Change Is A Good Thing, Right?

Have you ever gotten one of those really strange urges to just do something crazy? Something you would probably regret later and you'd get a lot of judgement over? No... I'm not talking about killing somebody. I'm talking about like a drastic change in style, getting a dog, streaking, or bleaching the royal f*** out of your hair. Well, I have. :P I went from this:

(Just an FYI: This was how I did my hair to play the role of Tommy in Annie: Get Your Gun)

To the ridiculously opposite:

Yes. My hair is not WHITE!!! Crazy, right? Let me put this in perspective for you. I'm 19 1/2. I've had dark brown hair since the day I was born. Almost 20 years of dark hair and all the sudden my hair is WHITE. It's not like I gradually changed or I went with a light shade of brown or even like a dirty blonde. No. I went WHITE. People kept asking me "Why'd you dye your hair white?" I answered with two parts. First part: "I didn't dye it. I bleached the living hell out of it" which got a decent amount of laughs. And the second part: "I'm 19. I need to do stuff that I'm gonna regret later". The last one was mostly for laughs but it also ties into my "Make Life Amazing" mantra (as of late). Why hold back? I've seen people in movies with this hair. I think it looks cool. So why the hell not? What are people gonna do? Tell me they don't like it? Then what? Stumped ya, didn't I. Well, that's precisely it. They can't do jack shit! :D So, why not even add some purple in their. Actually, I think I just might. ;P You never know. I may have just leapt off the deep end.

Peace, Love, and the Beauty of Existentialism,

Matty Taylor :) 

Curtain Call!!

Unfortunately for me, I don't actually fall in love with people. I've tried. Oh, God... I've tried so hard. You would not believe the scenarios I've put myself into just to feel even a glimpse of love for another person. Now, you may be thinking "Well, how can you be certain that you're gay if you've never loved anyone" or even "But you're so young. There's still time for you to fall in love". Both very good questions and potentially difficult to answer for those who have yet to either make up their minds or to do any self-discovery. However, I've done both. I may not fall in love but I certainly fall in "like" and DEFINITELY (being a typical teenaged guy) fall in lust. There's no doubt in my mind what and who turns me on; gets my motor running. I can go to the store and bump hands with a guy reaching for the same jar of peanut butter (actually, I hate peanut butter. Can't stand the stuff. But it's simple for the sake of the story) and feel that spark. I know what it feels like to have the POTENTIAL for love. And, even though the odds are WAY against me that I'm wrong, I'm highly doubtful that I ever will fall in love. But, not because I'm some martyr with a cliche back-story or because I'm a classically slutty guy. I'm already in love.

I'm in love with music and with theater. You know how you see those people that are so absolutely devastated when their relationships end because that's what they need to survive? How they seem like they're not themselves until they're at least out searching again? I'm that person... except with productions.

Auditions are like first dates for me. I go in not knowing exactly what to expect, feeling so excited that I'm nearly bursting at the seems, giving it everything I've got to impress my date. Everything in me compels me not to mess it up. I couldn't take it if I was the reason that it didn't work out. If I don't get a part, then that's it: the relationship stops before it began and we go separate ways. However, If I DO get a part, then that's when the real relationship starts. Rehearsals begin and we start to learn each other. We make each other laugh, and cry, and dance. We learn each other's back stories. We learn what makes each other tick. We have a new understanding of what it means to live the life we've been "assigned" (more literal in this case). The show opens and it's like getting married. It's a commitment. We're too far in to back out. There's nothing more that we want than to make each other successful, happy. And then... the end of the show. Closing performance. It's like the worst break-up in your life. It just happens over and over. No show can last forever. But I'm addicted. I can't get enough. Even the agonizing heart break is necessary. I want it. I NEED it. My life is incomplete until I'm in a show, again. It's the love of my life...

Peace, love, and the glorious curtain call,

Matty Taylor :)

The epitome of a sex scandell and an awesome ass

I downloaded Ke$ha's new album because I am a die-hard fan. Well, to be honest, I'm a die-hard fan of a LOT of music. Everything from Ke$ha, the epitome of a sex scandal, to the classics like Fleetwood Mac, all the way to the classicAL like Chopin and Vivaldi. I love music more than anything. Maybe that's why I've been single for so longer: I'm waiting for the guy that please me the same way music can. Haha anyway, Ke$ha's album is fantastic. Its obviously very dance-pop with some rap and, ironically enough, a sense of classic ballads such as those heard by Fleetwood Mac. It always surprises me how well Ke$ha can sing. Given the subject matter of her songs and the fact that she's ALWAYS waisted (or at least acting like it), you wouldn't expect her vocals to match her popularity but they certainly exceed expectations. Of course, not that its any surprise, there is a decent amount of auto-tune to be heard, but the clever thing about auto-tune that a lot of people don't understand is that she needs to be able to reach the notes she sings and most of the runs have to be decipherable. She can't just talk into the mic and have it come out a brilliant song. Its kind of like running with a knee brace. The runner still has to be able to run and the knee brace doesn't increase speed. All it does is support the runner to make it a little easier.

I also started running over the weekend. Well, restarted. I was giving myself a good once-over in the mirror the other day and I realized just how scrawny my legs have gotten. And hairy. It's been a while since I had shaved them. Don't get me wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being thin or hairy. I love a good manly man or a twink just as much as the next guy but not for myself. Everyone has different ideas about who they want to be... Or in other, more unfortunate cases, who they feel they NEED to be. So, I mapped out a route in my middle-of-nowhere neighborhood that's about two miles starting and ending at my house. I'm gonna start out running every other day until my legs stop being so sore. (I always LOATH the conditioning. It's tiresome. I really should just stop stopping). Then I'll move up to every day and then eventually just start adding to the route until I have a decent run. Master plan and a killer outfit. All I need now is the determination to stick with it. If only I had a running buddy or something like a demented clown with a bloody knife to keep me motivated. In any case, I have to get to bed so I can wake up early and run in the morning. Boo. I hate this already...

Love, peace, and a soon-to-be fantastic ass,

Matty Taylor ;)

Music

I had a fantastic day!! Well, actually, I ended up with a fantastic day. It started out sooo bad. I woke up late. I had to skip a shower (which wasn't that bad since I'd had one the night before), and had to skip breakfast, which did NOT make me a happy camper. I'm a firm believer in taking your time to do something and making sure to have breakfast: the most important meal of the day. If I don't have my oatmeal, then I'm a complete slug the rest of the day, oozing around, barely getting anything accomplished other than junking up other people's progress, and leaving behind nasty, icky, sticky mess wherever I go as the remnants of my fantastic attitude. I made it through till lunch and cheered up a little since I had some food in my stomach. I am the walking epitome of a snickers commercial. Seriously, I could sell some serious snickers if they just followed me around with a camera on a day like today.

After work, I had rehearsal, again, which, in and of itself, was fine. It was the people. Those damn choreographers and their superiority complexes! I waited around for an hour and a freaking half so that we could block the curtain call. If you don't know anything about curtain call, it's simply when the cast comes out on stage, usually in a particular order (from least important to star of the show). They don't tell you how to come out, or anything specific. It's just "Come out on this chord, stand here, bow, back up to the line". It's that simple. As you can imagine, it only takes about five minutes to block and run a time or two to get used to it. So, in short: I waited for an hour and a half without so much as a magazine to read for five freaking minutes of not-even work. I was so mad. And nobody would tell me WHY I couldn't leave. They just said I still had stuff to do and to stick around.

However, my day ended really really well. I started writing a song today that kind of sounds like a mix between Celine Dion's "Fade Away" and Paula Abdul's "Dance Like There's No Tomorrow". I LOVE it. The track itself is pretty much finished. I have a rough draft of the lyrics. All I need to do is add final touches and then record the vocals. It's exciting!! I can't wait until it's finished. :D

But that's all I really have today.

Peace, love, and people that DON'T piss you off ;)

Matty Taylor :)

The usual.

My day was epically uneventful. I woke up, went to work, came home, DIDN'T write music, then went to rehearsal and now here I am: desperately trying to pull something out of the abyss of a day to write about and hopefully entertain you...... Nope... nothing...

Have you ever been friends with someone and then you just... weren't anymore? Like, have you ever had a best best best friend that you could tell absolutely anything to, would die for you, and you for them, and then out of the blue, you're just not really even friends? That's happened between Erica and I. We even dated. (far too awkward so we both called it off) We remained friends for years after that and then all the sudden we just stopped... needing each other. I don't know what happened.

Have you ever been in one of those REALLY uncomfortable scenarios where you had to be around an old friend that you don't really talk to or have anything in common with anymore? Well, Erica's dancing the lead in the Nutcracker. It's not really heart-breaking that we're not friends. It isn't inspiring in anyway. There isn't hardly any desire on either side to rekindle the friendship. We're both just there, with the faint memory of the intimacy that USED to be there and not sure if we can act on that past relationship or act like we hardly know each other. It's... painful, really. Not in an emotional ties, sort of  way. More in a you-just-can't-look-away kind of... way... I don't know. I'll figure it out. Somebody will do something. Or not. Or the show will just end and we'll part ways again...

Ugh... Life is far to complicated. There are way too many ellipses for my taste.

Peace, Love, and the ability to keep friends around,

Matty Taylor :-/

Passion

Yesterday, I ordered a program called Music Maker by Magix. I have the 2012 version and they just started selling the 2013 version (obviously, not wanting to wait past 12/21). I love music. It's my passion, my reason for living. I may or may not be good at it but I definitely try anyway. I love the program because it makes it fairly easy to focus less on the technical side and more on the artistic side: the only side I AM good at. Well, when I tried installing it, it took forever to download the pieces and then to extract and then to... well, long story short... it took forever. I finally think it's finished and low and behold: nope. It didn't install correctly. At this point, i'm frustrated and miserable because all I wanted to do today was play with my new toy. Come six o'clock, I had to go to rehearsal for the Nutcracker. Mind you, I started trying to install the program at eight o'clock this morning, so yeah, it took a long time. Well, here it is, 10:45 at night and yet it STILL has not finished. I called customer support and they've fixed it. All it needs to do is finish. Turns out, I didn't have enough space on my computer. Of all things... I wish I had more to report but I unfortunately don't, therefor: I'm going to leave you with links to some of my songs that I made with the OLD version. Hopefully I'll get some songs up from the NEW program (if I can ever get it to work...)

Peace, Love, and a working computer

Matty Taylor :)


I Don't Understand
Going Down
Wide Awake (Cover)

Here we go

Ok, so Day 2 of "December Practice Month" is a go. Ironically enough, I actually have some things to talk about. My brother and I went to Columbia to the movies to see The Rise of the Guardians and it was FANTASTIC. For those who don't know, the movie is about 6 childhood figures: The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, The Sandman, Jack Frost, and the antagonist, Pitch Black (a.k.a. The Boogie Man). Jack Frost is the only one of the characters that the children of the world don't believe in and he hates it. Well, the boogie man decides that he's going to exploit that and use the separation of the 5 to try and destroy them. In the end, good triumphs over evil, blah blah blah. Same cliche story line. Even though the story itself has been done (classic figures and fables retold in an ironic light), the actual movie was REALLY good. There were decent plot twists and a good ending. I left the theater very happy with the money I spent on a movie ticket. I definitely recommend seeing it.

I watched another movie called An Englishman in New York. Now, I'm not entirely sure what the movie was about. It was all very wanna-be british humor but what HAPPENS is this famous author (who's name escapes me) moves from London to New York, New York to be a public speaker. Well, the movie really wasn't that entertaining, mostly because the main character spoke every last one of his sentences with the EXACT SAME EMPHASIS. Imagine a highly refined, upper class, English woman saying "I tire of these games" and then use that same inflection for every sentence she spoke. Highly repetitive and counter-productive, isn't it... Well, out of all of this, there was one section of the movie where this man is in a gay club speaking on stage and he says one particular part of his monologue that I absolutely LOVED. It was amazing. Here it is:
"Don’t look forward where there is doubt

Nor backwards where there is regret.

Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside that you want

But whether there is something inside that you have not yet unpacked"

Even though the entire movie really sucked, this line made it so worth the hour and a half.

Not to make this about cinema, my new favorite T.V. show is The Vampire Diaries. I got into it because it was in my recommendations on Netflix and I recognized the leading lady from the Teen Nick show Victorious, in which she also stars. (That's a personal favorite of mine, as well). IT. IS. A-MA-ZING!! Of course, I have been using that word a lot and this is only my first post. I promise, by the time January comes around, I will have found more adjectives to use and will have widened my horizons of perspective. In the meantime, I'm going to go watch another episode to desperately try and get caught up so that I can obsess and hopelessly wait for new seasons. It'll only be my luck that it's been canceled...

Peace, Love, and an addiction to a cliche t.v. show,

Matty Taylor :)