Tuesday was one of the best days of my recent life. It wasn't that any one incredibly awesome thing happened, it was more like a string of slightly awesome things that just continued for the entire day. Overall, it was pretty sweet. Here's how Tuesday went:
During the school day, the junior class went on a field trip to a college fair in Boston. Neither Dave nor Molly was signed up for some reason. Blocking the hallway time consisted of Dave trying to convince Molly to skip school with him and hang out in the bird sanctuary. (Which, now that I think of it, was kind of sketchy. The bird santuary is basically a large, closed off forest without any people in it. It serves two purposes for the teenage population in town. Guess what they are?) He did not succeed, so Molly just went to school and Dave "snuck onto the bus" to go on the field trip even though he hadn't paid or turned in a permission slip. I put the sneaking part in quotes because he just got onto a bus and no one noticed. It really didn't surprise me that it was easy. There were three or four hundred kids loaded onto seven busses - honestly, how did anyone expect them to keep track of us?
On the bus ride, I talked to Dave and we listened to ska. I also got some good staring at Julian in - he was sitting with Adam in a seat across the aisle and a little in front of us. The actual college fair was basically colleges giving me junk mail in person instead of mailing it to me. The only person I actually talked to was from Oberlin, which I have actually been looking at pretty seriously. She was really intense and kind of eccentric looking and sounded apologetic when she told me that the school only offered one dialect of Chinese. There were thousands of people in the hall where it was, and the crowd was so thick that I couldn't find a six foot four kid hanging around any engineering school booths no matter how hard I tried. It was also relatively hard to find a six foot one kid wearing a bright orange hat with a pompom on it when I lost him. Mostly, Dave and I tried to keep close for the whole thing just because it was so easy to lose people and so hard to find them. We checked out some schools, but mostly we just wandered around gossiping and making fun of the college fair.
We were only at the college fair for an hour and a half or so before we went to Quincy Market for lunch. "Lunch" lasted about two and a half hours. So we ate lunch, and then we hung around with Tom for a while, and then we hung around with Eric for a while (he skipped the college fair to hang out at Berklee by himself, which is simultaneously rebellious and band-geeky.) And then we tried to get Adam to stop hanging out with us for a while, and then we found Julian, who had been wandering around Quincy Market by himself, completely lost. Unfortunately, Adam and Julian hung out for almost the enirety of this field trip. This presented me with some very difficult decisions. However, Dave and I ended up eating icecream with both of them in a funky little underground icecream place, which was actually not too painful Adam-wise and allowed me to talk to Julian about colleges, crack jokes which made him laugh, and watch him eat an icecream cone. Ahem. But anyway, Quincy Market is a very cool place, and hanging out there was fun.
Busride back: gossip, ska, staring. When we got back to school forty-five minutes before it ended, the teacher who was on the bus said, "You can go back to your fourth block class if you want to," in response to which there was much jubilation. So Dave and I wandered the halls, talked to Mr. Hoffman, bothered Special K, unsuccessfully tried to get Molly to wander the halls with us, and then went to the band room, where we hung out with Julian, and DIDN'T hang out with Adam, and picked things out on the piano and talked about music and colleges.
I went home and stayed there for about an hour. Then I went back to the band room where we had practice for jazz night. Practice was followed by hanging out in the band room with Dave and a weird Asian kid from our math class, eating pizza and arguing with said Asian kid about the merits of classical versus jazz. We made fun of each other a lot, but it was just really funny rather than being nasty.
Then jazz night. Since I was in two out of the four bands that performed plus a combo, jazz night was a lot of playing and not a lot of hanging around. However, even though I was tired and sweaty by the end and my lips were shot, it made me extremely happy. It was just fun. Performing is fun. And I performed for like an hour. Also, if I do say so myself, I rocked the jazz flute. Seriously, I did really well in the combo. I was very close to being what I would qualify as "amazing." I got many compliments afterwards - from people who I knew meant it, like Jason and RJ and Jay's mom and strangers and Evan Desmond, who doesn't usually even talk at jazz band related things. Apparantly, my father started crying during my solo. (Of course though, the compliment that I cared the most about was the little "sounds good" Julian gave me as we were passing each other on stage during rehearsal, accompanied by a little smile.) I also took a pretty good trombone solo in JV band, of which I am almost as proud, just because it was not long ago that I absolutely sucked at trombone.
My mother videotaped jazz night. I am currently being extremely obsessive about it. I have watched it too many times. I keep being like, "I think Tuesday night proved that I am a good musician. I'm not sure. Let's watch the recording of my solo again." Then I usually end up watching the whole thing, or at least what she recorded - in addition to my combo, JV, varsity, and Julian's combo. (With, Jay, Noah and Rob. They played Watermelon Man, complete with the blowing across glass bottles.) It's weird watching something like that over and over again. During the live performance, you're kind of rooting for people at certain times, and you don't know exactly how everything's going to turn out. The seventh time that you watch the video of it, you still root for people, but you know what's going to happen. Craig will never hit that high partial during his solo in 'Round Midnight. Vicky will always forget the words to Respect, but she will always be awesome anyway. I will always hit that one B natural where there is supposed to be a B flat. And I will never milk that pause for quite long enough. But I will always hit that high A dead on. And my solo will always be intelligent and melodic and emotional and pretty damn near to amazing.
(Also, there is a giant picture of me playing the trombone in the town newspaper. It may be the worst picture of me that has ever been taken. People are not attractive when they are playing the trombone.)
To top it off, my parents pulled me aside right before the concert started to tell me that we'd sold the apartment. We actually have two different people who want to buy. They are fighting over it. This means that we will probably get a good price. And we will most likely move in two months.
I hung out with Dave for the entire day, and he basically never shut up about Molly. During the college fair, he wished she were there, or that he were in the bird sanctuary with her. Before and during jazz night, he wondered when she would be able to get out of orchestra so she could come. He constantly wondered what she was doing at the time. This leads into my next entry, which will most likely be written tomorrow. Probably.
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