after one long season of waiting

It's been a rough few days, and in the interest in not writing down an essay's worth of whining, I'm going to stick to last night, because last night was good.

I got to see Patrick Watson at Schubas. In fact, I'd almost forgotten I'd even bought the tickets (good thing I usually put things like that in my iPod calendar, otherwise I'd be forgetting things left and right). And right off the bat... I love Schubas. I think I've covered that before, though. They even have free wireless so when I invariably arrive way earlier than necessary I have something to do. But most importantly, it's the smallest, coziest, best-sounding place I've been in Chicago. It's just nice. I hadn't been there since I saw the Bowerbirds last year, and unfortunately for that show it was mostly Pitchforky hipsters standing around with their arms crossed and chatting the whole time (which I think made the Bowerbirds kind of cross). This show was entirely the opposite. The opener was from Chicago, and amazingly (considering my history with local openers) she was good. And she'd brought a lot of her friends, who cheered and clapped and made the entire crowd seem a lot warmer. But it was obvious from the start that it wasn't the usual hipster crowd. The people I was next to had come all the way up from Louisville, Kentucky. It hadn't occurred to me, since I was lucky enough to have seen him at Hillside last year, that Patrick Watson could very well be one of those artists who just doesn't venture into the US much. (Stop being selfish, Canada!) So, what we had was a crowd of friends-of-the-opening-act, travelling fanatics, and... maybe some of us were hipsters? But there was so much cheering and mutual laughter between us and the band and just... fantastic vibes. And I think a good part of that was also that the band just does not stop smiling, or laughing at each other and the occasional little slip-up. They have a fantastic presence, and the energy is rather contagious. Also, the music is awesome. This show is definitely up there on my list of Great Shows I've Been To. Sure, there wasn't rain, thunder, or risk of electrocution, but the show concluded with Patrick donning a megaphone contraption that looked like it was inspired by Doctor Octopus and trekking out into the crowd to sing a cappella. Then, since it was such a small place, he did one more song truly a cappella. And both of these songs ended in massive sing-alongs (one of which was entirely spontaneous). By this point, though, I think Patrick could've led us out into the streets and we all would've followed in neat lines, so maybe he just had to think "They should sing along now!" and we did. Considering the number of people who were obviously video taping it on their phones and cameras, I am severely disappointed that something isn't up on youtube yet.

In conclusion, may I just say that I adore the way this man (and his band) makes music. They're just up there making wonderful noise in as many ways possible: the percussionist beating on tins and other flotsam, banging on guitar strings with a couple of chopsticks, Patrick humming into a megaphone with a toilet plunger used as a mute or shouting up and out above the mic to get an echo from the ceiling... it's just crazy fun to witness, and with the existence of the megaphone suit, it borders on mad aural science, which is entirely the sort of thing I am wont to adore in a group of people.

And then I biked the 13 miles home, but the wind was behind me and it wasn't freezing out, so I was happy.

Everything else is just going to be disregarded for now, because I could catch you all up on the last five days of my life, but it'd be ridiculous and you'd think it was all hyperbole anyway. I will say this, though: Bad timing is bad. On every front. Especially today (holy crap especially today). Related to the portion of the drama that is (hopefully) less messy, I've also exponentially increased the number of people I owe pies to (which could go either way, except I hate making pastry crust). Whine whine whine; I've made my day, now I have to sleep in it.

But oh! There is one bit from Saturday morning I should point out. You know that random cliche on TV or in movies where groups of high school kids are liable to burst randomly into song, even (sometimes especially) in situations involving boredom and drudgery? So, I spent my Saturday morning running detention at the high school I've been volunteering at. We had the detention kids and the team work on Instant Challenge packets as a way to raise money for the team to go to Globals. And we had some music on in the background and guys... guys you think TV is lying to you, but I can say from experience that inner-city high school kids in detention really can and do burst into song at random. (Seriously, I adore this high school more and more every time I'm there. It's so interesting! And completely unlike high school as I knew it.)

So right, something that isn't about my job! Today was the regional DI tournament, and I got to be torn between appraising and several wild attempts at sprinting the length of a middle school in order to catch the two high school teams I'd been working with.

I was actually very happy with the way the structure challenge worked out this year. Usually there's no real incentive for the teams to have any sort of skit or props, but either this year we had phenomenally more ambitious teams, or something about having to build out of newspaper and having some small suggestions of scenery and costume requirements actually made teams pay attention to the rest of the challenge. We had a team re-enact the Maldives' underwater global warming summit (only with T-Pain along, too). There was a team with a BBC broadcast and infomercial interruptions (and a fantastic German accent that was, apparently, learned from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. By a tiny, 7th grade girl.) There was a performance about the Knights Templar trying to kill a king for a debt. The story-loving bit of me was downright gleeful. There was also a team that crafted a glass mosaic shoe that was really, really amazing (and apparently took more than 20 hours to make). And the structures, which I suppose were kind of important, were all pretty good, too. They were made of nothing but newspaper and commercially available glue, and several of them held over 100 pounds (two of them held around 160).

I was sad to find out that I wasn't going to get to see either of my high school teams perform, so I visited them all in the early afternoon, wished them luck, and disappeared. Then one of our afternoon teams didn't make it, so I rushed over to their challenge area and managed to catch one of the two teams. I was actually really impressed at what they'd managed to finish over the last couple of days. It was far better than what I'd seen from them on Wednesday, and in fact, was quite a bit better even than what most appraisers expect out of high school teams in general on the regional level. High school teams are notorious for being ill-prepared, for overlooking key bits of the rules, and for bringing in solutions that were invented about 24 hours beforehand. (For this particular team, though, it's kind of a habit, and they work well that way.) Unfortunately, they did overlook a key bit of the rules, which was that there was a giant bit of the floor you weren't supposed to stand on, and if you did it negated your entire score for the mechanical objectives. And... they stood on it. The entire time. I sat there with my face half-hidden in my hands, silently wishing they would at least just accidentally step out of it for a bit, but it didn't happen. And I have no idea how my other team did, because I had to rush back to my challenge as soon as the first team had finished. Their solution had a lot more to it that could have potentially gone wrong, but their team leader also paid closer attention to the rules, so chances are if things went wrong for them, they were technical rather than oversights.

Also, my team of seniors literally stood in front of an entire suburban crowd and, when asked if they were ready, let out a terrifying scream and then shouted "What's the power level... IT'S OVER 9000!!" (This is also the team that was going to do an Elite Beat Agents-based solution, but unfortunately that script was scrapped in favour of a beat poetry story about a delivery boy getting bitten by a dog) I... may have been the only one laughing for the intended reason, but they did get a laugh out of everyone else as well, for absurdity. Also, a friend of mine was quite impressed at their random nerd-pop culture references during another portion of the competition.

Actually, that's one of the things that made things really weird this year. Usually the kids are referencing really weird things, and I know for certain I'm not any more tuned in to pop culture than usual, but this year I got most of their references. So, either these things are on a trickle-down timer, and we've hit the point where the weird sense of (internets) humour that was in its beginning stages while I was in college has extended all the way down to middle schoolers, or... I don't know. (You know what I realized today? A senior in high school this year was a third grader when I was a freshman. A third grader! This means the DI kids I coached my senior year of high school are sophomores, at least. Holy crap I am old).

The other weird thing this year was realizing that there are now a ton of DI alumni being dropped into the system. It was my freshman year when the whole thing started (though OM was around for a long time before that). Now we're to the point that there are kids graduating who've done DI since they were old enough, and a lot of them are coming back in as volunteers. Add to this the fact that we also had a ton (TON!) of people helping on on the Disney give a day get a day thing, and the average age of appraisers at the tournament this year was probably literally cut in half. I think we averaged about 25, and the percentage of us who were teachers was way, way super down, so the scoring, in comparison to years before, was also much more... DI-style. It was bizarre. And... everything ran so much more smoothly. I was kind of stunned. It was like an alternate universe tournament.

Anyway, though I am now very, very tired (I've been up since before 6), it was a very satisfying day. Hooray!

I came home today to an entire pot of peas standing about an inch and a half tall, all stretching towards my window. I think maybe if the weather holds this week, I'll start putting them out in the morning and bringing them in at night.

Friday night through this morning was a pretty crazy blur. I was up until well after midnight last night working on volunteer schedules for the state DI tournament, then I got up at 5:30 to get to the tournament. And the rest of the morning and afternoon was spent appraising teams. And there were some that I knew from regionals that had made huge improvements on their skits. I was very happy, and quite impressed. I was kind of sad for them, though, that their structures didn't work any better, especially since it's the vast majority of their score.

I also got to take a walk around suburbia with a teacher who adopted me for a few hours after we were done, before my train got in. She talked about all the neighbors, and the new developers building million-dollar homes, the Yuppies and the old families that had been there forever, and she talked about how great it is to be a teacher. Which is good, because I had spent most of Friday night and Saturday realizing that the idea of working in a school for years and years kind of weirds me out on a basic level. Maybe it's the suburban school thing. But I just can't imagine having to sit in a teacher's lounge for lunch, with postage-stamp houses all around and... and parents. Maybe I should teach in an urban public school and just have my soul crushed. In a more urban, nihilistic way. Unfortunately, this doesn't get me any closer to A Plan. I think it's time for me to start seriously researching grad school, though. I'm still just as stuck between going for some sort of publishing thing, or getting a masters in something+education. I'm actually leaning more towards publishing in some form, because I'm finally starting to feel like I'm in an okay enough place with myself to actually communicate with people and make connections and actually get somewhere. If I do go back to school, I aim to get much more out of it, people-wise, than I did out of college. (Though failing to do that would be pretty hard.) I'd really like to be in the sort of Editor position that'd let me pick out people I actually like and give them a leg up.

I got a lot of thinking done on the train back, but most of it was about musical experiments, and whether to take mandolin lessons without a mandolin. Goshdarn my lack of focus. And goshdarn you, Teach Abroad Plan, for letting me down in my Try Things Out experiment.