Aubrey Webb's Weblog

almost the end of this semester…

aubreywebb — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:14:42 +0000

I can’t believe that Winter semester will be over in just 2 weeks. Academically…not my best. And I only had three classes. How am I ever going to make it through college???? At least I’m starting to figure out what I should do…kinda. Something health related. Dad thinks nursing would be good. I fell in love with philosophy. I want to keep taking classes in it, hopefully with the same teacher I had this time. Still at PF Changs…back waiting now and i LOVE it. I can’t stand hoting anymore. It makes me a ball of anxiety. I don’t like being on display.

Powerpoint

aubreywebb — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:42:07 +0000

new-ppt-12

Final Draft-Review

aubreywebb — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:09:40 +0000

Anberlin has never had a reputation as a “main-stream” band.
Personally, I imagined it was because they made the conscious choice to
shy away from major-record labels. They didn’t want to become one of
those big-name, sell out bands, because that would most likely
compromise their values. The values that set them apart and made
them…well, Anberlin. The reason their fans both admire them and respect
them, a rare combination in the alternative rock scene these days.
Anyone band can rock out and make good tunes, but what about standing
for something while you do it? Anberlin still manages to maintain the
fine balance with their latest album, New Surrender. However, while it
brings the standard Anberlin vibe, New Surrender doesn’t seem to be the
delivery that fans have been waiting over a year for.
While it remains upbeat and positive, further cementing their own
unique “sound”, New Surrender doesn’t break any new ground for the
band. With the general poppy-ness and rather monotonous
overtone(incredibly ironic with one of the popular songs from the
critically-acclaimed album being called “symphony of the blasé”), fans
my begin to worry that one of their favorite unique groups is selling
out after all! This may both be explained, and validated, by the fact
that this is Anberlin’s first album under a new record label. On August
16, 2007, the artists moved from semi-independent record label Tooth &
Nail Records to major label Universal Republic Records.
It is always hard for a band to continue cranking out one amazing album
after another, at some point all bands seem to climax and fizzle into
mediocrity. It is especially tough, though, when your standard setting
album is in the beginning of your career. Never Take Friendship
Personal, their second album, released in 2005, really set the stage
for Anberlin, with its wide range of melodies, heartbreaking lyrics,
and crunching guitar rhythms. Though Cities, their next release in
2007, scored higher on the charts(coming out as #19 on the Top 200),
reviews universally agreed that it was musically sub-par to NTFP.
Needless to say, their were high hopes for New Surrender as a comeback
album.
New Surrender definitely does not fail, far from it actually. It
delivers exactly what fans were expecting. Unfortunately, in Anberlin’s
case it like expecting to get a loaf of Great Harvest sourdough bread,
and opening the grocery bag to find Wonder bread instead. Yes, you
still get exactly what you needed, but far from what you expected and
hoped for. You expect variety and spice, but New Surrender really is
quite bland. You get all of the excitement in the first few bites;
tracks six through thirteen really don’t differ enough to even tell
them apart. On top is this, almost every single song is incredibly
repetitive, both lyrically and melodically. Unfortunately this monotony
isn’t enough to blur the tracks together, each song still starts and
ends sporadically, so there is very little album flow.
The lyrics aren’t anything to write home about, but they don’t directly
disappoint. In classic Anberlin style, they do remain witty,
interesting, and well-worded for the most part. Burn Out
Brighter(Northern Lights) sums the whole album’s style up within
itself(Live, I wanna live inspired/Die, I wanna die for something) The
album has a rather reminiscent feel to it, especially in the song
“Younglife” (The first time staying out all night/ The last that we got
away with lies/ I can hear it in the back of my mind). One of the major
faults with the writing in this albums definitely is the tendency to be
vague and confusing, as shown in Miserabile Vesu(ex malo bonum)
A man is coming in thirteen-one
To charm the daughters and the sons
Scared for our lives, I turned to your hand
Hold this tight while we run, if we still can
However, as both Pink Floyd and the Mars Volta show, if played right,
your unexplainable and “deep” lyrics can help propel you into infamy in
the music world.
The gem of the album is definitely “Feel Good Drag”, in fact most of
New Surrender’s blahness could be forgiven if not for one glaring
error-it is not original to New Surrender!!! This is a truly badly
played effort to try to publicize the album, one that has a very real
risk of backfiring. The first time I heard about the impending release
of a new Anberlin album, on X96, I was practically ecstatic…for about
15 seconds. That’s how far into the add I heard “featuring their new
single-Feel Good Drag” and I heard a slightly retooled version of a
song I had been listening to for over two years! Any even slight
Anberlin fan knows for a fact that Feel Good Drag was first released on
Never Take Friendship Personal. It is a slap in the face, as a fan, is
it really too much to expect new songs if we are going to support you
and buy your album? This could be forgiven, really, if they had
included other songs that were at least as good as Feel Good Drag,
however, that’s not the case. It is expected to be seen as the main
song of the album.
Many people appreciate Anberlin for their awesome guitar skills, but
there is very notiably little rocking-out in New Surrender. The only
rock-out songs are the aptly-named “the resistance” and
“feel-good drag”. Where are the awesome guitar riffs? This one may not
be entirely the bands fault. Only “One day before the release of
Cities, it was announced that guitarist Nathan Strayer
amicably left the band to go back to The Mosaic and that Christian
McAlhaney, formerly of the band Acceptance, would take over as the new
guitarist.

First Draft-Review

aubreywebb — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:07:13 +0000

Memoir: The Airport Race

aubreywebb — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:25:10 +0000

The lights of Houston spread endlessly below us as our plane finally made its final descent. The turbulence of the past few hours was finally in the past. I looked at my watch nervously, willing myself to believe that it only seemed so late because of our change in time zones. I could not deny the truth, though. We only had mere minutes to make our connecting flight to Albuquerque.
“Gather your things,” my mother urged across the aisle. “Be ready to bolt off this plane!” All six of us sat perched on the edges of our seats, bags in our laps, ready to pounce.
The hour and a half layover that had originally been ours had dwindled down to ten minutes as our plane taxied to the gate. We had known this before we had even boarded in Raleigh, having sat it out prematurely, while we watched the lightning through the giant windows of the RDU airport. There my father had given me a thorough tongue-lashing, for wasting a dollar-fifty on a bottle of water. Little did we know how grateful we would be for that overpriced H2O in a couple hours.
The stewardess was listing the gates numbers and letters for all the connecting flights. Why didn’t I hear ours? I was sure I had been listening attentively. I leaned over and asked my brother what she had said about Albuquerque. He just shrugged.
Finally, the ding signaling the removal of seatbelts sounded, it might as well have been a shotgun at the races. People were shoving, hustling, impolitely cutting each other off. Thankfully, with a group of six we could take matters into our own hands.
It is always a little disorienting to exit the contained little world of an airplane and enter into the halls of a major airport. It must be like being born, to a degree. You leave the quiet hum and (relative) comfort of the place you called home for just a little while, and then suddenly you are pushed back into the world of noise and bright lights, and there’s all these people, and languages you don’t understand, and weird smells, and activity everywhere. The Houston International Airport is one of the largest airports in the world, so as we stepped off the plane that cold March night, already distressed, we were really thrown for a loop.
Continental employees, recognizable by their company-standard blue uniform, were milling all around gate B5, sheparding the confused and concerned customers who still had a chance of making their connecting flight. Those who had already missed their next flights were directed to form a line to the left of the little gray ticket desk.
My dad immediately rushed up to this desk, and consulted with the harassed looking woman at the computer there. She barely spoke to him, and I noticed that she did not one look him in the eye. After being as short as she could, she brightly chirped “here you go!” handed my dad a packet of tickets, and promptly turning away from us. Obviously she had thought what she had done would cheer us up.
We quickly realized that they were not going to help us make our connecting flight at 8:15 (it was 8:05, according to their clocks). They had flat out given up hope on us. This was NOT what we wanted or needed, maybe in other circumstances we would have been more forgiving, but this was not a pleasure trip. This was a necessity, and we were on a very tight time schedule.
The tickets they so thoughtfully provided for us were for four different flights to Albuquerque, spread over the next 24 hours. My mom and dad would leave first, then my brother and sister, me, and my youngest sister, age 11, was assigned to leave at 1 in the morning, the next day. By herself. My dad was back at the desk in less than a second.
Usually, I am embarrassed by my father and his demand to get things just right. And he does demand sometimes. I try to be invisible as he harasses our waiters at restaurants, and the manager of the movie theater, or the school vice-principal. I am a very low-key, don’t-make-waves, type of person, to a fault. I know I getted walked all over occasionally, but I am just too shy to say anything. Right now, as I watched my dad, red in the face, pounding his fist on the desks flimsy counter, I cheered him on.
“Does it matter to any of you that we will be missing my FATHER’S FUNERAL?” he raged.
Apparently not. We got nowhere, actually, we only lost precious minutes haggling with the continental people. We looked around desperately.
One of the employees, a short, pinched looking lady with messy blond hair and angry eyes, flashing behind her glasses, was gathering people onto trolleys that had been standing by, so that they could be rushed to their next gates. Perfect, just for people like us! We got our hopes up for only a second. She took one look at the ticket my father handed her, and throw her hands out, looking crazily like a very short, blond football player trying to keep opponents away. She was keeping us off of her trolleys. They really had given up on us!
“NO!” Her voice was amazingly shrill. “No, you have no chance, you need to stand to the left with the others.”
We took one look behind us at that dejected group. It felt like time slowed down, and we all looked at one another, my two younger sisters, brother, mom, dad. We didn’t speak, but I could tell we were all thinking the same thing, and sizing each other up.
I heard that impossibly shrill voice drill into my head “It’s all the way in terminal E! There is no chance you’ll make it. Don’t even try!”
That’s what really determined it. If there is something you don’t tell a member of my stubborn family, it’s that they can’t do something. We were still looking at each other, but we knew what we had to do.
“RUN!” My dad yelled, and we were gone.

This I Believe-1

aubreywebb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:59:51 +0000

This I Believe
“Your attitude determines your altitude!” Can’t you just picture that phrase on a brightly-colored poster hanging in the halls of your middle school memories? It probably made you roll your thirteen-year old eyes in doubt; maybe it still does. How can something as inconsequential as your attitude determine just how far you go in life? Your “attitude” isn’t even a tangible thing! Yes, it is definitely your actions and circumstances ]]that propel you through life.
I don’t believe that is true. Attitude can and does make a difference in everything we do everyday of our life. It is our basis, our foundation for our hopes and dreams, our self-confidence and beliefs, and ultimately every single choice we make. You do not set out to try to accomplish a goal if you don’t actually believe that you can do it. If nagging thoughts of self-doubt set in while working toward your goal, you will fail, no questions asked. Even worse, your failure will further cement a bad attitude into your mind. We live in a time where it is fashionable to be negative and critical, poverty covers the globe, and war affects every nation. Bad-attitude is at an all-time epidemic high. Thankfully, there is a cure.
The secret to both greater satisfaction with our own lives, and helping those around us become more positive and proactive, is one and the same. Best of all, it is completely free and starts working instantly when you put it into effect. If it were possible to put in a bottle and sell, it would be a billion-dollar a year industry. The secret is simple, it is called “Look on the bright side.” It all starts in your head.
There are three components to looking on the bright side. First, smile more. Just think of a happy thought, maybe a nice memory or something that you are looking forward to. Plant that as your seed, and then smile. If you are out of practice, start small, you don’t even have to smile where anyone can see you. Just for a couple minutes a day, take a break and think of something happy and let yourself be glad to be alive. Next, be grateful for what you have. Everyone has something to be grateful for, at the very least we all have the great gift of life, which is the greatest gift there is. Also, dwell less on what you want, the more you are consumed by a desire for more, the less you can actually enjoy what you have.
Last but not least, wake up every morning and tell yourself you are going to have a great day. Tell yourself you can achieve anything you want to do. Believe it and it will happen. I believe in the power of a good attitude, and I believe that it will change your life forever and for the better if you will only be a little more positive each day. Anyone can do it.

About Me

aubreywebb — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:39:50 +0000

Everyone calls me sweetheart. I don’t usually mind this, since it reaffirms that I must be a nice person, but it often makes me feel like I am 6 years old. I love popcorn, cream of wheat, and eggo waffles. This is about all I eat, mostly because its about all I can afford. I have an addictive personality; right now I would say I am definitely addicted to work. This is not always a bad thing, but it is not necessarily a good thing either. I would love to live in Manhattan someday, but right now I happily reside in Salt Lake City, Utah. I plan to graduate in Psychology from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.