Virginia Tech

Events... Events... Events...

Things are so... eventful....

yet... so normal

too normal

My life has been governed around the concept that my life is boring and that I need to cope with it... which I've learned to do wonderfully... But now everything is simply happening... so many events and problems and dillemas and confusions and I don't feel like I can handle it. When I stop to sit and feel what my emotions feel like, I just don't feel anything. As I wrote in that poem:



My feeling of nuetral
Has diminished to nothing
What is nothing?
Nothing makes sense

It makes so much sense
But why can't I handle it?
Why are these thoughts I'm having
So candle-lit?



And this is quite true... Never has something occured where I haven't felt anything. The feeling of being nuetral, of just experiencing life and going along with it, it is still a feeling, a genuine feeling that I'm just supposed to keep going- not happy, not sad...

And now it's disappeared. I don't even feel it anymore. And maybe I'm just beginning to think more and more about things, but I've noticed that things don't really even feel like they've happened. They feel distant, like a dream, only my dreams are usually clearer in memory.

Although I don't think I've dreamed at all in the past month or so. I just fall asleep and then wake up... no in between. I might dream.... maybe I just don't remember it. What I've decided to do is train my mind to think of what I dreamt about immediately when I wake up. This used to come naturally to me. Maybe I still do have that ability- I just haven't been dreaming...

Sometimes I wish the others around me were more selfish. If I sacrifice my own happiness for somebody elses, than my happiness is diminished too, but whoever is meant to be pleased wants to do the same thing that I've done- try to make me happy whilst sacrificing their own happiness... And Daeriam, you feel guilty because you think you are annoying toward me, you think that you are making me suffer. You should know that you aren't. You should know that I love you, and it would take the world to change that. You should know I want to see you just as much as you want to see me, but I've just learned to cope. And you should have realized by now that I am a very understanding person. I completely understand your dillema. No, I have never experienced it in the way that you are experiencing it, but I can understand and relate all the same. I'm not telling you not to feel sad... For God's sake, you have every right to feel sad. I'm telling you that you that you should not feel sad about the idea that you are annoying me. Which is completely false, by the way.

Shall I summarize my trip to VT? I believe that would be preferable. I kept wishing that I had a laptop with me so I could write down the things that were happening to me as they happened. Many thoughts went through my head about many things- annoyances, understandings, familiarities, people that I met, events that occured, happy things, sad things, everything......

Well, the main annoyance:

We arrived there many, many hours late. I originally had to be up and at the high school at 4:45 Friday Morning. Due to the bad weather, Mr. Yonkey changed that to 11:45 in the morning. Of course, this made us 7 hours late. Quite late, in fact. We made it to VT, me being quite annoyed, having been squished next to Ryan Benyo with my legs at an acute angle due to the lack of leg room (because Mr. Yonkey is a giant...). We walked into the ballroom, and waited. Everybody but us had already auditioned, so when they called for people to go where their designated areas were, confusion overtook some of us. Eventually, a decision was made. Since it was too late to audition, we would be judged by how we did at Districts and reccomendations from band directors, and simply be put in last chair of a band that was considered our level. I did Districts two years ago. So I was being judged as an eighth grader by how I did in sixth grade.

There are five bands-

Bronze
Silver
Maroon
Orange
Gold

Bronze being the lowest. In sixth grade, I was terrible. So guess what I got.

8th chair in Bronze band.

Well, to continue, while we were getting things straightened out, all of the bands had gone to their designated practice rooms. Now that we knew what bands we were in, we were to go there as well. Lauren Light and I were the only two Bronze band people from Rappahannock. Mr. Beasley, Lauren, and I eventually, after much searching, found our practice room. We managed to enter quietly, while the band rehearsed, or rather, made sounds similar to that of an elephant giving birth. We found somebody who was designated to help out with anything, still with barely anybody realizing that we had entered the room. Mr. Beasley told her what chairs we were in, and she went to get us seats. She got Lauren's first, because the trumpets were on the far row and easiest to get to, wheras the French Horns were right in the middle. She took a little while to get the chair without disturbing anybody, so I waited patiently in the back for her to finish.

The director was an old woman, still obviously full of life enough to handle kids, but old nontheless. She reminded me of Ms. Fornier, in the way that the latter treated everyone in fifth grade. She noticed me waiting calmy in the back, and she offered to get me a seat and asked me what chair I was in, completely shattering my hopes of entering the band silently and without a big scene.

Several heads turned back to look at me. I momentarily looked around at theses faces, young, some even looked like they were in fifth grade. Their eyes were all fixed on me, and, for the first time in my life, I regretted looking 3 or 4 years older than I am. I've been mistaken many times for ages as high as 17, because of my height, my clarity of speech, my vocabulary usage, and my face development (I'm not assuming these things. I was told them by the many people who have mistaken my age.)

So there I was. I might as well have been 16 or 17- it didn't make a difference to these people. They didn't know how old I was, how old I looked was enough to handle.

The director asked me what chair I was in, and, after surveying over these people, these faces, I replied:

"I'm in eighth chair."

I managed to say it clearly and distinctively, showing very little hint of the embarrasment that I was feeling. Many of these fifth grade faces didn't even bother to stifle their laughter. Clearly, I was being ridiculed. Sill not showing any hint of embarrasment, I walked up through the row and sat down in the chair that I had been given by the band director. My embarrasment was hidden, but my annoyance at the entire thing was very apparent.

The 7th chair French Hornist next to me reminded me of someone in my grade. I would later learn many differences between them, but the angle in which I saw her at first made me almost mistake her for Johanna Hughes.

We played a few warm-ups, and began to take a look at our pieces of music. I will describe them to you, along with our progress along the way with them.

Kitty Hawk March- One of the easiest pieces of music that I have ever played. On my part, at least, it didnt go above a concert D and didn't go below a concert A flat. If you are in band, than you should know how pathetically easy that is. We sucked at it when we first played it. We sucked at it at the concert.

New World Symphony- Sounds strangely like the theme from Jaws in some aspects. Or something similar to that. We made quite a bit of improvement on this piece, in fact. Still intensely easy, though.





Meh... this is really getting boring... It's boring to read and boring to type and I doubt you'll care so I'll just leave it like this.