Murr. In my head I have this huge, long blaug post planned. But I know I'll cut it short and skimp on details. Not that people ever read this, mirite?

Anyway, a bit of backstory about me. Gather 'round, kiddies, it's time for Grandpa Kolth's Story Time!

...actually, screw that. Long story short: dated a friend (lets call her M) back in middle school, had no idea what I was doing, broke up; still (off and on) friends; now I realize that she is the most amazing thing before, during, and after sliced bread and am doing everything in my power to win her heart. I've lost track of how many times I've been friendzoned. And now I'm dating the cheer captain, who is also a genius and in the band. Sound awesome? Yeah, she is. But she isn't the one I care about.

I grew up around my dad, mainly. He always taught me to do whatever it takes to make people happy: that amounted to "never say no." And now I cannot break up my girlfriend. Like, I can SEE myself doing it, but then I realize that everyone would hate me and people would feel bad (long(er) story), so I never get the balls to do it. But I'm slowly getting better at it because I've realized that leading her on like this is worse than just cutting it off.

Damn, didn't mean to get on a tangent. But that sort of relates to today.

Woke up early so I could take M out to coffee because, y'know, coffee is catnip for girls or something. And just because of that (and maybe the other dozen times I've taken her out to dinner, coffee dates, etc) people think I have some huge crush on her. Which I totally do. But I can't tell them that.

So we get back to the school and I manage to avoid the girlfriend until the wind ensemble gets ready to leave at 11:00. We had a competition at a community college today; it was our second of three chances to make it to state.

In our division, you need two scores of 70/100 from three judges to make it to state. One year we had something like 69, 68, and 66. THAT sucked.

So beginning of the day went by okay. On the bus ride, everyone was just kind of milling about. I thought "Hey, I have a smartphone! Why don't I post some funny things on the Foru- Oh, right, I got a warning from a mod."

Another thing I inherited from my dad: stubbornness.

The warning was for, per usual, "character limit violation" or whatever they want to call it. This was a post made back in DECEMBER in a ROLEPLAY thread. I checked every post I made in the thread - every one of them had at least 250+ characters. So I kindly asked the mod to point out which post was offensive. Here is the post, copy/pasted:

"Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a good plan. What do you two think?" Jabber asked, looking to Bluenote and Lance. "Should we head right off for Clover's Rest? It seems like the best mo- aww, I just realized that the Castle of the Moon will have guards. And guards..." Inwardly, Jabber sighed. More likely than not there would be guards at Clover's Rest if it was any kind of close to the Castle, and guards meant that he couldn't sell his wares. The illegal ones, anyway.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Stupid freakin' character limit...

So what is not in the spoiler amounts to 469 characters. Maybe it is just miscommunication, but the post seems fine. I was just making a comment about the character limit and how I only had, like, 190 characters in the original version of this post. So I added some character building and bam, warning.

Honestly, it is cool that the mods will go back in time to find such a tiny mistake. But, whatever, they're just doing their job and I'm just bitching. So just a few minutes ago I finally "acknowledged" the ban because I thought I could talk it over with the mod, but s/he hasn't messaged me back, so...

So that was depressing me for much of the day. I don't like getting in trouble, ever.

Anyway. We end up getting the the college just in time to go on stage and perform. And...

We blew it. Horribly. Awfully. We have NEVER played that bad. French horns were out of tune, the damn trombones didn't come in on the ONE FREAKING TIME it was actually IMPORTANT that they were there, and in general it sucked. And afterwards we had to go into a separate room to sight read - something we had NO idea we would be doing.

The piece was some Spanish tune, lively in parts and slower in others. My part was busy with triplets and what I thought were backgrounds.

For sight reading, you are given seven minutes to analyze the piece, during which you get limited help from your conductor and you cannot play your instrument at all. Then you have one shot to play the song perfectly.

So we begin playing and I quickly realize that I'm one of, what, four people in a 40+ person band that is actually playing. The others that I knew were playing were a bari sax (who had few parts in this particular piece) and M on her clarinet (playing beautifully, as always ), and me covering the damn french horn solos because our horns suck.

Afterwards, the professor-dude running the clinic comes down to 'help' us see our mistakes which basically amounted to calling us kindergartners. No joke. But he did say "You definitely have some talented leaders in this band, especially your lead alto saxophone over here (he points at me) who was probably the only person in the band that I heard put emotion and feeling into his part."

My face when:

Fast forward to much later today, after the end of school and track practice. I'm still pretty bummed because I knew (thought) that we blew another chance at state. Then I see our bass clarinetist on the side of the road, on his phone, waving me down.

I thought he wanted a ride, so I kept driving.

But then he gave me this big thumbs up, so I thought that I had better turn around. When I pulled up next to him, he hung up on our conductor and told me the good news. Our conductor had gotten an email from the college saying "Congratulations to the 6A and 5A schools who competed today." or something like that. Naturally, we're 99.99999% sure this means those schools qualified for state.

Guess who was the only 5A school there?

Yeah, suck it, everyone. For the first time in who-knows-how-long, WE'RE GOING TO STATE.

And I REALLY hope I'm not wrong about that, because I don't wanna make another blaug post tomorrow denouncing these claims. That would just be embarrassing.

Anyway, our bass clarinetist mentioned something about how it was our sight reading that gave us that little nudge into state-dom; if that is true, I'm the savior of the band.

Feels good man.

So today has been a bit of a roller coaster and, frankly, I feel like I just bitched and whined a lot in this post. But that is what blaugs are for, right?

- Kolth