Allow me to introduce myself

Well, holy crap, here I am. I thought I'd be the last person to
a) buy an iPod
b) have a blog

a-HA! I have already deluded your expectations by setting up a sentence which suggested that I have done both things this summer. Yet only one is true. I probably will be the last person to jump on the iPod bandwagon. But this is a blog, so it looks like I have sold out to the current trend of spilling your guts so that your friends might vouyeristically have a better understanding of you without ever having to talk to them.

My family went to go help my grandfather move into an assisted living home this past July (my grandmother, his wife, my father's mom, had died a year before). Cleaning out the master bedroom, we found Shirley's diaries. She had written an entry every day of her life from the 1950s to a little before her passing. That's over 40 volumes and 123890348905 words about life. It was very detailed stuff, very observant, a chronicle of events: not much like the stereotypical diary of today's teenager who will one day look back on most entries as either overly melodramatic or scarily suicidal. This is all to say I've never been much for writing (or recreational reading for that matter), mainly because my brain moves too fast for me to articulate things with my hands on paper or a screen. And when I do talk about my feelings and complicated concerns and interesting stories, it's mainly to Katie, who is fast becoming my other half. Which makes a diary practically unnecessary.

But a blog is not a diary and you can use it for specific things from verbose heady philosophical ramblings to unfounded political opinions to... well those are the only two things I can think about blogs right now.
Anyway, I think that to understand Eric Hirsh, should one be interested, is to get beyond the facade of friendly, bright, talented, musician (not that it isn't genuine), and discover the staggeringly troublesome amount of thinking, planning, worrying, and organizing that fuels both his daily existence and his life goals.

I promise to never talk in the third person again.

It's all because I think too much. Not necessarily in a bad way, not just the kind where you overanalyze a situation and fret. The good kind where you have lots of nifty ideas floating around and they are all connected and you have a good self-understanding about how all the things you do are connected and affect each other. The kind where you refuse to walk into a project or an opinion or a person without assessing its significance in a larger cultural context.

Couple all of this with the conflict between a desire to be more self-confident and a fear of egotism in favor of extreme humility, stemming from a nice Christian upbringing and an awkward middle school era.

My suspicion is the next few entries are going to seem very professional, as in, all I will talk about is a music career and past feats and future goals. Don't worry, it's not all I think about in life. There is friendship and love and spontaneity and eating and helping those in need and all that. But you must understand that the focus is legitimate because I am kind of gonna be a senior in college.

Yep, everything before this was an introduction, the first blog topic is I'm a Senior!?!?!?!
I am not about to reflect on Carolina Blue Skies and the Old Well and School Spirit and I don't want to leave all my dorm room friends and dining halls (all with the subtext: this person is not yet ready for the real world). No, I don't subscribe to much of that hooey.

But two weeks ago I realized I would be a senior in the large senior class sense. OK. But tonight Steve called up and was wondering if I wanted to help set up a jazz jam session in the Cabaret, which I think is a great way to keep our small little jazz program alive and a way to connect it to the campus community. And Steve said that he felt like it would be a good thing to do since we are the jazz seniors and we need to pass on the torch. This gave a new meaning to the phrase "I am a senior" because, like it or not, I am one of only three "main" (read: actively pursuing a jazz career) seniors in the jazz department. Which, like it or not, is some kind of leadership role, only because of how small the program is. The last time I thought about senior leadership, it had something to do with captains of high school cross country teams and whathaveyou. So there it is, I am a forerunner, a senior.

This leads into a lengthy discussion of what I want to do in my time left at Carolina, whether or not I can/should do it in two more semesters or three, the road ahead, the towering indifferent city of New York, and the status of the Musical that Dana and I are trying to write and produce.

Are you allowed to use real people's names in blogs? I'm not saying anything secret or naughty about them.

But the first entry after this will be an assessment of the summer, since it was a Plan B summer, a transitional summer, a ride the wave and see what comes your way summer, a lackluster summer, an Awesome House summer.

Remember that fear of egotism I mentioned? Writing this blog is scary because it's about me and I really really don't want to come off as an asshole. So please let me know if I do.

In a spot of computer-nerd-iness, I compare this blog endeavor to a program. All you friends and acquaintances out there in the world interact with the user interface and sometimes the high-level functions, and I am documenting the development of the low-level functions and weird structures that are my modus operandi for the public to enjoy and/or pick apart.

So, welcome, enjoy, don't get freaked out, and let me know you're out there should you feel inclined.