and then the day just went down and down and down.
I thought it would be a wonderful day for regionals and everything. It has rained the past 3 days but the forecast said it wouldn’t rain today. Well, I got to band and fucking Lake Michigan was doing its magic again… lake effect rain, that wonderful stuff that can’t be predicted.
So, it was raining. Big fucking deal, right. I wasn’t too bothered… until it started hailing. And I’m still out there, using my sax bell as a hailstone container. It was little hail, so still not really too big a deal but rather annoying.
Well, following what I thought was actually a very good rehearsal, we get some news from the contest location that the current bands were performing indoors due to the weather issues. From here, things got suckish. When we arrived, everything had been delayed an hour so I sat on my ass in the bus for that hour doing absolutely nothing but looking at the recently restarted rain.
We discovered that the main field had been completely flooded out from the rain and we were going to be performing regionals, our final and to me most important performance, on a parking lot. What an insult to this honorable occasion. It just doesn’t do it for me. I come all this way, to march on concrete with only a few dozen people watching from ground level. No stadium, no big lights, no neat field, no flashing cameras, no nothing. I did not have that special, one of a kind adrenaline rush that I live for.
The show performance went decently, given the conditions, and I honestly had no regrets about that. Other people did though and started acting like big pessimists immediately after. All I heard from my fellow marchers was “we sucked” and I know it wasn’t true and it just pissed me off a lot.
So onwards to that little time after when there are still other bands to watch before awards. I concluded it was completely impossible to watch the other bands due to the limited seating/standing room, so I ended up doing a lot of wandering. I was hungry, and they were out of pizza so I was very mad. Then I dropped my phone in the mud by accident. Like, sink-several-inches-into-it-when-you-step mud. Luckily, it still works, but it’s pretty much encased in dried up mud now since I didn’t exactly have any way of cleaning it off immediately. Poor thing was doing so well not being dirty and messed up like my friends’ phones— it made it 1 year and 3 months! *resets Days Without An Accident sign*
And then the real shitty thing, the best way to really seal up an unexpectedly crap day— yet another silver award. That’s the fourth year. Didn’t even break 70. A 68 was decent 3 years ago; now it is just sad. We’re better than that but I guess yet again this wasn’t the year to get a gold. Hopefully next year will be— it is the only year of band I have left.
Oh, and upon returning to the school I realized that some kind of drama had occurred so half the people I know are acting bitchy and angry and generally annoying in that way.
So, uh, yeah. That was a really anticlimactic way for the season to end. I am sad about that.
