Oh man.
For my entire school career, I've been able to maintain a moderate level of laziness and still get by. This is mainly because every semester so far, I've had one real class and three joke classes. This semester I have three and a half real classes, and I am not being lazy at all, but I still can't keep up with the work. Thursday was the worst. I devided all of my homework into "absolutely necessary" and "kind of possible to put off." By the time I got home from band, I didn't even have time to get all of the absolutely necessary stuff done. All I did was three physics problems and a kind of pathetic lab before I got to my "I don't care, I am going the hell to bed" stage, which has been coming surprisingly early lately. I did not read Beowulf. I did not discuss a physical feature of Spain and its implications on Spanish culture. I definately didn't do those crazy ray diagram things, because I didn't even really know what they were or how to do them. (Julian ended up explaining it to me at lunch, and I finished them about five seconds before the bell rang.) Really. I'm fucked.
Oh well. At least I like my classes, which is relatively unheard of. And thanks to the number of people who dropped out of physics (including Adam, victory dance) seats have been rearranged and I now sit next to Julian and get to exchange glances with him and discuss classwork problems with him all the time. As in...
Me: What? You definately have to know the length of your own nose for this one.
Him: Well, maybe you're supposed to assume that you have a really flat nose. Or really, really buggy eyes.
Me: Or maybe you're just supposed to know your nose measurements off the top of your head.
Him: incredulous look What, you don't? What's wrong with you?
Even English is not so bad. Although Beowulf is pretty much the most boring thing I've ever read (it takes them forty pages to say "there was this monster, so this guy killed it") most of what we talk about in class is history/cultural stuff, which I like. Besides that, I get to make band jokes with Molly, Dave and Valerie. Emma and Helen are in our class now too, and I kind of feel like I ignore them. They kind of feel like I ignore them too. I feel bad but... it's wierd. It feels like there's nothing I can talk to them about anymore, because marching band has rapidly become, once again, my entire life, and they're not even musicians. They don't know Valerie, or even Dave, really. Besides that, Emma gets really annoying when she feels she is being ignored. It makes me want to ignore her more. It's... awkward.
Friday was our first football game. Which meant, for me, leaving the house at quarter to seven AM and getting back at the house at quarter to eleven PM. Besides this, I have a really bad cold. (Oh God, this really sucks. I can't afford to be sick right now.) I got really tired and stressed out during practice, and then I got a cramp. A pretty bad one. So I hung on for as long as I could and then fell out of formation and collapsed behind the concession stand and kind of simultaneously felt sick and freaked out. It was not cool. I was relatively afraid that I wouldn't be able to march the show, and I didn't want to miss our first football game. I sat out for most of the rest of practice. (not long - maybe fifteen minutes) I still felt terrible when we got back to the band room, but after Sarah gave me some Motrin (advantages to having someone that intense and overprepared in your section) and we took our dinner break, I was okay. That was breakdown number one. Breakdown number two came when we got our music for the fight song and the national anthem, which we were expected to sightread. Two problems:
- I cannot sightread trombone music at all.
- The lyre (portable music stand thing) they ordered for me does not fit anywhere on my instrument. Dave could not figure it out. His lyre is completely different.
Either one of these things by itself, and I would have been okay. I could have looked on with Dave while we performed, or examined my own music and practiced it over and over until I had it memorized. But since niether of these was an option, I freaked out. Oh my God, I thought. I am just going to be standing in the stands not playing anything. I might as well be that kid marching with an instrument and no mouthpiece. I can't play the trombone. I am not a good musician. I can't do this. I ended up yelling at some people and being on the verge of tears for a while, which was embarrassing, although I don't think that many people noticed. I calmed down when I realized that
A, I couldn't play the national anthem or the fight song for my first football game on the flute, and B, After Dave played each stand short for me, (the Hey Song, Iron Man, etc,) I was able to pick it out and play it from memory. I figure this makes me not a bad musician. As usual, my ear makes up for my lack of skill.
We lost, but the football game went okay from my standpoint, at least. We did surprisingly well on the halftime show. I played the root note during the national anthem. I played my stand shorts. I hung out with Eric, Alice, Rob, Dave and Molly during the third quarter and felt social. We exchanged health class anecdotes and tried to sing chords. We failed at most of them, but it was fun.
I also killed my throat. Ugh, I feel terrible.
Today consisted of a pretty intense practice, followed by the annual mandatory party. (Eric makes fun of this every year.) The mandatory party works like this: Everyone sits around and eats burgers. Then the parent and student officers run seperate meetings about things each group needs to do and events that will eventually take place. (Yes, we ran the meeting. It was kind of disorganized, but people still listened to us, so the points were gotten across.) After the students' twenty minute meeting, they go inside and play video games while the parents finish their two hour meeting. The meeting is not two hours long because the parents have any more to say. It's just that each parent officer feels the need to make herself feel more important than all of the other parent officers by talking for longer than they did. I swear to God. It's true. The parent officers are all long-winded and power hungry. I include my mother in this. She's the one who take pictures, runs the website, and sends out information emails. Why? So that she will be able to talk a lot, and be more powerful than Eric's mother and Mrs. Taylor. Student officers become officers primarily because they felt like making a funny speech at band camp. Stupid band parents.
Now I feel like absolute shit. And I have an essay to write and physics problems to do and stupid Beowulf to read, and, worst of all, I'm playing at church tomorrow. The same piece I screwed up last time. I don't want to play that feeling like this. And I haven't had time to practice it at all. Oh man.
Oh well. This is still better than summer.
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