Emerson / Los Angeles Retrospective Part 1

I should let you all know that the following is going to take a more personal, serious tone than most of my blog posts, but still trying to be funny. Also I will be frequently using the literary device of metaphor throughout the blog post in order to convey certain senses of emotion, and during some of these instances you might feel it necessary to call me a total homo with a gay problem for being such a literary emo fuck. However this is a fate I'm willing to accept in order to get across the emotional roller coaster ride (metaphor #1) that was my experience at Emerson College. It was around junior year of college, I pretty much decided I wanted to go to school and study audio production? Did I have any experience at all when it comes to the technical or artistic process of sound recording? No. But I liked and

Artistic Rendering of Freshman Year (Not pictured: PBR, Parliament Cigarettes, Morally Casual Sex)

listening to writing music. So my reasoning was pretty much " Hey I like the Goo Goo Dolls, I should spend $100,000 trying to make a career out of it." However it turns out that basing a future off of "Iris" wasn't such a good idea, regardless of how good Dizzy Up the Girl was or how many times I would come home from high school parties and cry to it. Look, what I'm trying to say is I found out that audio production wasn't really my thing, as I will discuss in a later blog post.

After weighing my college choices, I finally decided on Emerson. Emerson was in my favorite city in the world, Boston, it was close to home, and had a world-renowned reputation. One of my favorite high school teachers, Mr. Rea (who taught English and who was once spotted rocking out at Bright Eyes concert), was -- besides being the fucking man -- the professor who helped me on my college essay and whose classroom many of my friends and I would hang out at after school was out while we waited for our respective sports practices to start. I remember getting my acceptance letter in the mail and then running back to school (which was a five minute walk from my house) and showing Mr. Rea my acceptance letter. Mr. Rea would run into my mom, a veteran employee in the Ludlow public school system herself, and said that moment was one of the greatest ever in his teaching career. Which is an awesome thing to hear. My college experience seemed to be off to a good start.

Or so I thought. After getting accepted I joined the "Emerson Class of 2010" Myspace group page. I would find out almost immediately that it was a place where pretentious future college students can start arguments with each other before they even met or were officially enrolled in the school they'd all be going to for the next four years. Remember how you could change your name in MySpace to something silly whenever you wanted? Well after seeing Clerks 2 my friend changed my MySpace name to "Porch Monkey 4 Life," a reference to the Kevin Smith sequel. This was all my new virtual Emerson classmates needed to believe that I was a flaming racist who was about to enter their school and they would have none of it. I actually received an e-mail from a kid who I had never met or even freind'ed on MySpace pointing out to me Emerson's deep ethnic-student population (which I would later realize to be a total lie) and that perhaps I should consider going to another school. Wow. So yeah my first interaction with Emerson kids resulted in them telling me to disenroll over the internet. This should have been the first indication that Emerson College was going to be a rough, rough start.

And I was right. It was a horrible start. A horrible, horrible start. It was kinda like Mario Kart where you hold down the "A" button too long before the green light at the beginning of the race and you spin and flutter out of control while the other drives scurry past you. And then you get bombarded with banana peels and turtle-less turtle shells. And just when you think that little rainbow box with the question mark on it is going to be the answer to all your problems it explodes in your face. And then you get thrown off the course and a weird yellow creature comes flying in on a cloud and has to fish you out with a traffic light and bring you back to where you started. Actually, my freshman year at Emerson College was exactly like Mario Kart.

So I slipped into a deep, deep depression, turned to cigarettes and drugs, and basically saw my life get about as dark as you can get without having to have a reality show about you. Fortunately, as is often the case when you hit rock bottom, the only direction to go from there is up. Which, thankfully is what started to happen the next year.

So join me tomorrow for part two where things get a lot less depressing! I'll talk about SAE, what was happening back home, and, here's the part you've all been waiting for, MORE!!

Until then, one love
Andrew G / Geno