My Musical Love Affair

I never derived any joy from playing the flute.

It wasn't that I disliked it-elementary school band was an easy ticket out of the stifling classroom environment filled with too many brightly-colored pictures and not enough actual learning. Band was fun. The flute just... Never stuck.

I'd never worked well with others (and still don't), but band was a little different. We made sounds together, individually, but we were inextricably linked to the person next to us, the person on the other side of the room, the person behind us. We were independent. But somehow dependent.

It was a weird thing.

I'd wanted to take up alto sax in the fourth grade, but my mother (I remember this very vividly. I think I may still be rather bitter about this.) threw a flute at me and told me that I was a girl, and saxophones were "for boys." Ooooh. I was not happy.

My first band director was a gently greying man whose soft voice still somehow managed to subdue an entire room of bubbling fourth-through-sixth-graders. I made it to fourth chair as a flutist, then we changed band directors the next year and everything just kind of went haywire.

Then, middle school rolled around. I had no particular interest in participating in the "elective wheel" of Home Ec, Art, and Something-Else-I-Can't-Quite-Remember, so I kept up with band, even though I was bumped to Intermediate Band because of the annual numbers issue.

I bumped along with flute until Christmas break (I remember this because I also very vividly screeching "Frosty the Snowman" at a family gathering. I enjoyed it at the time. I am mortified now.). Then I decided to take up bassoon. All of this, of course, without parent consent. But they hadn't said that I couldn't take up bassoon.

I became a convert.

It gave me no end of joy to reach my hands all the way around the wing joints to hit that super-low B-flat. Playing bassoon gave me a power, a thrumming between my hands that made my silver Gemeinhardt seem like a cheap penny whistle in comparison. I loved the double reed, the funny little tooting noises it would make when I took it off the bocal. It sounded like a kazoo. A very nice kazoo.

I got calluses on my hands from lugging the cloth case around, and the fingers on my left hand became especially flat. But it was so. Much. Fun.

The first time I hit the low B-flat, my mother gave me a look that would have withered the sprightliest dandelion. I hit it again. She sighed.

I fondly referred to my bassoon, a rather old, creaky, rusting school rental affair, as my "dying whale." I loved it, loved polishing the wood, opening the case and smelling the scent of... music. The best were the nights when I had the time to take the entire thing apart and carefully polish every key, every lever, every wire. It would gleam in the yellowish family room light.

I got into Honor Band as the sole bassoonist and spent a delirious day in happiness at Disneyland in the stinging rain as a result.

Then, I decided that the bassoon was not enough. So I picked up the bari sax. I'm sure this was a subconscious decision.

For those of you who don't know, bari saxes are these bloated, enormously heavy (it's the brassiest, woodwind around) versions of the traditional alto sax, which is probably the most common sax around. The bassoon was as tall as I was. The bari was about as wide. The sax (and its case) were so heavy that I'd only bring it home to practice over the weekends. I had to make two trips from the band room to my mother's car. Once with all my school stuff and my bassoon, then one more for the bari sax, which required all of my muscular ninety-pound weight to lug the fifty meters to my mother's car. I'd hold up traffic.

I took the bari to jazz band and was a regular member for the last three-quarters of my middle school life.

Then came the French Horn.

I'd really wanted to learn the trumpet, but the school didn't have any I could take out, so I settled for French Horn, which is arguably the most difficult brass instrument to conquer (what kind of funnel-shaped mouthpiece was that?). I never did get the hang of the muffling stuff.

In my final concert of my band career, we played a Lord of the Rings medley, and I switched from bassoon to French Horn midway through. It was so fun.

I miss band a lot. Without it, I'd never appreciate half the music I love now, wouldn't have continued band at the community college (though I had to stop after a year because my braces seriously got out of hand), wouldn't have struggled valiantly through my last year of the CM, wouldn't have kept up with my music long after my classical training ended. I wonder what I'd be like if I'd continued band through high school. I wouldn't be in cross country. I probably wouldn't even be in MUN. But I'd have music.


I played this bassoon solo in my dreams. I was the second bassoon at the community college (a music major was the first chair), so I never did get to play it. But I dreamed about it. And thoroughly enjoyed it when the trumpets behind me blasted out my ears every single time.

I never really got into jazz, but the range of the bari is so awesome. I found this random guy on Youtube. 

And just for the sake of it, have a subcontrabass:

Waiting

This was written during an excruciating three-hour wait at LAC+USC. The font's bound to be screwy because this is all from my phone, so happy reading.


There are five of us in this bland room whose walls were once pink but are now a kind of tired, sagging bloody beige with the scuffed wallpaper peeling of in chunks and hastily plastered over by pieces of white tagboard. The light is two dim to even be considered fluorescent. They must be bygone relics of the time of incandescence.

There are four people at the table. Two male. Two female. I'm standing off to the side simply because there only four chairs at the table. There's a stack of chairs in the corner that reaches up above my head, but I can't be bothered with walking all the way across this tiny room to set one down at the two tables whose edges don't quite meet.

The swinging doors open, and now there are four.

It irks me that one table is a dark mahogany with darker legs while the other is a pale, bleached beige. Did no one think to match fake wood types? None of the four chairs match either, though the ones in the large stack in the corner on the far side of the room are faceless in their hard, black, plastic unity. I half expect the floor tiles to suddenly change from speckled off-white to some psychedelic rendering of Travolta's dance floor. Flashing lights included.

There is a blue streamer trapped in a ceiling panel. It's one of those cheap, pre-wrinkled ones that comes in huge rolls that are never fully used. It adds a much-needed splash of color to the pink room.

The whiteboard is something else completely. On it, demanding immediate attention, is an anterior view of the human knee with all the parts labelled. MCL. PCL. ACL. LCL. I feel last year's AP Biology kicking in. Around it are scribbles: calculations for a CrCl (Chromium Chloride?), which is to be administered (according to a splattering of blue scribbles) at 54 liters per hour (or 90 milliliters per minute); neater, bluer scribbles are boxed in on the left, but all I can make out from this side of the room are ESTROGEN and PROGESTERONE written just like that in all caps; there are arrows pointing either up on down, with the word "risk" after each of them, and I see words like OVARIAN CA and ENVIRONMENTAL CA; at the very bottom is a large RISKS which is also underlined rather crookedly, followed by MI/STROKE and VTE/CUT. I come to the conclusion that this is the room where people come to die. There are just too many risks.

A girl screeches outside (or are those just the wheels of some poorly-maintained piece of death-defying machinery?).

Above the board, in foot-high capitals, a sign reads CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, followed by a large, yellow smiley face.

The yellowed clock face follows the red hand around.

Below that is a long double row of X-ray backlights. There are four individual panels and eight clips to each panel. Thirty-two lives could be decided here all at once. Strangely, though, there is only one socket for the four panels. Perhaps that will cut down on the death rate.

There are five of us again now.

A minuscule television sits on top of a rolling trolley by the X-ray backlights. A sign is taped over the screen: THIS TV/DVD BELONGS TO BREAST/MAMMO DEPT AT CLINIC TOWER followed by a name and a phone number. Women are so possessive. It may be just my perspective, but the trolley seems a little bent out of shape.

I just realized that the doors are blue. A kind of washed-out blue, though, not like the forced dying pink-beige of the walls.

The blue doors bang open again, but after a fluttering of paperwork, there are still five of us. Waiting.

The white trash can in the corner has a serious design flaw. It's base is less than a quarter the size of its lid. It is an inverted trapezoid. What will happen when the step-lever is stepped on? The trash can will tip over, that's what, held upright only by the weight of the stepper's foot. What will happen when the stepper steps off the step-lever? Well, the trash can will wobble precariously for a few moments, and one of two things will happen: 1) the trash can will remain standing, or b) the trash can will fall over with a crash and everyone will die for a moment.

There are no red emergency sockets in here. But I suppose this is just a conference room. So there would be no need for life-support machinery in here. But what if the blue doors somehow got stuck and we were trapped in here forever with only the minuscule television with the sign taped over the screen as our only form of entertainment? What if the only thing in the DVD player was of someone's mammogram? Would we watch it for the rest of our lives in this dying-pink room? What if there was a tumor in the mammogram? Would we be able to tell? Would be able to say, right then and there, as we were dying in this conference room that the person whose mammogram we were watching was going to die? If the lights went out and the emergency generators failed, would we sit alone in here and take comfort in knowing that someone out there was dying too?

The atmosphere in here is still a sullen silence sullied by the screeching of the girl (or machine) in the hall beyond the blue doors.

Absurdly, I realize that the telephone on the wall opposite matches the dying-pink of the walls. It's as if they died (or are dying-I'm no expert on the death of inanimate objects) together.

It's strange, the symmetry I now find in this room. The black floor trim matches the black of the non-emergency electrical sockets, some of which are upside-down like the exposed electrical cord next to me which is a sad tan-ish color like the hinges on the blue door, which is the only blue in the room except for the blue scribbles on the board that dictate risk and chromium chloride or the blue streamer hanging from the ceiling panel that is a much happier blue than either the door or the scribbles, but not as happy as the yellow smiling face after CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, which only emphasizes the dying-pink-ness of the walls.

Raised silver panels, also trapezoidal in shape, run waist-high around the room. I do not know what they are for and it irks me.

I'm still standing next to the waist-high silver trapezoidal panel. I think it might be electrically charged. Shiny silver things have a habit of being electrically charged.

None of this makes any sense.

Fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I have gone through a decade-old issue of the American Journal of Nursing and read a particularly unenlightening article about bowel sounds. I now know that there are four abdominal quadrants and that gastrointestinal motility returns in the small intestine after two to four hours, to the stomach in three days, and to the colon in six days. Bowel sounds are heard through the stethoscope, and the recommended listening time per quadrant is five minutes, for a total of twenty minutes of bowel-listening. This is why bowel sounds are being called into question as a means of patient diagnosis. They take too long.

I've given up. I'm sitting down in a chair now. At the table. I feel as if my legs do not belong to me anymore. Can I listen for leg sounds?

I just stepped on the step-lever of the trapezoidal trash can. It's a great deal heavier than it looks. It didn't even wobble.

Noise

Today, I saw a man walking down a street in my neighborhood with a murderous look ill-concealed by a pair of rather large, ostentatious sunglasses. He gripped an also rather large pair of vine cutters in his hand. In fact, everything about this man was large. Except for himself.

His ill-fitting, rather washed-out yellow polo shirt hung past his elbows and flapped sadly with the violence of his motion, shaking their heads in resignation. His cargo shorts swished around his knees in a sort of counter-motion to the polo sleeves so there became an opposing balance to this man's hardly contained fury. Sleeves flap forward, shorts flap back, sleeves forward, shorts back, forward, back, forward, back.

Then his tired shoelaces joined in the chorus, plastic ends slapping against the synthetic uppers of shoes that had terribly scuffed heels, though not from any sort of physical activity. Socks drooped still lower.

Where was he going? Where had he been? Was he going to return the pliers to some erstwhile neighbor as my mother, naive in so many ways, believed? Or was he out to perpetrate the grisly murder of some former friend who had wronged him dreadfully? Perhaps there was a scandal involved. Perhaps the woman running an intersection behind him was his wife, frantically seeking forgiveness and an end to this madness.

But maybe he was just a guy in a big shirt who was really unhappy about having to carry a large vine cutter around on a Sunday morning. I can't say that I blame him.

Show

Cal stared at the numbers swimming by on blank paper. There was nothing left in his head, just a few empty thoughts rolling around in a deep sea of vague resentment. The door creaked open, then thudded shut, rattling the large plastic window above the handle. The beige wall gazed silently past the glare of the fluorescent lights. Cal ducked his head under the visual warfare and pretended to scribble.

He distantly heard two of the other occupants of the room start to talk quietly, the absence of authority prompting that which would not have been censured, just chided. Their voices released some of the tension of silence, and Cal slumped back in his seat, tossing his pencil with a sharp clack onto the chipped wooden surface.

The whiteboard at the front of the room was uncharacteristically bare, but no less than characteristically clean, polished by the alcohol that cleaned and corroded and made Cal a little giddy every time he breathed in. Sometimes, he would take a few extra breaths before the smell could fade.

The voices behind him grew louder, but Cal didn't turn around. He lowered his eyes back to the smudged page before him, shoving himself back upright, and snatching up his pencil, tapping a plastic end against his chin. The two behind him suddenly grew quiet, and Cal froze, staring nowhere.

One lowered voice broke the silence.

"Hey, want to see the video of the fight? I have it on my phone."

The other replied, fast and guilt-low.

"Yeah, sure."

"It's HD, man."

"Wow."

"It's pretty tight."

"Where was it?"

"Vernon Park."

"You went?"

"No, I... I didn't go. Wait, wait. You have to see this part. I'll tell you when Michael dislocates his shoulder."

"Why'd they fight?"

"Because Michael and Rodney, they... You know. They had this thing and... I don't know."

"There a lot of people there?"

"Yeah. Oh wait. Wait. There."

"Oooh."

"See, Michael's trying to punch, but he can't."

"Shit."

"And then he breaks Rodney's nose right... there."

"Wait, he broke his nose!?"

"Yeah. If you wait, you'll see this huge thing of blood on the ground."

"Oh, man."

"They say that when Michael got home, he was covered in blood and stuff and he passed out and ended up in the ER."

"Holy-"

"-There, you see it? The blood?"

"What-oh."

The door creaked open again, and Cal sensed a flurry of movement behind him. He sank back down in his seat, pencil dropping again from twitching fingers. He breathed deeply, once.

The show was over.