Sunday, May 14, 2006
So.
... So.
It was supposed to be my grandest performance. My last time playing the Ballade for a true audience. The piano was of high caliber, and the acoustics of the room were admirable. I was given fourteen minutes, give or take, to play a two-and-a-half minute piece and a seven-minute piece.
I played all of the two-and-a-half minute piece, Prokofiev's "Mercutio" from Romeo and Juliet. I played around four minutes of Chopin's Ballade in A-flat major before the judges told me to stop.
I hate to use cliches, but I couldn't believe my ears. The last three minutes of that Ballade are by far the most powerful that I play, ever. Getting cut off there was... insulting, to say the least. I believe that I stared at the keys for a full minute. I didn't have a watch, but when I left the room a few minutes later, there were still five minutes remaining in my allocated fourteen minutes.
I was too weary to get sufficiently angry... it didn't help that my teacher and father were insisted on telling me that it "didn't mean anything"... I was judged on incomplete information - everything except my strongest suit. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. The water poured mercilessly all the way to the car and all the way home, as well. I came home - to use another cliche - like a drenched cat.
Minutes after arriving home, my cat came in, drenched. I can almost understand why writers abuse water so much as a means of expressing emotion or turmoil... Every day, I begin to appreciate literary cliches more...
Success of the MMTA competition as a whole: learning to tie a tie.
I need to pick two schools to receive my PSAT scores. I also need to pick a tentative major. Current thoughts: Columbia and Washington University, St. Louis with a Math or Engineering major.
... Yeah. Now that this year has been a total failure, I'm going to.. find myself...
1:52a.m.
... Well, 24 will be on in 24 hours.
In a significantly better mood now than I was sixteen hours ago.
However... now, rather than feeling ridiculously unwarranted self-pity, I mourn the finish of the greatest class of my life. BC Calculus 2005-2006: It ends tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Monday.
Along with the French and Economics tests, there will be the double-200-point BC Calculus test on Chapter 10. The AP has run its course, and the class has finished in its own right.
So the lifetime has expired, but selfishly, I don't want it to be expired. For five years, I've been with the elite, the greatest minds of the Acton-Boxborough Class of 2006. For me, there quite possibly may never be anything as amazing as this class.
Nostalgia? Oh yes. Five years has gone by so fast. Quite honestly, I can say that math has always been the greatest, and that will never change.
The legacy must never die - in my last seventeen years, this has been the ultimate scholastic culmination. And now... it's done.
It has been an honor to study and to learn with this class.
9:48p.m.
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