Breakfast with Amber

August 2020: Class with Amber

It's now August of 2020, and it's time for me to begin sophomore year. Hard to believe we've already made it a quarter of the way through. Like I mentioned before, I spent the fall semester at home, too. I wanted to move back onto campus, but Trinity was only allowing select students to come back. I remember the list of students who were allowed to return to campus because I copied and pasted it into the first chapter of Dancing in the Rain, a book I wrote that takes place in the fall of 2020 while the COVID pandemic was going on. Here it is below:

First years

Transfers

International students

RAs

Those living in San Antonio

Those living in City Vista

Students facing housing or food insecurities, and/or a difficult remote learning environment

Students who are currently involved in supervised research or a project that requires on-campus completion

Student athletes participating in fall and winter sports who must return to campus for conditioning, in hopes of competing once athletic conference restrictions are lifted.

And I wasn't any of those, so I was staying home. There was a point where I wanted to apply to return to campus since the electronic music class I had enrolled in was labeled as in person only, but then the professor changed it to a hybrid class, so now I had no argument as to why I should return. The student population was pretty much divided into thirds: one third returned to campus, one third stayed off campus but still lived in San Antonio, and a third was scattered across the country, including in Houston, where I was.

With a new semester came a new set of classes. As I mentioned before, I took an electronic music class for my new media minor. Electronic music is the "it" class of the music department, so the fact that I was able to get in as a sophomore is pretty impressive. It was taught Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30 to 3:45 by Dr. Bondari, who definitely gives off the vibes of a college professor who teaches electronic music. He had long hair and glasses, and he was super chill with all of us. He taught us all the basics of electronic music from producing MIDIs to sampling. We were using a software called Tracktion Waveform. Dr. Bondari had never used this software, either, but it was only $110, which is cheaper than the software that the class normally uses, and he "didn't want to make us spend $300 when we weren't even going to be on campus." That meant it was a learning curve for all of us. (Or perhaps a learning wave. Get it? Because sound waves? Oh, never mind.) I promised myself I'd keep making music using Waveform after the class was over, but I've only produced one song since then, and it was in January 2022.

Apparently, I had a lasting effect on Dr. Bondari. My senior year, I was waiting for dance class to start, and one of my classmates was on her computer working on her midterm for electronic music. I told her that I took that same class and showed her my own midterm. She mentioned that Dr. Bondari talked about a student "who wrote lyrics and sang them and everything" for her midterm a couple years ago when assigning the midterm, and I knew instantly which student he was talking about. If you know me, you know that I ain't making music if I ain't singing in it. Then there was the Christmas vespers service that same semester where we just so happened to sit next to each other and didn't notice until the service was over. He mentioned that his kids still listen to the song I made for my music video project two years later, but that's a story for another chapter.

The other class I took for my minor was an art history survey class that spanned from the Renaissance to the present. Half of the semester was just the Renaissance, but I guess it counts as new media because it's the second half of the history of art. This class was on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:35 to 4:50 and was taught by Dr. Agoston. Dr. Agoston wasn't old, but she was definitely upper-middle-aged, maybe in her 50s. She was also very sweet and made sure we all got the chance to speak during discussions.