Recent Happenings

Friends and Colleagues,

Thanksgiving has passed and I have had my good share of rest and gluttony.

Right on Thanksgiving day, my mom and I left for a church conference that was held in LA right near the airport in the Westin Hotel. It was real cool. However, the real eventful moments happened during a random discovery expedition taken by me and a few friends of mine fron Austin that were also at the same conference. Since the conference had scheduled no time for us to see the city of LA, we decide to escape for one night and travel through the city of Los Angeles via public bus system! We boarded a bus near our hotel and took it an uncertain direction. Wew were slowly creeping into the ghetto...I was a bit concerned yet very exited to see the gehtto of LA first hand! It wasn't until a very helping lady on the bus realize dthat we were tourists and suggested that we head toward hollywood. We looked at eachother and said "sweet". We got off to make a connection to another bus and as I looked around, I notice that everyone was black...haha....this was obviously one of the blackest areas I have ever seen. A nice lady at the bus stop who was also waiting informed us that we were in Inglewood which is a section of LA that is known to be pretty black. I hear about Inglewood as a few rappers are from there. From Inglewood, we took the bus no 210 towards Hollywood. This bus was awful, bunch of homeless people and the odor was nothing short 0f smelling like PISS. Anyways, it was still fun to be in the LA Ghetto...haha. And the bus we were on was riding on CRENSHAW BLVD...ever heard of that one? I asked one fella on the bus how far we were from Hollywood and he told us that we would bne sitting a good 45 minutes. Well, that was kinda depressing so we diecided to stop somewhere along the way to get out and see random parts of LA. So we did...and we ended up in apart of Korea Town...otherwise known as K-Town. Everything was Korean. Unfortunately, everythign was closed down and all we did wa sjsut walk around and burn claories from the big thanksgiving dinner we had at the hotel.

From there, we hopped the bus again and at this point, it was well into the night and transportation comion back home had become a huge qiestion mark as we had no diea when the buses would still be runnign when were done terrorizing hollywood. Nevertheless, we got to Hollywood and compelted on journey to seeing LA. Once we got to Hollywood, we saw alot of cool things and a lot of weired people. There is a museum lined up on Hollywood street and alady gathered us in somehow and told is there was a free exhibit...we were like...."wy not?" The exhibit was about the famous American writer/philosopher L. Ron Huffman. It whole thing was pretty cool. Somewhere in the middle of the exhibit, the tour guide introduced us to a religion that Hubbrad had began...the religion known as Scientology. Yeah, thats the stufd Tom Cruise is going crazy about. I was only itnerested in learning of it but not interested of converting...but she did give in dept detail that was very interesting...the tour ended, the lady was awesome...and we were out...on the way out, as we got to baout 100 yards away, we look up towards the museum and realize that this is a huge 20+ story building that has a sign ont he top in huge letters, "Church of Scientology". So that was funny...haha, no wonder this lady was goign in dept on scienbtology...and then as we walked around hollywood more, we saw more and more buildings devooted tot he promotion of Scientology...nethertheless, the exhbit about the man behind Scientlogy was so interesting. You guys should read up on him.

It was about 12am at this point we decided to find some "only in Hollywood" grubb before we left out random journey of LA . We ended up at a place called Johnny Rockets and the food was delish. Buses steopped working at this poitn so we took an LA cab back tot he hotel for the fee of 50 damn dollars to make our LA themed jouney complete.

All in all, I think our journey of LA was magnficant despite having ended up in the ghetto and hind of lost in random places with jsut hte three of us at niht in the closed down city of Los Angeles. We seriously shouldve brought a camera. We literally jsut got bored, hopped on arandom bus, took it to a random place, then we began apursuit of ending up in Hollywood...it serious was an epic journey that I enjoyed every step of the way...if you guys ever go to LA...just travel it with random bus routes and maybe...jsu tmaybe,...you might have as cool trip as we did.

Ite guys,,,,damn school tomorrow...see you guys on the flip flop.

-JL

Keepin' y'all posted

Friends and colleagues,

A lot has happened since I last wrote but I forgot about half of it. Training in both throwing and music so far have been awesome. Throwing wise, I am reaching new distances and stronger lifts in the weight room. Trombone wise, Im starting to gain some good perspective on playing.

However, let me dedicate this entry and share the fact that I just absolutely love music. I mean, It's one of the only things that I am sure about in my life...and that is that I love music. Even if by some odd happening, I do not end up being a performer, I will still love music. And of course, this is mainly classical and jazz I am talking about. My life has been extremely stressful lately and I have been feeling like people don't understand me. Music, though....music is where I live. Music is my reality...music is where I can be understood. I have found no greater joy than what I feel when I hear a heart gripping melody of Brahms or a weeping plea by the hand of Beethoven. it is truely divine. I wrote this knowing well that it has a risk of being cheesy but I can say it no other way or find another means of sharing this...this fact that music is what I speak, eat, breath...music is what I go to ...music is where i come from...music is where I live...music is what sustains my life...what a pleasure it is to share music with everyone else! Please, just believe me on this one.

Some things coming up:
-Los Angeles during Thanksgiving Break
-Finals
-Sending in tape for International Trombone Association Competition
-Training my azz off


Alright, dudes... keep it classy

-JL