Photography Site
• Kate Kinley: Flickr & Photography Site & Blog

If you are one of the people I mentioned above and want me to delete the link, please let me know, like now. I don't want you to sue me or whatever, just email me at alex dot popichak at gmail dot com.

Oh, and the Spring Standards are playing Mr. Smalls (of Tally Hall adventure fame) April First. This is not a drill.

I Can't Tell Where the Journey Will End But I Know Where to Start: The Carlynton Student Section

So it's a friday night, and that means Boys Varsity Football (American) here in Western Pennsylvania.

The cool thing about announcing for the band is I get to see all of the Carlynton football games for free and I get to see every game. When we traveled to Clairton last week, that wasn't exactly the best game, but it was still seeing guys I know play a sport they love, and that's still pretty cool.

And then there was tonight.

Background: Canevin (Bishop Canevin High School) is a private school that geographically is roughly the same area. As a result of this, we are rivals in one another's back yard.

Something amazing happened, and it was quite evident in the air. The student section (which I eagerly was a part of) exploded and so did our marching band and cheerleaders. It was wild, and our Carlynton Cougars won 37-12. But I don't think that was the important part, the winning that is. Granted, that is still quite great to be a part of.

The thing I love about the student section is the sense of unity that comes with it. People screaming all at the same time for the same reason. Heck, even our new principal got into it for a while there. It's something amazing to be a part of, and I think it's great to be able to be a part of something.

And it continues past the time you graduate too, at least in spirit. I know one of the biggest players in the student section still tweets about how he wishes he could be back there with us. I talked to at least two alumni tonight about it, and it's just an atmosphere that's contagious, whether we win or not. But it helps to have won.

More coherant posts to come. I hope. And the giant rubber duck is coming in like two weeks! Oh and FreeBurgh Fest is tomorrow at 5 in Schenley Plaza. I'm done now.

I'm Moving Slowly for I Dare Not Want to Cause Alarm

(Alternatively Titled "I've got that Summertime, Summertime Anti-Sadness" I don't know what I was going for though. End Parenthesis.)

So I sort of misled you in that my last post I alluded to having been done with vacation. But I was actually in Delaware at the time, enjoying the last few days/hours of my vacation. The following day I took a ferry to Cape May New Jersey from Lewes, Delaware where I took this picture of a picture of Chris Christie:

If you look closely, you can see someone's lipstick on the lovely face of Chris Cristie. Inspiring.

I just thought I'd share that with you. Cape May was quite lovely, and pictures from there and the adventures following that will be up on Flickr in the coming weeks... Sorry, I'm bad at that.

Then we went back to Delaware and the following morning set back for Pittsburgh. I already wrote about taking road trips, but I had absolutely no idea of what happened roughly 30 hours after I hit publish. I was navigating shotgun, getting ready to circumnavigate Baltimore, when we got into a crash. Well, it was a fender bender, but being about 5 feet from the majority of the damage shook me up quite a bit, I'm just very glad I wasn't driving at the time.

But I'm not going to ramble on that, we got back into Pittsburgh on a Sunday (with thankfully no delays, yay! Seven hours in a car FTW!) and I started junior year on that Wednesday.

One of the things that comes inherently with this cycle is readjustments. And it's hard to adjust to new courses, and to at least two people I've met this week, it means adjusting to a whole different world. Because let's face it, each high school is it's own little world. But for the first time in a long time, I adjusted, and for some reason like zenned out (is that a word? I don't know...) which I think is fantastic. Hopefully it's a sign of things to come.

That Friday I came up with a crazy idea which I'll probably announce sometime this week, and we had the first football game of the season.

It was wild to be back in an announcer's booth to again announce the band. Even though I'm scripted, I still love the feeling of it. And what was even weirder was that when the band started marching, nothing happened but cadence. However, as soon as I said "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN please welcome to the field YOUR 2013-2014 Carlynton Golden Cougar Marching Band!" everyone cheered. And that's awesome too. And to top it off I spent the weekend at camp.

So it was a week of strange contrasts from ferries to tall ships; from DelMarVa to New Jersey; from DelMarVa to Pittsburgh; a beach to an announcer's booth.

This coming Friday is an away game at Clairton, and Saturday brings the CHS Festival of Bands, which you should totally come to and listen to me help emcee, or perhaps come for the fireworks, and the fantastic bands. It's 7PM at Honus Wagner. More details on a site I worked on: carlyntonband.org. Click the graphic on the home page for more info.

T-Minus 25 Days Until the GIANT DUCK!!!

Looking Back At Sunsets On The East Side / We Lost Track Of The Time

So I apologize for not posting last night, but the reasoning will come later.

So this week was about accomplishing things and catching up. I wrapped reading "Fences" by August Wilson, and earlier wrapped reading "Manhunt: the 12 day search for Lincoln's killer", and I plan on writing reviews a bit later. I also was granted access and am now the head designer/web developer for the Carlynton Marching Band. So that's sort of exciting.

I also got to catch up with an old friend of mine, as well as Dave (of Dave 'n Clay show concept fame on here I guess). We took on the world through wooded trails, and Dave screaming "YOLO" for no particular reason.

It was nice to catch up. And anyone that's read Paper Towns by Jayscribble can appreciate this when I say she pulled a Margo and called me about an hour ahead of time, and appeared at my doorstep for an adventure the nature of which neither of us exactly knew.

And I like that. Spontaneity. Nevertheless, we adventured around and talked about where we're going and what we're doing. And it was then that I realized how far I've come, and actually how 'old' we are.

In my mind at least, I was back in eight grade. It was when we got to talking that I realized that I'm now a Junior. It's crazy.

So this Friday (the day I SHOULD have posted, yeah, yesterday) I got another one of those Margo-esque calls but this time it was from Clay. Today when I post this is his birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!), and last night we went on a bowling adventure in an underground lane in Crafton. But first we went to the dollar store in the same plaza.

Dollar stores are curious places, full of deals and the strong smell of plastic. You know the plastic I'm talking about - not the lovelyness of new car, but the stuff that makes you wonder how the nice people working the registers don't get asphyxiated on their shift.

We had no purpose there except to kill time, and it's sort of dangerous to let four teenagers loose in a dollar store. And they had everything there from "LOOKS REAL!" gag ketchup to "Jihad Joe: the novel" to Pokemon tattoos... and 'Hater Shades'.

At least I think that's what they're called. That or shutter shades or something. They were given the dollar store generic name of "party shades" and 3/4 of us got them and I bowled about 1/6 of the time with them on. Now I may have been hallucinating, but I think they helped me line up the shot better. Nevertheless, I still lost.

But ultimately that didn't matter. We were in a half-decent yet deserted bowling alley underneath a grocery store in a shopping plaza I've been to once, having the time of our lives. And yeah, the pizza wasn't that great, but these are definitely the things I will remember about my summers: getting calls randomly from friends and the adventures that follow.

Schools Out, Forever (or at least next week)

(It's a play on song lyrics... If you haven't heard the song, then I don' know what to tell you)
So yeah, it's winter break. I think I'm going to blog about a few things, but I'll name them as subheadings: It's the End of The World As We Know it (and I Feel Fine), and OMG It's Snowing In Carnegie.

It's The End Of The World As We Know it (And I Feel Fine)
I have some bad news for you conspiracy theorists: I procrastinated on my Friday blog post, and we're all alive.

But Friday marked the last day we had before this lovely little break, as well as the annual CHS Variety Show. I was informed the day before that the WCHS Morning Crew (Consisting of Me, Clay Bodnar of JSVH fame, and Aidan K of AK Productions Fame) were to host the variety show. Now, I had emceed events before, notably the Talent show of like 2009 or something but my counterparts had only done the AM announcements with me.

It's strange to be on this end of the spectrum when a year back I ran lights for the same event. I got the call from the people running the lights that it was time to go, and instead of hitting the button for a spot, I led Aidan and Clay into darkness with nothing but a spotlight glaring upon us. For me, it was very strange.

We then talked about the end of the world as the opening, doing a custom-tailored version of REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine)" that we had learned a mere 9 minutes before curtain. It was complete with jumbled lyrics and an ancient Mayan dance, which consisted of Aidan doing the "start the lawnmower" and sprinkler.

Somehow, we managed to host the show with limited injury. We almost lost a Kozy cutout, and were nearly booed for our jokes, but hey, so are the pros! There were a few tech and performance snafus, but I think we managed well enough on our end.

I was asked when I went up to my grandparents house this weekend if our grades were checked, or if we needed to be in scholars or honors classes to do the announcements. Quite plainly, no. We're a group of volunteers that just want to do this for the heck of it. We get no bonus points, magic pats on the back, and I don't think we need it. Our announcements crew (not the tech crew... that is another story entirely) is a dysfunctional family that gets stuff done in a wacky way.

OMG It's Snowing In Carnegie
(Kudos to the CHS band for inspiring the title)
So there were two trends inspiring a lot of the tweets among local teens, or at least the people that I follow on twitter. The first was the end of the world, and the second is that it's snowing.

What a shocker that the first day of winter (northern hemisphere) contains snow. Yet the local news, and twitterers alike took to their proverbial pulpits preaching that it had indeed snowed.

On a final note, these events inspired this gem of a tweet from the great Lana Meyer responding to the great Marin Exler:

No school means hopefully more time to blog. Look for something on Boxing day and MAYBE on Friday for once. 

Happy Western Christmas, Chanukah, Boxing Day, Festivus, and New Years everyone!

JOTA, Scouting, and the Sort

So this weekend marks an annual event internationally... Jamboree on the Air, or JOTA. I had been receiving a bunch of emails in recent weeks about this, and thought it was "kinda cool" but in reality had no clue what it was.

Enter today, Saturday the 20th, and I find myself in a flag ceremony taking pictures for the mayor, and then at breakfast, and then on the second highest point in Allegheny County. I was visiting the Steel City Amateur Radio Club  who hosted a station for scouts interested in participating in the international event. The idea? Scouts from all over the world could talk to each other on two specified days using HAM radios and at the same time learned about Amateur Radio-ing.

The members of the club that were there were EXTREMELY NICE. We arrived like ten minutes earlier than the beginning of the window (SCARC allotted us use from noon-5 eastern) and still the gentleman gave us a tour of the grounds, including the ham and low-frequency towers, and then took us into the clubhouse.

There, after a brief explanation of this gentleman's history of being in the scouts and hosting a JOTA at the then newly-built Heritage Reservation in 1983, they led us into the studio. Now, I've been in the studios of WYEP, KDKA, and practically live in the studio of WCHS (Morning Announcements), and I was about to add another callsign to that list.

I utilized a ham radio station using the club's callsign W3KWH, and connected to Kissimee Florida and talked to some scouts a few miles from Disney World. They said it was 'nice' being 73 degrees(F) we said it was nice, overcast, and 53 in Pittsburgh. We also connected to Birmingham, Alabama, as well as another station in Florida (Fort Meyers), and then finally contacted a guy on a county line in Iowa (Jefferson, I think) working out of his car in an Iowan contest to see who could contact the most people. This guy was from Minnesota.

I learned a few things today. I learned just how small the world was, and how friendly people are in amateur radio, and above all, I am falling in love with this Radio thing. I almost walked out with a membership application, but I want to get qualified by the FCC first. (Hear that FCC?)

If I met you (Alex Popichak, Life Scout with Troop 831, Right Outside Of Pittsburgh) it was awesome to do so =73=. I remember there was a guy named Isaac, and I think a Connor there too. So many others, and I plan on getting into this a tad further, and maybe meeting some other new people.

This coming Friday (10/26) marks the Fall Sports senior night, and the last time I'm lending my voice to the Cougar Marching band and Carlynton's football field this year. It's been fantastic, and I plan on doing it again soon. Come on out, game starts at 7pm, and senior night stuff starts at like 6:45...

With that means that I will attempt to get back to Friday Evening posts come this November... Fingers Crossed!

Football, Friday Nights, and WCHS

I don't think Fridays this fall will be the best time to blog. I apologize in advance for that, but please bear with me. I am announcing this year for the Carlynton Marching Band during all of their halftime shows and band festivals. So why not go there?

So anyway, this Friday was my first announcing gig with the band. It was an away game at Fort Cherry (Before you ask, we lost 31-21, but it was a FANTASTIC game!).

It's kind of weird being at an away game for the first time, and basically being invited into the press box to talk into a mic that plays throughout this entire stadium that, did I mention, is being listened to by about 300 people at their home field you don't know, and your alma mater's side containing your principal? Also, you are like the start gun to the halftime show...

Yeah, I overanalyze things, but at the same time, this is all going through my mind as I stand up to the microphone.

I have this amazing ability to do something and just not think about it. That is exactly what I did Friday night. I read off my infosheet and didn't think twice about it. I seem to snap into this mode when a microphone is live where I read everything smoothly and NEVER REMEMBER IT. Oh well...

So completely switching gears, we also start WCHS's new season tomorrow... and I'm proud to announce that we have an amazing crew including the likes of my brother on sound, internet-footprintless Greg on the video board, the great Clay Bodnar, and I am anchoring alongside Aidan from AK Productions.

SO we attempted a broadcasting test Friday to make sure all systems were go. Unfortunately they weren't. We couldn't get the cameras working, the broadcaster was on the fritz and we didn't have a host mic.

I spent my fourth period study hall working on that lab. I had to work with the breaker boxes, this stupid VHS player, and then everything was hunky-dorey. Whatever.

So anyway, we are set to go tomorrow during homeroom bringing you the latest on Carlynton sports, news, and when the Library will be open.

I hope to write Thursday... As Friday we'll be at Home Versus the Clairton Bears.

Happy Labor Day everyone.