A New Year, a New Start

Hi there :)

Now I've started my final year of high school. During this year, I will obviously continue being involved in CAS in numerous ways, which I will outline in this post.

Creativity:

Last year, I fulfilled my Creativity part of CAS by playing bass, singing and writing. All of these will continue this year. However, things have changed. I brought my sister's old guitar with me after the summer and started playing it. I've never really played guitar before, which means that this will be my hardest task in the next few months, until graduation.

My goals for my Creativity activities are:
Singing: evolve. I spent several weeks with my friends during the summer, some of which are vocalists in bands. I got advice from them, as well as new music to inspire me. I have new ideas and want to take the next step with my voice: I can do low growls, I can shout, but I can't do highs. Highs are screams that are high pitched. They've always been the hardest to do for me, because I always end up hurting my vocal cords, which is not meant to happen. My goal is to cover at least one song that utilizes several types of screaming in such a way that it is presentable to people who listen to my kind of music. No one else will like it, anyway.

Bass: I have gathered some detailed experience about playing the bass and the role of the bass in the hardcore/metalcore genre, which means I now have a better idea of what I want to do. My goal for playing the bass is not aimed very high though: I want to improve my technique and cover at least one song of the genres mentioned before. part of improving my technique will be to master the "spider walk" which is a warm-up that requires finger movement and placement. I also want to learn how to mute my bass strings while playing with a pick, which is something that none of my bass-playing friends knew how to do.

Writing: over the summer, I have already started pursuing one of the goals that I have set myself: I want to stylistically evolve from using simple structures to paying more attention to detail. I want to extensively consider the choice and placement and diction within my work in order to make it more effective. My work has already been complimented by many readers, but I want to take it to the next level. One accomplishment that I've made over the summer was that one of my friend's band is using two of my pieces as lyrics for their songs. They will be recording an album soon and once done with it, providing it for free on the internet. This means that, at least in some way, my work will have been publicized. Furthermore, the band (called The Offshore Burial, visit their myspace!) will be recording the instrumentals to one of their songs and send it to me so I can write lyrics for it. I never actually thought that I would get this far with my writing! You can read everything I've put up on my other blog.

Guitar: since I've only just started playing the guitar, my goals for it won't be too hard. Because I have played the bass, playing guitar is not as hard for me as it would be for an all new beginner, nevertheless it is still very hard for me. The different sizes of the strings mean that I need to be much more precise with my finger placement than on my bass. My goal for this activity is to cover the song "Children of Divorce" by Jonny Craig, which you can listen to here. I think because I have only just started, it makes sense to set small goals, one at a time rather than to say that I want to be playing Canon in D by the end of the year. Once I can play this song, I will move on to the next.

One thing I had forgotten to mention last year, was my poster design. I had designed a poster for the band mentioned above and printed 20 copies of it, to bring with me to Germany. I paid for the posters myself and made sure that the band gave them to their fans for free. I used photoshop and several images to create it. During the process of it, I got to know photoshop a lot better, learned how to use gradient layers, blending options and several filters. Here the poster:



Action:

Last year, my Action creativity involved lots of things: playing football, training football, working out on my own and pilates. For this year, these have slightly changed:

I will, or am hoping to take part in the boxing elective. This is an after school activity. I've never done boxing in my life, which means that this will be completely new to me. I will wait until after my first few lessons to set myself a goal, because I have no sense of what to expect from it, but I'm sure that it will be lots of fun and also give me an impression of what real boxing is like. I've never even done any martial arts in my life, so I'm looking forward to this.

I have already talked to Mr Shipley, who will be coaching the girls' team this year, whether I could do that exact thing with him. He gladly agreed, which means that I will be training the girls' football team during their season, at least once a week. I have to make sure that I can keep up with my academics as well, which means that I will be flexible with how many times a week I will take part in the practices. My goal for this is to become a better coach on one hand, but also to better my own skills in football. Last year I think I did an okay job training the girls and it was great fun, but I want to have a system and make sure that I know what I'm doing, because it seems to me that this is the kind of thing I might enjoy doing way past graduation. I want to make sure that all of the girls know what they're doing technically as well as strategically, because I noticed last year that many of the girls had the technique that was necessary, but didn't quite know where to go or where to play the ball.

Additionally, I will work out at least once a week. Over the summer, I made up my mind and said to myself that I need to "buffen up". I have been at a constant weight for about a year now and I think it's time that I get bigger. This means that I will be asking the PE department to make sure that I can use the weights in their room, as well as I will be working out at home. After my injury shortly before the SAISA boys' football tournament, I was told by the doctor that my muscles were not strong enough, so my goal is similar to what it was for pilates: gain muscle. I have already taken steps towards this, I've sat down with my parents and talked about a protein and carbo-hydrate diet, which will help me achieve my goal. I had done intense research on this topic, to make sure I don't make any mistakes. In my eyes, the most useful information is to be found on this site.

What will happen to me doing pilates is still unclear, because I don't know whether the instructor is still here. If she is, I will certainly continue doing it ever Wednesday night, because it helped me a lot last year. I will state my goal once I know whether it will be happening.

Overall for Action, I hope to become a healthier person. As a high school senior in a rather western setting, it'd be considered normal to go out on weekends and have drinks with friends. I do not drink, nor do I smoke. I even go so far to refuse to eat anything that has alcohol in it. I think this is a very healthy way of living and will help me stay healthy. Why do I need to stay healthy? Because in the IB, being sick is very bad. If you miss out on a few days, it's already hard to catch up. With all the deadlines and homework, being sick is really not an option. My planned activities for Action will help me avoid this as much as possible.


Service:

Last year, I was the leader of two CAS activities, of which one was more successful than the other, DAWG being the more successful one. This year, I will remain as leader of DAWG. Due to schedule changes, all Wednesday electives are now in the afternoon, but because our supervising teacher from last year is already supervising one other CAS activity, we had to reschedule: we had a few talks and decided that we will choose a few people (group of 8 or 9 people) to work with us on another collection of food for the animal shelter, as well as another sterilization campaign. We also decided that we will only meet every second week, because even when we only met every second week last year, we still had some days where we had nothing to do, since everything was already done. Meeting in the afternoons now means that we can be very flexible with our meetings: we can meet for a shorter or longer period of time. This will help not only to maximize our efficiency, but to motivate people. I have already "recruited" this year's DAWG members, now we just have to hope that those people will be the ones in it.

As mentioned above as well as in earlier posts, the goals for DAWG will be to complete another food collection for the animal shelter and another successful sterilization campaign. This year, we have to make sure that enough vaccines are available for the dogs, because last year we ran out very quickly.

This DAWG activity deals directly with global issues of street dogs as well as insufficient health care for animals around the world. Being in DAWG has made me much more aware of this, even seriously consider being active in animal rights groups such as PETA after graduating. It has not only let me learn many new things, but also opened my eyes to things I didn't see before and changed me as a person.

Other than DAWG, I will be taking up chances to help people out every now and then. I have asked to take part in a build for the Hope for Humanity elective, for example. I did it, because I want to open up to other things, learn new ways in which to help my community and share with people who are less privileged than we are at this school. I enjoy putting a smile on peoples' faces.
I don't have a goal for this build, because I don't know what to expect and what exactly it is that we are trying to do. I just want to help out where I can, give back to the country in which I've been a guest for three years now.


That's it for now, I will post every now and then and give progress reports :)

Smile,

Paul