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Montage of text from the first half-week of school
So... the 2006-2007 school year has started. Time for a minor update. Green Day's American Idiot album contains a song called "Wake Me Up When September Ends." I'm rather torn between the lyrics of that song and those of "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing."
I guess that's that.
I can already tell that the anthem of my senior year is gonna be Scatman's World. It is a very powerful album. I guess I'm trying to swallow the disappointment of senior classes. Junior year's cast of teachers and classmates was probably unsurpassable - for me - but nonetheless, I found myself feeling rather... empty, I guess.
We learn history, because it repeats itself. Originally, this phrase seemed like meaningless cliche bullshit. Of course history repeats itself, but why would learning it prevent it?
Looking back, learning history doesn't prevent it from repeating itself. But learning does prepare us better for when history does repeat itself. And now Steege's preachings of 1920s disillusionment seem to be catching up with me. Little psychological patterns are always looping. Some take a year to complete; others have repeated several times in the last six months. Is repetition of boom-bust-Depression-war inevitable? Well, no, but it sounded sorta cool.
My first hour of the class went something like this.
You are Donkey Kong, an ape of ape-like proportions.
You are the Master of your Town; you wake up early as all hell and lord it all the way to a doughnut shop. You embark from there on a reconnaissance flight back to your Domain. You and Carol Murphree exchange words, laughter, hugs, and pastries before heading off to the New Challenges.
The path of the giant ape is beset on all sides by the inequities of the freshman and the tyranny of lower ability students. Blessed are you who, in the name of nobility and sheer leetness, shove the weak down the stairs of the West Wing, for you are truly your vassals' superior... and the owner of lost children.
And you will strike down upon the masses, with coconut shells and bongo bashings, those who attempt to obscure and deride your hallways. And they will you that you are mother****ing Donkey Kong... when you lay your vengeance upon them.
Empowered by your righteous religious imagery, you discover an English class that, for the first time ever, does not look like a total abomination. An abomination it is, without doubt, but not total.
Speaking of abominations, I've tried before to describe playing piano, but it always sounds so damned pretentious, vague, elitist, sappy... basically, whenever I read my ramblings about piano, a slew of negative adjectives overruns me.
Anyway, I'm gonna be pretentious, vague, elitist, sappy now, complete with ellipses and dashes and parenthetical phrases. Commas are a thing of the past; F. Scott Fitzgerald ain't got nothin' on this.
Yesterday, my wrists were genuinely tired. Playing that coda to the Ballade actually brought my hands to the breaking point, so that I felt like I really couldn't produce any more sound. The beautiful acoustic that construction had afforded had faded from the Asian bitches' return from China. She had insisted on pushing the piano in close to the wall, effectively stifling a consuming resonance.
The temperature was high, even for me. My sore wrist rendered my fingers unresponsive, even as they are sluggish while typing these words. The shower was running, with some nondescript family member occupying it. My father was sitting on the couch, typing on his laptop, while the television's audio played the aftermath of a political debate. From the unoccupied overheating computer in the dining room came the low-fidelity sound of "Dirty Little Secret." And at the heart of my living room, I tapped out the notes to Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata mechanically, inaccurately, inaudibly. Talk about the heights of romanticism.
Today was also rather bad. The thermostat read 78 degrees, and humidity wrapped me like a towel being shoved down my throat. The heat was causing malfunctions already with my dexterity, and it didn't help that every three minutes or so, my eyes would - yes, it happens - flicker from their destination of dead ahead and peer at the television. The speakers were off, but two vicious Hispanic boxers were pounding at one another, inevitably winding up hugging one another. The Ballade, which always begs performance, suffered lackluster "emotion," as the fleet-footed referee liquified my melting concentration.
There was no "new" sense of power that came on Wednesday, when I stepped over the threshold and into the hallways. Superiority hasn't been a question since ... well, since January. The absence the Class of 2006 leaves only emptiness, rather than adding freedom. This seems to be the year of my class, but after BC Calc, it's like my time has ended. The new freshmen do not look like an appealing crowd.
So... now I'm just trying to get over my disillusionments about the year, trying to have a shred of faith, trying to last until January...
SD
Sept. 9, '06
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