Problems With The Band - 11/9/2006 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Saturday after the SAT2s, Dave came by to drop off my keys because I'd left them at his house. The SAT2s, as I mentioned in the last entry, were very upsetting, especially when I had already been on the verge of a minor emotional breakdown going into them. I left the SAT2s feeling slightly insane and shaking from fear because of the stress and the chaos and the fact that it took me a long time to figure out where I was and how to get off of the prep school campus. When Dave came over, I looked and felt completely disheveled and was sitting in my kitchen drinking water to fight nausea in my largest, most beat up long sleve t-shirt. He ended up sitting in my kitchen with me for a few hours talking to me. Not even about important things. We talked about the physics of guitar effects and the tempered scale and the Turing test. And it calmed me way the fuck down. It made me feel like everything was okay.

Fuck. I could be one of those girls whose boyfriend drives her to school. I could be one of those girls who hangs out at home and talks to her boyfriend for hours on end. I could be done with stupid, infatuation-based, highschool love and be experiencing adult love. The kind where you know exactly how insecure and bullshitting and weak the other person is, but you don't care, you just stick together. Because you depend on each other. But I'm not. There is a barrier between us because we don't have a sexual relationship, and because now one's not even possible. He and Molly have a level of closeness that I'll never have with either of them. They know things about each other that I'll never know. And even though they still like me, and they'll keep hanging out with me, and they're pretty close to me, I guess, they don't depend on me anymore. No one depends on me.

Alternative jazz band didn't go so well yesterday. A lot of people haven't been showing up, and the people who have been showing up I don't have any control over. How can I? I don't have any authority over them. I'm the same age as they are, and they're all there by choice. I guess I just assumed that people would choose not to goof off. And to show up. Jesus, I don't even usually have a rhythm section. And the horns don't appear to be getting any better. They don't sound horrendous, but they're close to it. I don't know what it is. Could it just be my arranging? I noticed a few mistakes in the score to 'Round Midnight - weird chords that don't fit - that I can't figure out how to fix. All the notes I used make perfect sense, but together they don't sound good. Maybe I make things too thin. It sounded too thin yesterday. But that could just be because of the people we were missing. I also don't know how much I'm doing to improve the group during rehearsal. I don't always know what to say to people who aren't playing things the way I intended. The flutes are the problem, usually. Because they aren't jazz musicians. Everything sounds so uptight. I try to tell them to relax, to be intense, to rock more and to worry more about emotion than technique. But what I say never comes out right. I'm not a band director - I can't make motivational speeches. I just feel like I'm being silly, or insulting them.

In terms of not showing up and goofing off... and playing badly, for that matter, Julian is one of the worst. This is surprising and upsetting enough to take away all of my confidence while I'm standing up there. It seems so out of his character - Mr. Excellence in Jazz Band, naturally reserved and always good and respectful and never a jerk, is contributing to the destruction of something I care about deeply, by being a jerk. I don't feel comfortable telling anyone to shut up, but of everyone in the band, I feel least comfortable telling it to him. He is my musical superior, he is cooler than me, and he's... Julian. I mean, I dunno. I never expected it to be formal or anything. I don't want to be uptight. But I have little enough control over the group so that we don't get as much done as we should. I find myself being a little angry at him. I find myself acting all passive-aggressive towards him. That's the worst part.

Is it possible that he's intentionally annoying me so that I won't be in love with him anymore? I mean, that's occoured to me. I can see a mind as calm and logical as his deciding to do that. But it's kind of elaborate. I'm probably just paranoid. Besides that, I'm not in love with him anymore. I still... admire him. But it's not the same thing.

This cannot fail. It must be awesome. I must fix it. I must fix everything in the next three rehearsals, since after that we have a concert. We're performing in the winter school concert, like a normal, school-run band, in front of Mr. Thomas and my parents and everyone else's parents and pretty much the entire musical community of the highschool. On December 14th, I will know, and everyone else will know, whether or not I was capable of pulling this off. We must be awesome.