Thoughts on Obsession - 3/19/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Sometimes it just hits me across the face that life is surreal, and I start laughing.

I worked for eight hours at the bagel store today. Business was slow and I had had a coffee, so I spent a lot of time talking to the two other highschool kids who work there, Roxie and Steve. They are more or less complete strangers to me, and our personalities are very clearly and comically different, but we talked and laughed and I was happy. I was ecstatically happy at work all day, and it does not make any sense. It could not have been just because of the coffee.

I came home and worked on bebopping. I got better. I can bring a little more of the funk in Spain. I can solo quickly and coherantly to it. I accomplished this by playing over the same chords for ten minutes at a time, chords which I had recorded on to garageband, sloppily, because I am neither a pianist nor am I really a guitarist. I put the computer metronome on the recording to keep the beat. It came out all fuzzy because I had acheived some sort of overdrive effect. The finished product sounded fucking terrible. But it helped me bring the funk. It will help me bring the funk at the next concert, which, incidentally, is tomorrow.

Then I wrote a "report" on Marcel DuChamp for humanities. He is the guy whose most famous work is just a urinal that he found. He signed the urinal "R. Mutt". Lately in humanities I have been engaging in open warfare with the student teacher who has taken over our class oh-so-very poorly. I point out her mistakes and question the validity of her assignments and refuse to bullshit when I am clearly supposed to. She is being a big idiot and I am being a big jerk. I can't help it. I also can't figure out whether or not it's justified. It's certainly unpleasant. I wish I weren't doing this. It makes me dread going to school. It has made me break down completely a few times in the past week. For some reason, this person just makes me angrier than any teacher has made me in a while. It does not even make that much sense.

My mom ran into Julian's mom at the grocery store and told me a story about it. It made me feel lots of emotion. Good emotion. Swelling, beautiful, all-the-way-to-the-depths-of-my-body emotion. Just that little bit of information about him, aquired third hand. Just the mention of him for a little while. I know this isn't healthy. He's not even the same person anymore. He's not even who I think he is. I mean Christ, he consented to going to a place called Condom World. I've also realized, finally, that no matter who he is, he's not worthy of this kind of obsession. Nobody's so awesome that just gathering facts about them should bring on a drug-like euphoria. (He is a terrible driver. His brother works for the government. When he first got his trumpet, he locked himself in a closet with it for several hours. He wants to switch over to trumpet from saxophone for good now. He is applying to the following universities: Johns Hopkins. Oberlin. University of Chicago. MIT. Graham. He did not get into MIT. He got into the University of Chicago.)

(Wheee.)

Molly thinks that music affects my emotions to an unusual extent. Sometimes I think that maybe my obsession with music is arbitaray. I mean, it kind of snuck up on me. I wasn't obsessed with music in middle school. But then I just sort of started joining bands, and then I couldn't stop, and now somehow I'm at this point, where half of the time I'm in the school I'm in the band room, and music defines my personality. This makes it seem to me like it might have been arbitrary. But if I am exceptionally sensitive to music, maybe there is a reason. I would prefer that.

I think I'm going to quit school and read Harry Potter.