I was walking past the music building at OSU yesterday and I heard a choir just singing their hearts out on what sounded like a Spiritual of some sort. It reminded me so much of my past experience with choirs, the camraderie, the music, the pulling together.

I've been running with a school theme, which sort of makes sense because it's a huge chunk of my life at this point. Continuing in that vein (this could be an incorrect usage of the word) students--when they badmouth teachers--nearly always do not know what they are talking about. It's like this people: the teacher nearly always knows more than you do. And they know how to deal with students better than you do. And there probably was a reason they didn't round your 79.89 average up to a B. And they actually do know how to grade tests. And they've probably dealt with 20 other disgruntled smartmouths after exams. And they don't have it in for you, unless you were rude to them. Then, maybe they do have it in for you but who's fault is that?

Then the question becomes, "Byran, have you ever criticized a teacher?" Well...yes, though I generally give them the benefit of the doubt even if I disagree with them. But when you think about it that way, you realize why everyone else has all this nasty stuff to say about the teacher that was so terrible. From there point of view everything's perfectly logical; any thinking person should be able to see how horrible the professor was. But that's the challenge, to look at stuff (and this encompasses all of life) not using your tiny little perspective but from others' perspective, to see where they're coming from.

We are semi-finished with the recording part of our album. Last night we muscled through the last of the songs that we needed to get done. Of course, one of the toughest things about recording is knowing when to stop, finding that line between "I know we can do better" and "I don't think we're going to improve on this." We'll probably go at it once or twice more and see if we can improve anything we currently have.