I took drum lessons during 5th grade, and was always a bit behind the rest of the class. Most of the other students started lessons the previous year, and somehow this seemed like a great advantage to me. During our concerts, when we could get to play real snare drums, I remember always being told by the other kids in band that I was off time. But really, I couldn't read music at all. In our lessons, we sat in this narrow rooms--perhaps it was supposed to be a closet, it wouldn't have been the first class in a closet that I'd had in that school--and followed instructions from a rather nice man as to how to play snare. And we all had these practise pads, not a snare drum, but a little round circle with a firm plastic material in the middle, that made a curt thump when struck.
When I was in middle school, the band program was a bit more organised, and we had more than one section. There were no practise pads there, I think. We had a real band room--two of them, actually--with levels going up toward the back of the room in steps. One of these rooms was full of electronic keyboards, but I never had any reason to go into that room. The other one, the one I spent time in, had seats and music stands and timpani in the front with drums in the back. There was one boy that played drums in my band section, and I remember thinking that he was very quite good. Some days, when band met after the elite Jazz band section had left, there would be a full drum set sitting out with the other drums and percussion instruments. It was a black, beaten-up Ludwig set; but it still was very impressive to me. I remember when the boy first sat down and played that, which nobody else in the band had done well, I thought, very impressed, "Wow, this sounds like something that would be in actual recorded music". And perhaps he was not very good at the time, but I wouldn't have know that.
I'm still friends with that boy; he is the frontman for a band that is a cross between Japanese-rock and metal. Now, he plays guitar and single and writes songs, and he is much better at drums. I don't know how he makes a living. Last time I asked him, he was commuting to city to work at a Japanese book store. I met him on the train home once, very coincidentally. While on the ride home, I took a photo with a Holga 120 of a hispanic woman dearly playing with her child. It was a magical moment. But one of her daughters noticed the flash from the camera, and she reprimanded me severely for what I had done. But she couldn't really speak English well, so I couldn't explain myself. Eventually she left and asked the conductor to confiscate my film on the way out, and he thought the whole situation was a but dramatic, and didn't do much. I think that photo is back in my blog, somewhere.
In eighth grade, boy had a girlfriend for six months, which at the time seemed like a very long time to everyone who knew him. He and his girlfriend were both a bit gothic at this time, wearing big black cargo pants and chains with flourescent trim and lots of red and heavy studded bracelets. And she wore thick eyeliner and dyed her hair, and she would even wear black lipstick sometimes, which was a bit rare in middle school even for the gothic crowd. I remember seeing her in the hallways when all the students stampeded between classes, and noting her appearance but not really thinking of her as an actual person. The first time I remember seeing her was when I was trying to talk to the boy, but he walked away a bit in a hurry and tried to conclude whatever we were saying, and went over to talk to this girl. And that was the first time she ever remembered seeing me.
I talked to her online on occasion. Once I met up with some friends at a Rita's Waterice stand down the street, and she was across the parking lot with another friend of hers, standing outside and asking customers to buy them cigarettes before entering the store. It worked. I always bought energy drinks from that convenience store.
She had a rather harsh personality which led me to think of her as a bad person, or some sort of emotional poison. Once I told her that she was a terrible person over the phone, for some reason thinking that she might understand. But that didn't go over so well, and she started crying. Maybe something clicked in my head after that because we became alright friends. She broke up with the boy after a while and it was really a scene, but I never learned what happened. Neither of them wanted to talk about it, it seemed like both their hearts were broken. She later started dating another guy, who was eighteen at the time. This was substantial, since we were both thirteen. And while they were dating (for two months, I think) I met her in person. It was one of those times when you know what someone or something looks like, but you don't totally understand or believe in until you see the thing. And it was a bit strange, like she looked totally different that I had thought, although I had in fact seen her in person before. Her hair was faded from all different colours, a rather strange shag with residual bleach in the back, but straight and neatly combed down in the front. Very airy. She wasn't so goth anymore, wearing a mimsy plaid button-down, covered in Scooby-Doo stickers, I still have one of them. When my parents drove her home and I went with her, it was snowing. She was wearing a black trenchcoat and we didn't talk much going home, and I couldn't even remember what she looked like while I sit sitting right next to her, if I wasn't looking directly at her. I have terrible facial memory.
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