Siprianna Bracamontez had been decorating cakes since she was in fifth grade, but last spring she was put in responsibility of creating a masterpiece for her mom’s wedding. This neon pink and green wedding cake has been the highlight of her cake decorating career.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Bracamontez said. “The hardest thing about it is coming up with ideas. For my mom’s work I do monthly birthdays and they can’t all be the same thing. It’s hard coming up with new ideas each month and I’ve been doing it for two years now.”
From cake decorating to deejaying, students are finding creative ways to express themselves outside of the classroom. Freshman John Morgan spends his time away from school building sculptures out of Legos.
“It’s a way to express myself,” Morgan said. “It’s kind of a toy so you can mess around with it more than just looking at it. Most of my Lego creations are geared to war because most of them are featured in a game of Transformers. I don’t own my own Transformers so I build my own weapons.”
Hobbies can carry over from childhood like playing with Legos, or can begin at any age. Freshman Alec Tripp started deejaying when he was nine years old on Christmas Day.
“I heard of a band called ‘People on the Stairs’ who made scratches and interesting sounds in their songs,” Tripp said. “I wanted to know how they could do that so perfectly with the rhythm. So I got my dad’s old turn tables from college.”
Tripp has become a viral video sensation n YouTube and has even been featured on a United Kingdom television show called Blue Peter. His videos were picked up and played on a segment they were doing on deejays across the world.
“I began listening to a lot of music from around the world and I chose ’80s Brazilian music because it has grooves that makes you want to dance,” Tripp said. “It’s really fun to remix it and it’s working well so far. It takes a lot of skill and dedication.”
Hobbies can be physical as well as creative. Junior Oliver Gelleni has been playing the guitar since he was in middle school and is currently in a band called DFF.
“I don’t listen to the radio, they ruin songs by never playing them,” Gelleni said. “I try to write something original just to bring something new to the table.”
While Gelleni gets his inspiration from Jimmy Page and Jack White, freshman Kaitlynn Morris gets her inspiration for dancing from her middle school dance teacher Brooke Solomon.
“She was the one who taught me how to dance,” Morris said. “Without her constantly pushing me to do better I wouldn’t be the dancer or person that I am today.”
Morris has taken inspiration from her middle school dance coach and applied it to becoming a rookie Royal and hopes to join the Royals next year.
“I love to dance,” Morris said. “To me dance is just a way to let out any kind of emotion whether it be extreme happiness or mourning. In that sense, dance helps me get my emotions out in an amazing way through my body.”
Another physical hobby has been taken up by freshman Cori Young. Over the last two and a half years he has become a freestyle biker. Freestyle bikers bike at skate parks and perform tricks.
“All of my friends were doing it,” Young said. “I just moved here so I joined in.”
This hobby comes with many bumps and bruises. Young’s worse crash so far happened a couple weeks ago.
“I was biking at East side and got a concussion,” Young said. “The fourth jump was longer than I expected and I hit my head pretty hard.”
A less dangerous hobby then biking is Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is a pencil and paper role playing game taken up by junior Chris Williams.
“It’s fun because you can do what you want to and it’s a better alternative to staring at a screen for five hours,” Williams said. “It has a learning curve; you have to calculate a lot of stuff like health and damage. There is other complicated stuff that I haven’t run into yet. My adventure has just begun.”
