That Jazz Festival, Take Two - 3/18/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Friday was a half day for seniors because of course selection, and yesterday was the Berklee jazz festival. This means that within a span of about thirty-six hours, I hung out with Molly and Dave for about eighteen.

This is significant because it went fine. It is fine. Everything is fine. I got mad at Molly briefly when she was yelling at Dave for making little mistakes while driving, and again when she cared that I started my pad thai before she got hers. But otherwise, everything was okay. We talked a lot and sat around a lot and ate a lot of food, and it was an overall pleasant experience.

It started snowing very hard as we left school Friday. When we went to the Thai restaurant, the air was completely white. It was not even snowing very purposefully - it was that slow, floaty snow that drifts lazily to the ground. Just a lot of it. It kept snowing like that all night. For this reason, we didn't go to the jazz festival until later than anticipated. We missed a train, and then Molly decided that she did not want to drive until things cleared up, so we missed the next train. We hung around until the next train and took that one. Getting into Boston always takes longer than I think. Also, both the train and the subway were filled with dumb, rowdy people in green preparing to be drunk.

When we got to Berklee, we immediately caught sight of Julian, Malcolm, Noah, Captain Mojo, and Jay Goldman. We went over to say hi.

"Woah. Woah. Woah," said Malcolm as he saw us, apparantly one at a time.

"Oh, hey," said Julian, looking a little pleasantly surprised, but mostly just surprised. "We weren't expecting to see... you... here."

We had a small, silly conversation. Then Captain Mojo and Jay, who had never made an indication that they had noticed our presence, started to walk away, and the rest followed them.

"We were just going to see Reading," explained Julian, staying behind with us.

"Oh. Do you have like, a program? Do you know what's going on?" asked Dave, taking a piece of paper from Julian's hands and examining it.

"Well, that's a train schedule." He laughed. "But yeah, uh, you can get them out by the front."

We followed Captain Mojo and Jay into a small room which was already filled with people. We stood at the back because there were no more chairs. Soon after the band was announced, Jay and Captain Mojo, and then Noah, Malcolm and Julian, left.

"Wait, what?" I said to Molly.

She shrugged.

I tried to watch the band and not strive to follow Julian around. They were wearing brightly colored shirts with mismatching brightly colored ties. They had one female, a tenor sax player, who was their Jay Goldman. She took a solo in every song. She made strange movements with her body, even when she was not playing. They played Somewhere Over the Rainbow (a tenor sax feature). It was very pretty. Then we saw another, even better band in which the guitarist skatted along to his solos. Then we saw Berklee. It was amazing, but not fucking amazing. The conductor was extremely amusing. Also, during a crazy fast swing song, all four trombonists traded off. It seemed to be a spontaneous thing. Each one of them took a solo. Then they each took eight, then four, then two, then one, and then they all played at the same time, without the rhythm section. The bass trombonist seemed pretty uncomfortably soloing. So once, in respose to three really fast, really high licks from the other trombones, he held the lowest note he could hit. The audience went nuts after they were done.

We ran into Julian, Malcolm, Noah and Captain Mojo again at the train station. Jay had presumably left for whatever college it is that he goes to.

"Hey," said Julian. "Wow we... keep running into each other."

"Well, we did attend the same event, and we are from the same town," said Dave.

"...Okay, I guess it is not that coincidental."

"They wouldn't let us in to condom world," Noah stated.

"We were not virile enough," said Julian, laughing.

At that point it struck me how bizarre the collective physical appearance of this group was - Malcolm huge and hairy, Julian tall and skinny, Captain Mojo small and angular, and Noah medium sized and muscular like an insect, with a slightly insane look about him. Malcolm was wearing a brightly colored, dirty knit cap with a huge pompom on top. Julian had his saxophone.

"Wait..." I said. "There actually exists a place called condom world?"

"Yeah," said Noah.

"And... That is what they exclusively sell?" I was talking too loudly and with too much inflection because I was uncomfortable.

"In different varieties and sizes?" suggested Molly.

"They sell like, dildos too," said Noah.

"Hey, that's our train," said Julian. "Track five."

We walked out to it and got onto it. They didn't sit down in the first car, so we did, and let them go to another one. There were rowdy drunk people in green behind us.

"We should... move," said Molly.

"Let's move that way," I said, pointing in the direction opposite to the one they had gone in.

"Why?"

I mumbled incoherantly.

"Why not move the other way?"

"Because that would be... awkward..." I said.

"Yeah," said Dave. "It would be like, 'oh, hey again, we're not following you, really...'" He paused. "'But you know, Aidan really wanted to move into this car...'"

"Shut up," I said inconsequentially.

"Oh. Okay," said Molly.

So we moved in the opposite direction, where we sat near, but not immediately in front of, rowdy drunk people in green.

"I can never tell," said Molly, "whether Noah dislikes me intensely or whether he treats everyone that way. I feel like he just always makes me uncomfortable on purpose and that... He might really dislike me."

"Yeah," I said. "I can never think of reactions to things he does, and I feel like he dislikes me because of that. But I just... can't... think of reactions. It's the same thing with Captain Mojo."

"What?"

"Well, not that he does weird things, but I just get the feeling that he dislikes me, and I don't know why. I feel like I come into contact with him in enough situations so that we should probably be acquaintences by now, but we're not, I've never spoken to him, so I suspect that he doesn't like me. Why wouldn't he though? He doesn't even know me."

In my imagination, both Noah and Captain Mojo dislike me because they think that I have no right to be a musician while also being so spectacularly uncool. They think that I am too square to understand the spirit of of jazz or to collaborate properly with other musicians, which I suppose might be true.

"Maybe he's heard things about you," said Dave. "Terrible things. I mean... not that I've been telling Captain Mojo terrible things about you or anything..."

"Me neither," said Molly. They looked conspicuous.

"Maybe he secretly has a crush on you."

"I... don't think that's what it is Dave."

"Are you sure?

"Almost positive."

The rowdy drunk people in green started singing "why do you build me up buttercup". I started to feel depressed.

We did not even get to hear that much jazz.

I suppose that when Julian did interact with us, he was very pleasant about it. He was treating us amicably. But he was not treating us as friends. He was with his group of friends, and I was with mine. He and the rest of them made it clear that there was no overlap. And now I was on a train, and he was on the same train, and even though we didn't know that many people on the train, he was not sitting with me or talking to me. He had been very attractive, when I saw him. I wondered if he has actually gotten more attractive over the last two years, or whether it is just my imagination.

"You know what you were saying the other day about how goal oriented people are less happy because failure is devastating whereas success is only temporarily satisfying?" I said to Molly.

"Yeah."

"I am exactly like that."

"I know."

"I am thinking about how before, it was my goal to be able to improvise melodically. Now that I can do that, it does not particularly make me happy. Now I must learn to bebop. I will be unhappy again until I learn to do that. I must bebop in Spain."

"Yeah, honestly, when you told me you wanted to go to Graham, my first reaction was, 'oh, no.'"

"Yeah, me too," said Dave.

"Really? I don't think it would've been a huge deal if I hadn't gotten in."

"It seemed like it would have been."

"Yeah."

"Oh. I did not know that. I guess maybe I just thought it wasn't a big deal because it wasn't a big deal the same way it would be for most people. It wasn't because of the prestige. It wasn't like, 'I must go to a pretigious school,' it was like, 'I like this school. I want to go to it.'"

"I still don't know where I want to go," said Molly.

"At least you know your major," I said. Molly's major is chemical engineering.

"You know your major."

"I have my doubts."