My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Friday, February 28, 2003

Loose Ends

There is that magical time of every year, when the kids get together and play in the streets, and the old couples stroll romantically down country lanes, and everything is gay and happy and Boris has absolutely no idea what the hell to write in his blog.

So, I’ve decided to tie up some—as you can tell by the title—dusty shoelaces. Yep, they’re dusty. … Okay, they’re tied up now. Which means I can move on to the other thing I wanted to tie up: loose ends. My blog has a lot of those. Some topics, by their very nature, cannot be written about all at once, so multiple blog entries are needed to cover them. Sadly, I appear to have the long-term attention span of an incompetent dentist (don’t ask; I have no idea how that analogy makes any sense, either, but trust me, it’s negative). Thus, many things get started without necessarily getting ended. That is, finished. In this entry I would like to finish up all these things, or at least try to, in spite of the fact that most of you probably don’t really care. Like I said, I’m REALLY out of ideas.

A Dead Squirrel : in the intervening time since I wrote this entry, I have seen many dead squirrels, whether while walking or while driving, and I now understand that, frankly, dead squirrels aren’t really that uncommon or, for that matter, worth writing about, which is why I’m going to stop right now.

My Latest Obsession : it was a very, very unfortunate stroke of bad luck that I happened to be in a writing mood during the otherwise mercifully brief period of time during which I was obsessed with Tom Swifties. I am glad to say that I am no longer obsessed with them anymore, though the donkey I mentioned in that entry has sparked a very interesting email exchange with Cherie.

Why I Hate It When My Pencil Lead Breaks…and so on and so forth: here I urged my readers to check out two blogs made by Michelle, neither of which exist anymore because Michelle’s computer had one too many martinis one night and things just got worse from there. She has, however, after vowing to never ever make another blog ever again as long as she lives, made another blog, the link to which is in my profile. Er, links section. Whew, I am OFF tonight.

Hit the Links! : aside from “Ashley’s blog” and “Golf,” none of the links I put in my original links section are still there. Flipside and The Lemonade Game were taken off because they were dumb, and Michelle’s two blogs were removed because she lost access to them.

Hit the Links! (Again) : this short entry talked about how I put up a link to www.homestarrunner.com, a really cool site. The site is still there, but the link isn’t. Now, I don’t exactly remember taking this link off, but it’s definitely not there anymore, which leads me to believe that a higher power or at least a competent hacker somewhere doesn’t want this link to exist, so I’m not going to defy nature. Or whatever. That is, I’m pitifully lazy.

Andy Vs. Roger: The Showdown : this whole series of entries was about…okay, I’m not going to get into it here, but basically, as far as I can tell, the showdown was never really resolved, and when I stopped writing about it, nobody seemed to mind. However, for the sake of completeness I will resolve the showdown right here: the winner of the showdown was…*drumroll*…Ashley! If anybody disagrees with this decision, talk to me personally, please—we can’t waste class time talking about individual problems.

What’s a Saxophone? : this entry was the result of my effort to come up with a good superlative for the saxophone. It was prompted by a conversation I had with Ashley wherein we decided that trumpets were the Greatest but hit a snag on saxophones when Ashley flatly rejected my assertion that they were the Coolest. Adam won the distinction of being the first person ever to send me an email with regards to my blog by sending me a list of musical instruments and their corresponding adjectives, which I would have posted if he had bugged me about it, but he didn’t, and I decided not to follow up on the entry because after talking to people I quickly discovered that—surprise!—everybody thinks that the instrument THEY happen to play is the Coolest. Okay, yes, I’m guilty of this as well. But while I’ll go with basses and trumpets as being cool, when people start saying that flutes and violins are the Coolest, that’s when I realize there’s too much bias out there to really come up with any good conclusions. And nobody ever DID come up with a good alternative to Coolest for the saxophone, which is all I really wanted in the first place.

Margins : this entry and the one following it contain an amusing mistake that I’m surprised nobody ever caught. I talk about how I don’t like the extreme skinniness of the blog, a problem that I try to solve by putting in “fatter margins.” However, what I’m actually doing is making the blog fatter, an act that is accomplished by increasing the table width and decreasing the margins, thus making them skinnier, not fatter.

My Poofy Coat : at one point in here I talked about the “stuffy and scraggly” gloves that I wear with my coat. However, since then I have lost one of these gloves, possibly in Dan’s minivan on the way back from a chess tournament, so I replaced them with leather ones, which I probably would have done anyway because leather gloves don’t slip and therefore can be used for driving. One time I wore these gloves when Julie took me, Marina, and Aron to Subway for lunch, and everybody laughed at me and said that they were “gangster gloves.” Sigh. When it comes to clothing, I simply cannot win. Why can’t we all just go around naked?

Dan’s Sad Story : sad story, indeed. I begged and pleaded everybody to sign Chris’s guestbook, and for what? The guestbook isn’t even there anymore! But I guess the good part of it is that Dan has a girlfriend now, so it’s okay that he never got laid with that hot college chick, because then there’s a good chance that he would have gotten herpes or something and that would have created some major problems. Perhaps that blasted class ring was a good thing after all…

This Blog Entry Is Really Really Short, I Swear! : I made a vow here that all future blog entries would fit within a page. Then I almost immediately broke it. The reason this is a loose end is because I never actually came right out and SAID that I broke it. I recall making a compromise of some sort, but no—I’ve definitely broken this vow. The two people (Andy and Steven) whom the vow was meant to appease were not appeased, and everybody else was actually rather annoyed, so from now on the entries will be as long or as short as they need to be, and that’s that. Sorry if I sound snappy here, but it bugs me when people (Andy and Steven) badmouth my blog without ever, ahem, technically speaking, reading it.

Smileys: wow…what a weird entry. Anyway, the point I wanted to make about this one is that shortly after I wrote it Mandy took those dang annoying fish and whatnot smileys off and replaced them with the good ol’ original smiley set. Thanks, Mandy!

Nationals, Part One: The Plane Ride : anybody notice how I said I would continue the story, but never did? Yeah. It really was a good story, but somehow I couldn’t write it into a good blog entry. If at first you don’t succeed, quit—that’s the motto that has made me the man I am today. “Boris, when are you going to write a second entry about the chess tournament?” This is a comment that I have never heard, so I take it none of you minded that I kind of dropped the subject and moved on to other things. Also, my biology book is still lost.

The New Phone: I’m sure you’re all just dying to know how this story ended up. My dad eventually took the phone away because—as became quickly clear—it didn’t work. For a while we didn’t have a phone in here at all, which was very irritating, but then my dad brought back the old phone and put it in its old place. Hooray!

Counting and Moving: yeah, I know, it’s kind of dumb/sad that there’s a loose end in this one seeing as how I wrote it less than a week ago. In any case, the error message I was getting went away the very day after I posted the entry, but I still finished copying everything to the diary. Eventually I will begin to pluck old entries off of this main page; if, for some reason, you are strongly against this, email me and tell me! Believe it or not, you can have an impact on what happens in this blog. Granted, what happens in this blog isn’t really that big of a deal, and you probably won’t get any girls by bragging that you influenced a guy named Boris’s formatting decisions, but if you want things to be a certain way in here then email me and I’ll seriously consider it. On a side note, “Counting and Moving” was my exact 40th blog entry! Ten more and I get to the big five-zero! Well, if you want to get technical about it, only nine more now…

That’s all I could find. If you think I missed something, i.e. there’s a glaring lack of a conclusion to an open-ended entry, or something changed and thereby made an entry obsolete but I didn’t catch it, email me the untied loose end and I’ll be sure to include it in a future post. Oh, and one more thing—how about “the Loneliest” for the sax? Saxes are never mixed into other instruments’ ensembles, they don’t really fit into anything except jazz band, and all the other instruments look down on them. They’re the outcasts of the band and orchestra. They’re ostracized. Loneliest! How about it, guys?

.: posted by Boris 4:58 PM

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Counting and Moving

Sorry, folks, but this isn’t a “real” entry. Just thought I’d give ya a fair warning.

That said, I’d like to begin with a thanks—a thanks to all you guys who come this blog, because I recently broke 1000 hits! To be sure, many of those hits came from me, but I couldn’t have done it without you. Literally. A person can come to this site from their computer a million times in a row, but the counter won’t budge unless somebody else comes to the blog and “clears” the counter for them. Mandy and I, in what was a perfect case of two people with way too much time on their hands, discovered this fact one evening by getting on the phone and repeatedly hitting the Refresh buttons on our computers, thus raising up about 30 or so hits before figuring out that as soon as one of us stopped doing it, the counter would stop rising.

Are you confused now? I hope so. My point is, I didn’t cheat with the counter. If you don’t believe me, hit the End key on your keyboard, look at the counter, and reload the page. You’ll see that the counter did not go up. So basically, the 1000 hits were racked up by real, actual people sitting behind their computers and spending their preciously limited free time going to my blog. Isn’t that neat?

Sadly, today isn’t all about cheer and praise. Problems are beginning to crop up. For one thing, you may have noticed that every single dang entry I’ve ever posted is right here on the main page. It’s kind of nice, yes, but I imagine that a few months and many entries from now this is going to create severe loading problems. There’s an archiving system, but I can’t get it to work properly. The only thing you get when you click on the “Archives” button near the top of the page is a link to this month’s archive—nothing else. If I set it so that only a limited number of entries appear on the page, the older entries completely disappear. They are not deleted—if I undo the changes the entries reappear—but they’re not on the main page and they’re not in the archives. Where are they, then? Good question.

Another problem is that whenever I post anything, I get a funky error message. A “more info” link appears next to it, but that only leads to a generic troubleshooting site that mysteriously does not have anything whatsoever regarding the specific problem I’m getting. Apparently there’s a “template file” somewhere, and apparently it’s supposed to load, and apparently it’s not doing this. I don’t know how to get it to do load myself, probably because I don’t know what it is. The error message also cheerily informs me that somebody is “working on it” and suggests that I try again “later.” My fellow bloggers, as far as I know, aren’t getting this problem, so it must just be me, and unless I’m supposed to believe that the Blogger people like my blog so much that they are willing to pour all their resources into fixing a mysterious problem plaguing one, nonpaying user of their service, the problem isn’t going to get fixed “later” or ever. The presence of this entry hopefully confirms that I can still post to the site, but there’s another problem that I think is tied to the error message—on some people’s computers, the latest entry won’t show up on the page. While this can be fixed by going to the Archives and clicking on the link to this month’s archive, I don’t see anything stopping this problem from spreading, and for all I know when I go to my blog tomorrow I’ll get nothing but a little message in small black font informing me that a furry green monster hacked into Blogger and ate all my entries along with his guacamole sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice.

What I’ve decided to do is “copy” this blog onto a diary site. For those of you who don’t know what an online diary is, it’s basically like a blog, only not nearly as cool. Near as I can tell, you can’t do anything nifty with a diary like make links or tag boards or counters; I don’t even know if you can put HTML in the entries. If you can’t, then I’m really screwed, because all the italics I’ve been using in my recent entries won’t carry over and I’ll have to change them to caps, which works okay but isn’t quite the same. Another slight but important note is that with a diary (at least the ones I’ve seen) you don’t really get your own website. I mean, my blog is www.boarass.blogspot.com, which is a normal URL, whereas the diary version is the rather lame-o www.my-diary.org/read/?read=66396. One thing that annoys me about the particular diary service I’m using is that you can’t change the font or margins or anything like that, so the entries all appear in small white text on a black background in really narrow columns, which burns the eyes and is rather annoying to read. Alas, I am left without my trusty Comic Sans MS :(

The diary does, however, have its advantages. For one thing, rather than globbing all the entries onto one page, it sorts them into a nice column and you click on the one you want to read. And though it’s not as customizable as a blog, with the smaller range of possibilities also comes a smaller learning curve. I won’t get into the details, but basically a blog is a major pain in the ass to use, as opposed to the very user-friendly diary. There is also—I think this is sweet—a button you can click on that will “subscribe” you to the diary and send you an email whenever it’s updated. No more randomly going to Boris’s blog or constantly peering at his AIM profile to see if he’s updated or not! I realize this will probably significantly decrease my hit count, but hey—I’ve already got 1000 and that’s good enough for me.

Even with all that, the blog is way cooler than the diary, so I’m only going to copy it—not move it. Having a mirror of this site will let me lop off the old (and often rather bad) entries, hopefully giving everybody a faster loading time and a more manageable scrollbar. Once I’ve moved everything into the diary, I plan to add each new entry into it as it comes into the blog, so you can use the nifty email feature of the diary to find out when I’ve put something up in my blog. Gee, I hope after all that hype the subscribe feature actually works. Ah, crap! I just tested it out, and it turns out you have to be registered with the “my-diary” people in order to use the feature. Well, it’s not too hard to register, so you can still use it…anyway, it’s up to you.

Okay, let’s see—the counter, the diary—I think that’s all I wanted to talk about. Once again, I earnestly thank you for coming to this blog and reading my stuff! With any luck, pretty soon you’ll see something along the lines of a “mirror of this blog at My-Diary” link in my links section, which means I’ve finished moving everything and this blog has a little less junk on it. As far as how many entries I should keep on this page, I think the ten most recent ones should suffice. If you have any comments about this—or, for that matter, anything regarding this blog—or, heck, anything regarding anything—scroll up and email me your thoughts!

.: posted by Boris 12:07 AM

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Quartet Woes

One of the great mysteries currently occupying the keenest scientific and philosophical minds of this country is why the Solo & Ensemble Contest is called the Solo & Ensemble Contest when it, in fact, is not a contest. A contest is something that has a winner. The winner of a pie-eating contest, for example, is the person who can eat the most pies. The winner of a hot-dog-eating contest is the person who can eat the most hot dogs. The winner of a hamburger-eating contest is the person who can do the most consecutive backward summersaults over giant vats of hydrochloric acid. All right, just checking to see if you’re actually reading or not. My point is, when you hear “Solo & Ensemble Contest,” you think that there’s a winner, a person or a group of people whom the judges proclaim to be the best. But alas, there is no such thing. No winner, no awards ceremony. You do your thing before a judge and go home—what kind of a “contest” is that?

The Solo & Ensemble Contest is more like a game. People prepare pieces of music in advance, either by themselves or with a few of their buddies, and then go to the contest to perform them before a judge. Then the judge, who we must assume is a qualified musical expert, but who might not be, and who might in fact be a professional monster truck racer by trade, and who might know less about music than my pet cat, gives the person or the ensemble a score. If you get a 1—the highest score—you win, and you get to go around bragging to everybody that you got a 1, and you can sleep easy that night. But if you get anything other than a 1—from a 2 down to a 5—you collapse to your knees and furiously pound the floor until your fists are bloody, and then you go home and hang yourself with dental floss. This game is not for the lighthearted.

Despite the glaring falsity in its name, the Solo & Ensemble Contest is quite a big thing around here. For those of you who aren’t too familiar with it, here’s what happens: high school musicians from all over the place, be they in the choir, orchestra, or band, come down to Walnut Ridge High School out on Livingston Avenue one Saturday in February or late January, depending on the year, and take up all the parking spaces, so that when you and Steven get down there at 1:00 PM you’re forced to park 14 miles away on some remote side street in front of a beat-up white car and pray to god that the owner of the driveway you just completely blocked doesn’t have to use it anytime soon. You then have to hike those 14 miles back to the school with your heavy saxophone case and wonder: why the hell doesn’t this street have a sidewalk? But you better not get too distracted with your wondering, because you also have to periodically dodge maniac cars whose drivers seem to be having an immeasurably hard time figuring out where the road is. If you manage to get to the target site without dying, the next step is to find a warm-up room and practice your solo, unless you’re in an ensemble, in which case you want to figure out where Lauren and Adam are so that the four of you can do a final play-through of “Conversation Piece,” the sax quartet you’ve been practicing for the past few weeks. Then it’s off to room 216 to play for real.

And now, a short interlude to tell you who the members of the Bexley High School Saxophone Quartet were this year:
Adam “Hort Dawg” Horton—1st alto sax
Lauren “Anne” Cooper—2nd alto sax
Boris “Boarass” Dvorkin—tenor sax
Steven “BouTwo” Bouyack—bari sax

The four of us and our band director, Jeffrey “Schneids” Schneider, hung around outside the door of room 216 and made idle small talk until the judge poked her head out the door and told us to haul our noisy asses away from the door and go hang around and make idle small talk somewhere else, because there’s a clarinet ensemble trying to perform in here, dammit. Or something along those lines. We moved away and leaned against some lockers, continuing our pointless conversation whilst waiting for the cue to come in. Apparently we were really early or the contest was running behind schedule or something, because we had to wait for quite a long time. Soon the tenor sax hanging around my neck began to feel really heavy. Steven, whose humongous bari sax made my tenor look like sodium molecule, had it even worse, so he shifted the saxophone in his arms. At one point in his shifting—we’ll never know when—he unwittingly dislodged the critical bar that connects to his high F key, popping that pad open just a little. I don’t know how familiar you are with the mechanism of a saxophone, but if your high F key is open when you’re trying to play, that is very, very bad. All of your air rushes out of that one goddam little hole, making it supremely difficult to get any sort of sound out of the instrument. Those sounds that do come out are gross, and low notes are a lost cause altogether. And that is exactly what had occurred on Steven’s sax, though we didn’t know it yet. The seeds of our destruction were sown.

When it finally came time to perform, we were very displeased to discover that room 216 was actually a fully functional blast furnace. This was upsetting not just because it made us horribly uncomfortable, but because extreme and sudden temperature changes can and will completely throw most instruments out of tune. It is a sad fact of life for most musicians that playing all the right notes does not necessarily guarantee you won’t still sound like shit. Tuning is critical, and the tuning that we had done in the nice and comfortable warm-up room was all but shot by the gusts of hot, swampy air that blasted us when we set foot inside that hellhole. I made a mental note to make sure that we re-tuned before beginning to play.

But before we could do that, another problem sprang up—we were missing a stand. Oh, sure, we noticed right away that there were only three stands as opposed to four of us, but somehow the importance of this fact didn’t sink in until everything was set up and Lauren was left standless. The three of us guys had all taken a stand. Were we all so lacking in gentlemanly tact that none of us would give up his stand and offer to go in search of another for the only lady in the group? Were we all such rotten bastards that when Lauren said, “I think I’m gonna go look for another stand,” we actually let her leave the room to find a stand for herself? Were we all such despicable, heartless monsters that we allowed Lauren to wander around in platform shoes which made her duck under the doorway and which forced her to expend the same amount of energy and effort to take five steps that most men would lose climbing Mount Everest? Yes, I’m ashamed to say we were. We watched Lauren hobble out of the room and waited in awkward silence for her to return. When, several minutes later, Lauren finally stumbled back into the room, stand in hand, she looked ruffled and flustered. Collapsing heavily into her chair, she began to spew forth the angry tale of how hard a time she had had in procuring the stand. I don’t remember the exact details, but Lauren was really pissed, and to hear her tell the story it sounded like the act of acquiring that stand had required her wrestling to the death with a 350-ton mutant giraffe.

The long wait, the heat, the music stand escapade—these factors all combined to make us antsy and anxious get the whole thing over with. In our rush to start the song, no tuning note was played, and thus two important facts were left undiscovered: 1) the four of us were about as close together in tune as Iowa is close to France, and 2) Steven’s bari saxophone was, for lack of a better word, farked. Completely farked. Because we never learned these important facts, we didn’t get a chance to fix Steven’s sax or our horrible out-of-tune-ness. As a result, though we made very few technical errors, the quartet pretty much sucked. All our chords sounded like barf and the bari sax part was all but missing. I think it unnecessary for me to point out that what we played before the judge at the Solo & Ensemble Contest on Saturday, February 8, 2003, was definitely not one of our better performances. After the song was over, I looked over at Adam and saw a sour look on his face that I, personally, would probably never sport unless I looked out the window one morning to see my mother getting eaten alive by a pack of deranged poodles. Steven was no less upset, and after he discovered, upon returning to the warm-up room, that his entire problem could have been fixed in two seconds by simply pushing the metal rod back into place, he became so anguished and agitated that he went so far as to steal a spritz of Adam’s Warheads Sour Spray. Lauren didn’t feel terribly great, either, and Schneider was unsuccessful in his attempts to cajole her.

For lack of anything better to do while we waited for the results to come in, Steven and I trudged back to my car to put our saxophones away. When we got back to the school, I offered to buy Steven some candy from a vending machine to try to cheer him up. He asked for Fruity Chewy Runts or some such thing, and I got Sour Starbursts for myself. Did you guys all know that there are Sour Starbursts out now? I had no idea. My favorite Starbursts up to that point had been the ones that come with Apple instead of Lemon, but for some ungodly reason the majority of the people voted for Lemon instead of Apple and so now they don’t make those anymore. The sour ones were really good, though. Anyway, we eventually made it over to the cafeteria, where the results were posted and Lauren and Adam were sulking. We had gotten a 2. Nobody was in very high spirits. I hid how thoroughly depressed I was, but the first thing I did when I got home was pull out my dental floss, only to discover that I had absolutely no idea how to tie a noose.

In the face of this horrible outcome—we didn’t get a 1 on our last ever Solo & Ensemble Contest—there was a tiny shred of consolation. For one thing, a 2 really wasn’t all that bad considering we had sounded like a bunch of dying toads (one of whom was actually dead). For another, we still had several performances ahead of us and thus several chances to redeem ourselves. If we did an awesome job, if we could get people to think, “Wow, those guys were awesome! There is no way they got a 2! The judge must have been drinking too much cold medicine or something,” then maybe a little smidgen of the hurt would fizzle away.

Our first such opportunity occurred on the Wednesday after contest. The band and orchestra of Maryland Elementary were putting on a concert for the rest of the elementary school, and since the high school band and orchestra directors also run the elementary school band and orchestra, they asked several of the high school kids to skip 6th and 7th period that day and play at the concert. In addition to a few orchestra kids, the brass quartet, and a flute trio, the humbled sax quartet came along. Yeah, our audience would be a bunch of third graders more interested in the contents of their nostrils than in our saxophones, but so what? We still came with a heavy sense of purpose and focus, determined not to repeat the fiasco of the previous Saturday that was still fresh in our memories. After warming up, we sat outside the gym door and listened to the concert going on inside. Lauren was so nervous she went to the bathroom no less than 84 times before we performed. The elementary band kids slogged through some unrecognizable songs and also the oddest, weirdest arrangement of “Old Macdonald Had a Farm” that I have ever heard in my life. I’m sure the little fellas played it fine, but whoever composed that thing needs to have his ears sawed off.

With that in mind, soon it was our turn to go. We opted to stand instead of sit—we had sat at contest—and we were extremely pleased to note that there was a music stand for each of us, and that the temperature inside the gym was not comparable to that of a sauna. Taking a cue from mistakes past, we made DAMN sure to play a tuning note, and we all checked our rods to make sure that they were where they needed to be. After satisfying ourselves that we were in tune and that our saxes more or less worked, the four of us began to play. Oh, how we began to play. When I plunged into the first chord, I was moved. We had never played the song so beautifully, had never sounded so frickin’ awesome. It was, I think, the best start to the song that we had ever had. We were amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it felt like nothing could go wrong.

Did you catch my subtle foreshadowing of bad things to come? Yeah. Steven didn’t have his music open all the way. The song is two pages long and is written on two sheets of paper connected together in the middle, like this:

M | M (“M” denotes music, and “|” denotes the fold in the middle of the page.)

Well, Steven had forgotten to open his music all the way, so on his stand it looked like this:

M |

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the song afforded him a chance to flip to the second page after finishing the first. But, as it happens, everybody has notes right up until the end of the first page, and the bari sax has a solo at the very beginning of the second page. I guess it was this realization that prompted Steven, about halfway down the first page, to stop playing completely and open his music all the way. There we were, running along smoothly, when suddenly our bari sax player STOPS and begins to futz with his pages. This looked quite bad, I bet. Furthermore, Steven picked a pretty awful spot to do this, completely missing a solo and creating a weird pause where music should have been. Eventually Steven got the paper straight, figured out where we were, and joined back in, but by this point I had given up all hope. I don’t know about Adam and Lauren, but Steven’s little goof-up completely disheartened me to the point where I could no longer concentrate on the song. Rhythms were muddled, notes were mucked. I suppose I should have tried harder to at least finish the song well, but I felt like there was no point. We had blown it again.

The same concert was put on the following night, only this time it was for the parents. Third time’s the charm—that night we were sure we wouldn’t screw up. Everything bad that could have happened to a sax quartet, had. The evening, however, began on a bad note (hah! Get the pun? “Note?” Oh, I kill myself). Again I found myself giving Steven a ride, and as it always seems to happen when I’m driving Steven somewhere, I had difficulties parking. After my attempt to find anything remotely resembling a legal parking spot in the street ended in pitiful failure, I was forced to enlist the aid of an alley to turn around and go back. Next I decided to try the playground, where other people had parked. I was pulling into the asphalt path that led to the playground when something bizarre caught my eye. It seemed that the driveway type thingie was cut off just ahead by a row of bushes. Oh, well, I thought. If worse comes to worse, I can just drive across the…

That’s when I felt my car climb onto the sidewalk. Yes, I had actually driven onto the sidewalk, thinking that a patch of grass was the driveway, when in fact the actual road into the playground was several feet farther down. People with keen ears could probably have heard Steven’s laughter as far away as Pennsylvania. I made it into the playground on my second attempt and parked near a basketball hoop, burning with shame. Steven and I then tried to get into the school, but the door was locked. Fortunately, Marina’s dad was there to open it for us, and we momentarily found the warm-up room and met Adam there, who told us that Lauren would be a bit late. She finally arrived, at which point the four of us had a mini jam session of jazz band favorites and probably scared the crap out of all the little kids. Schneider quickly told us to can it and began to warm up the fifth and sixth graders. I have to say that I was especially impressed with the clarinetists—they played with a power and confidence that I wish more of our clarinet players had.

Soon the concert started, and we took up once more our perches outside the gymnasium door. It seemed like an eternity before Schneider poked his head out and told us that the time had come for us to try again. Again we chose to stand, not sit. This time, though, it was a lot more crowded than the day before, and we had a hard time setting up. Ultimately we had to arrange ourselves in an L shape instead of the usual square. But that was all right. Learning from previous mistakes, we not only made damn sure to play a tuning note and check our rods, but we also gave Steven evil glares and made certain his music was open all the way. For the last time, we began.

It wasn’t a brilliant, masterful performance. Steven has this one rhythm that he always plays wrong, and Lauren and I almost always derail just a little during a particular bastard of a sixteenth note run. Our dynamics could have been better, as always, and I think we might have been a hair slow. But you know what? We sounded okay, and we didn’t make any major mistakes. We played pretty dang well—we played how we should have played at contest. And, we were being taped. That performance of “Conversation Piece” is the one that we will be remembered by, and I couldn’t be happier.

.: posted by Boris 12:00 AM

Thursday, February 06, 2003

Senility

Here’s a surefire sign you’ve gone completely senile despite the fact that you’re still only 17 years old:

It’s 8:30 in the evening and you have to wake up at 6 the following morning so that you can make it to the school by 7 and practice with your sax quartet, so you decide to go to sleep a little early. But you’ve got an AP Euro test in two days, so you decide to reread a bit of the textbook first because you never take any notes and thus you have to read everything twice. You go to the dining room, which is where your backpack is, to get the textbook. But then you decide that you might as well eat your supper now, because you don’t like brushing your teeth immediately after eating, so you might as well get supper out of the way. You grab a can of yogurt from the fridge and a spoon, and eat it. The yogurt, not the spoon. Anyways, you then go to your room and stand there for a second, wondering what the heck you’re doing, until you remember that you wanted to read the European History textbook. You look around the room and don’t see it. Confused, you go to the family room, which is between your room and the kitchen, but don’t see it there, either. Where did I leave that textbook?! you think to yourself. Surely I didn’t leave it in the kitchen! Well, perhaps I did, you wonder. So you go to the kitchen, but the textbook isn’t there. Now you’re getting annoyed, because you were just holding it in your hands. Hmph! Perhaps I left it in my room, you think. So you retrace your steps back to your room, where you conduct a thorough investigation of your bed, the floor, and basically any surface where you could have set the book down in a temporary brain lapse, which turns up a lot of stuff but not the textbook. Huh! You walk into the hall and stop a moment to think. Your mom, who is on the computer, has heard you walking about like a confused cow for the past five minutes and is beginning to get antsy.

“Boris, do you want to get on the computer or something?!” she yells.

“No,” you yell back. “I’m just trying to find my history book. I had it out, and now I don’t know what I did with it.”

You head once more into the family room and resume your frantic searching. A thorough investigation of the couch, the table, and the floor reveals that the book is most definitely not there. WHAT THE HELL DID I DO WITH THE DAMN THING! you fume. Surely I didn’t leave it in the kitchen somewhere while I was getting the yogurt?! That can’t be. Well, you go into the kitchen anyway. No, the book isn’t there. Where the did you put it? The only rooms you were in were the kitchen, the family room, and your bedroo—

At this point you realize that you never actually took the book out of your backpack.

Ha, what an idiot you are! You stopped in the kitchen to eat your yogurt before you ever actually took the book! And then you looked frantically for the book you thought you had misplaced when in fact you hadn’t even touched it yet! Yep, you’ve grown senile. After coming to this conclusion, you heave a tired sigh and go over to the dining room, where you open up your backpack and find, to your dumbfounded astonishment, that the book is not in it!!!

Just kidding. It is. You’re senile.

.: posted by Boris 5:27 PM

Saturday, February 01, 2003

A Fateful Cruise

Cruises are fun, but they have one major problem. Teenagers, who can neither drink nor gamble, and who probably didn’t think to bring along somebody of the opposite gender with whom they can have sex when all other forms of entertainment have been exhausted, get bored easily on them. There you are, stuck on a ship with 2999 other people, all of whom are either eating, sunbathing, gambling, drinking, or having sex, and of those five activities you can only do two: eating, and going around trying to find hot women sunbathing topless. Eating, actually, isn’t all that bad of a choice because the food is free and absolutely delicious, a development that must have broken at least four laws of physics that I can think of. But eventually you can’t eat any more, and the topless sunbathers go away when the sun does. In the evening there are shows, but you’re still gonna have a lot more free time than you know what to do with. And if you’re an antisocial hermit like me—look, here I am on a Friday night, typing up a new blog entry—then going around and meeting people isn’t an option. How to pass the time?

Fortunately, I was saved from a lonely, lonely 12 days by a teen center that Princess (the company that runs the cruise) thoughtfully installed aboard the ship. This was basically a place that had a jukebox and cards and a bunch of board games and some N64’s and stuff where kids aged 13-17 could meet and hang out. It was staffed by two hosts, a guy and a girl, who periodically ran some planned group activities so that we could have fun and not necessarily play Super Mario Smash Brothers on the Nintendo for almost the entire duration of the cruise (which I ended up doing anyway, but at least they tried). The host guy’s name was Alan, and the girl was—well, I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the girl’s name, which is extremely odd considering she was way cooler than Alan and also kind of hot. Actually, not even “kind of.” She was just hot. She was also fun and seemed to like hanging out with the teens, as opposed to Alan, who got flustered easily and was definitely not a kid person, and who, now that I think about it, may or may not have had two L’s in his name, and perhaps an E and not an A. I did, however, like Allan, though not perhaps as much as the girl—was Debbie her name?—yes, let’s call her Debbie for the time being—and generally I liked the planned activities. I am in fact perpetually grateful to Allen, because one night he taught as all how to play President, a very fun card game that I apparently am the only person on the planet who enjoys, so I practically never get to play it anymore. But whenever I do, I think of Alen. The time we played President was something of an exception, though, because although Alin and Barbara had the entire cruise packed with pre-planned activities, most of the time we ignored the schedule and—yup—played Super Mario Smash Brothers.

Another exception to the “we’re all a bunch of losers who spend every waking moment playing Super Mario Smash Brothers despite the fact that YOU’RE ON A FREAKING CRUISE SHIP GO DO SOMETHING FUN YOU MORON” rule occurred on I think the second night of the cruise, which was, of course, way before we discovered Super Mario Smash Brothers. Allon and Joanne gathered up all the teens who came and had us play The Toilet Paper Game. I’m not sure if that’s what Allin and Meredith called it, but it’s a fitting name regardless, so I’ll leave it. Basically the way you play The Toilet Paper Game is this: everybody sits around in a rough circle and with your right hand you grab the left hand of the person sitting to your right, and with your left hand you grab the right hand of the person sitting to your left, and then one person says “penis” really quietly and then the person to his right says “penis!” a little louder and then the person to their right says “PEnis” and then the next person says “PENIS” and so on until you’re all screaming “PEEEEEEEEEENIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS!!!!!!!” and the old people who walk by the teen center get really scared and—wait, my bad, we played THAT on the third night. So, The Toilet Paper Game—okay, that’s when you pass around a roll of toilet paper and everybody tears off some squares, at least two or three, and then everybody gets a turn to say one fact about themselves for each square of toilet paper that they ripped off. In other words, if Andy, to pick a random friend, were there, he could have torn off four squares of toilet paper, and then when it was his turn he could have been like, “(1) I play the violin, (2) I’m really awesome at math, (3) I used to grow my hair out a whole lot when I was little and it would get all curly and funny-looking and I would never cut it or comb it, and (4) I have a big fat friendly orange cat named Mouse.” The catch is this: when Alun and Shaniqua passed around the roll and told us to rip off squares, they didn’t tell us what the squares were for. Thus, nobody knew if they were good or bad; maybe the rules of the game went, “for every square you take, you get a dollar,” but they also could have gone, “for every square you take, you must listen to one entire Britney Spears CD.” This made the game exciting. A lot of people only took the bare minimum; others, like me, took off four or five just to be cool and daring. After we had all gotten our TP and it was quickly established that this was just another lame-o “meet everybody” type of game, play began.

Allllllllllllllllen and Mariah got things going by telling us a little about themselves, and then the game continued randomly, with each player picking the next person to go after them. Eventually the spotlight fell upon a 16 year-old girl named Ashley who was from Coppell, Texas. I don’t remember all of how she described herself, but one of her squares was used for something like, “I play the trumpet, but I’m not like a band dork or anything. Band is huge at our school—there are over 300 people in it, we practice a lot, and it’s a pretty big deal. At our school it’s considered cool to be in the band.” (Okay, I probably misquoted Ashley so badly here that I deserve to be shot in the eye with a BB gun, but you get the idea.) Later, when it was my turn to use the toilet paper, you can imagine the impression I made on everybody with: “Well, I play the saxophone in the band, and I’ll be honest with you: I am a band dork…” and so on. It’s too painful to try to type the rest.

But apparently I made a good impression on Ashley, because later that night—or perhaps it was the following night, or the night after that; I really have no idea, to be perfectly honest with you—when the action at the teen center got a bit stale, Ashley struck up a conversation with me and at her suggestion we snuck off to the arcade, where the lights were dim and there was nobody around. This, as you would expect, made the atmosphere absolutely perfect for two young kids, a boy and a girl, who wanted an evening of simple, naughty fun, and Ashley and I were just too weak to resist the urges that drove us almost immediately to play several furious games of air hockey. Over the course of the cruise I imagine we spent collectively at least 37 million dollars on that air hockey table, and though in the end I think I had a better win/lose record than did Ashley, in those initial games she pasted me with graceful ease. These games were all paid for by Ashley, by the way, because to play the games you had to have an arcade card, and to buy an arcade card you had to use your cruise card, which for some reason I couldn’t do at the time, so after several games I began to feel really guilty that Ashley was paying all the time, and I imagine Ashley got somewhat sick of it herself, so we took a break from air hockey and chatted for a while, with Ashley sitting upon a motorcycle or some such vehicle from one of the arcade games. (For some reason, my memory only seems to capture pointless, utterly irrelevant details of events, like for example “Ashley sat on a motorcycle while we talked,” or “Biff was wearing a green pair of cargo pants,” but not important things like “The hosts’ names were Allen and Denise,” or “the side pocket of Biff’s green cargo pants got caught on the side-view mirror of a passing minivan and Biff soon found himself unconscious atop a telephone pole minus his left leg.”)

A lot of you are probably starting to put 73 and 73 together (146) and realizing that the Ashley I’m talking about here is the very same Ashley whose name appears all over this blog—in the links, in the description box, in the blog entries themselves. In making this blog I figured I could stick the name “Ashley” all over the place and nobody would notice, but I was quickly proven wrong by the multitude of times I’ve had to answer the question, “Boris, who’s Ashley?!” This has turned out to be a tricky question to answer, because when I tell people that I met Ashley on a cruise, and that Ashley is a girl, they automatically assume that we fell hopelessly in love and had a secret fling in the lifeboats. Which, need I say it, didn’t happen. In actuality, we spent most of our time in the company of 13 year-olds playing air hockey, cards, and board games, and also eating (but not having sex, though one time a few of us did go without Ashley to gawk at topless sunbathers). I tell people this but nobody believes me. Look:

bassgirl237: boris!!!!
bassgirl237: is ashley ur girlfriend???!!!!!
bassgirl237: ahhh thats so great!!

And then there’s Chris, who thinks that I have schizophrenia and made Ashley up, not to mention the whole cruise:

C2daizzo54: ok Boris....who's Ashley?
Chessmen15: [a] girl from Texas who I met on the cruise
C2daizzo54: oh..."the cruise"
C2daizzo54: so where did you go on this "cruise"?
Chessmen15: [the] Mediterranean
Chessmen15: last June!
Chessmen15: what, you don't believe me?
C2daizzo54: I believe you
C2daizzo54: this "cruise" of yours sounds like it was real fun
Chessmen15: okay, it's making me nervous how you keep putting that in quotation marks
Chessmen15: do you think I'm nuts and made up the whole thing?
C2daizzo54: nope
Chessmen15: and fabricated a whole new blog to make you guys think some imaginary "Ashley" wrote it?
Chessmen15: and made links to other blogs, all of which I fabricated and made up?
C2daizzo54: never thought of it that way
C2daizzo54: looks like Boris made up a girl from Texas
C2daizzo54: and wrote some fabricated blogs
C2daizzo54: I should tell everyone else this secret

Hopefully this blog entry will clear up these rumors and misconceptions. After the cruise ended I stayed in touch with Ashley, whom I haven’t seen and might even never see again since she returned to Coppell, Texas and I returned to Theresalotofcornherebutthatsaboutit, Ohio. We don’t talk much on AIM anymore—I think this has something to do with the fact that I’ve temporarily sworn off AIM—but we still read each other’s blogs and even carry on a little conversation via the little message board Ashley has in hers. Now, it’s funny that I should mention blogs, because that’s precisely what I wanted to talk about. In August, after the cruise was long over, Ashley started up a blog. I’m not entirely sure who gave her the idea, but apparently blogging is a big thing down in Texas, because if you link off of Ashley’s blog to, say, Becky’s blog, you can then find a link to a whole BUNCH of other blogs. In that sense, Ashley was something of a follower, which she admits in her first entry. But in a very, very important way, Ashley was a true innovator. I’ve browsed around the Texans’ blogs and they are all mostly like diaries, places where people type up their feelings and what happened to them that day and whatnot. That’s not to say that sort of thing isn’t interesting, but Ashley pioneered the idea that a blog can be used for the amusement of others, and filled hers with funny essays and other interesting things. Her blog was initially a secret, so by the time she let me in on the secret there was a lot there for me to read. I thoroughly enjoyed her stuff and thought this “blog” thing was so cool that I decided to make one. It wasn’t until much later that I realized just how unique Ashley’s blog was, and how fortunate I am that I had the concept introduced to me by Ashley and not by somebody else.

For those of you who are a bit on the slow side, I will point out that this very blog that you’re reading right now exists solely as a direct result of my having met Ashley. The links section and the titles to the entries are also there thanks only to Ashley’s guidance and, in the case of the links, direct intervention. Pardon me for getting a bit sentimental here, but I owe Ashley bigtime for this blog’s existence. That, hopefully, explains why Ashley’s blog heads my list of links, and why “Ashley Rocks!” sits eternally at the bottom of my description box, and in general where Ashley came from and why she’s in my blog all the time. If you like my blog but haven’t looked at Ashley’s yet, bear in mind that I blatantly stole the idea in its entirety from her—scroll up to my list of links and take a look at the original! Her newest entry—well, it might not be new by the time you’re reading this, but whatever—The Birds—is hilarious. Best of all, Ashley’s blogs are not only funny, but also short , in sharp contrast to this four page monstrosity that I’m guessing fully half of you got to the third paragraph of before giving up and hurling yourselves off a cliff.

Thanks, Ashley! You rock. By the way, Chris says hi.