Playing/Practising/Perfoming music.

Frozen sweets and pains

Anyone unfortunate enough to have been within my vicinity for the past week will have undoubtedly heard of the endless pain on the right side of my mouth caused by two wisdom teeth growing simultaneously.

I’m sure majority thought I was just being a hypochondriac with all my bitching about it – but no longer! I finally managed to get a dentist’s appointment for about an hour ago, and immediately the dentist said I had to have the top one pulled out – right then and there. Needless to say I was mortified – I hadn’t had a tooth pulled out in over a decade and the last time I was sitting in the same seat a couple of months ago I’d had some fillings put in. My memory immediately flicked back to the pain and discomfort… if fillings hurt so much, how bad is getting a tooth pulled out going to be?! It turns out that getting numbing injections took a lot longer and hurt a lot more than getting the tooth itself taken out. I asked to keep it – but they didn’t even rinse it for me! At the moment, I’m just afraid of the numbness wearing off, since I could see some fleshy bits attached to the tooth, urgh. Sorry if the photo’s a bit gruesome, couldn’t help it!

The upside of it all is that Mum and I drove straight to the ice cream factory store and bought 4x frozen yoghurts and 2x mango sorbet tubs all for the cheap price of $10! The looney downside is that I can’t have hot food for a week; have to keep biting on this fucking gauze that’s really pissing me off right now to stop the bleeding; have to keep taking antibiotics; aaaaaand… I can’t drink my pains away either, bugger! Mind you, that’s proably better for my health and eftpos card in the long-run, but I’m going to see Handsome Furs tonight and was hoping to have a beer or too, grrr.

On the strand of music, I photographed the Popstrangers gig on Saturday night, so eveeentuuually the pics will be up. Also, the Stage Band has a gig at the Howick Club tonight; I’m not sure what the occasion is but I guess I’ll find out in about an hour. And the best news? Concert Band won KBB!

I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity

Somewhere amidst my current state of hayfeverish nose-blowing and nose-bleeding, I’ve been having a pretty reckless week. Kicking off Monday morning with Stage Band practise instead of hockey training for a change, we were hyped to attend the KBB Music Festival in town this week – it’s my 5th, and last.

All term I’ve been resentful towards school and agreeing with fellow cynical 7th formers who say that they “won’t be missing” college – and to a large extent, I now realise that I haven’t been completely lying. Maybe it’s because it’s midnight and I tend to get quite wordy and analytical at this time of day (or night, should I say… but it’s day to me, but more on that later), but I suddenly realise that the only place I will truly miss is probably the music department at school. As much grief, frustration and angry tears it has brought me in the past half a decade (good god, did I just say half a decade?!), it’s the one place outside my bedroom that I have spent the most collective time at. Trust me, I wish I was exaggerating when I say that, this Monday alone, I spent 6 hours at music at school: that’s two hours more than I had slept the night before.

For the first time in 4 years I changed my stage band attire – our uniform is basically black, black, and more black, with a gold and maroon waistcoat, but for once I didn’t wear jeans and wore a skirt instead. Mr. Bolley asked where my blazer was from because he thought it was part of some uniform, but I had just decided to wear it instead of the hoodies that everyone else had worn into town for KBB since it suited better (below, right… it looks quite posey, but truth be told I wasn’t looking at the camera because I’d just woken up from the long car ride home). The other picture is of an outfit I put together at the last minute a couple of weeks ago for a gig I photographed. It’s not a very “outfit picture” though, and I don’t even have my long socks and boots on, but I thought I’d just mention that the shirt I’m wearing is actually a dress! Although ironically, I’ve ever worn it out as a dress yet, but I think it looks better like this. You can’t see it in the picture, but I had to tie a black ribbon making the straps meet in the middle, since it was a low back, and very loose, low cut dress.

I’m still quite sketchy on their decision to relocate the festival at the Aotea Centre instead of at the Auckland Town Hall this year; in fact I have yet to find out as to why they did that at all, but the acoustics in the Aotea Centre simply pales in comparison to the Town Hall. The only upside I can think of, is that all the schools have much more storage space for instruments, cases and other gear – but for two days in a row now we’ve been assigned to level 5, which is a bitch of a tramp up the stairs with a bass case/amplifier! We were sneaky for Concert Band today and managed to dodge the event co-ordinators and snag rides upstairs in the lift, yay!

So I mentioned before that I get quite wordy during the late hours, on Sunday night (the reason I slept so little), I used my inspiration to churn out lyrical words as a means of procrastinating from finishing an English assignment. I wrote quite a fair bit, but here are just some snippets; none of them are titled (yet), and I find that phrasing/emjambment/punctuation seems to be a big aspect of things I write. If I ever put music to them, though, there are some lines/words that I will definitely change and rephrase:

The last thing I wrote that night, my personal highlight:
The navy curtains disguise the time of day
Or night, we are uncertain,
It’s been so long since we left.
A room once so small and empty
The hollowness of a house, not home,
How did things change the tone?
Candles won’t bring us romance,
But the closed white door a privacy
And in here, a silent intimacy.

This is only the second half, I’ve omitted the first part because in hindsight, it really sucks:
I will leave because you say
so, I will leave
Not of my own accord.
I will leave because you say,
So I will leave.

I’m not too sure where this came from, it was mostly spurned from the first couple of lines:Whatever happened to indifference?
Your sun-stained chest

Makes me cringe that you

Want her berry-kissed lips on you.

Since when could I not keep

A small cup of coffee steady

It would be easier than easy
To shed this on her lap.

What happened to “go with the flow”?
Now I’m looking up maps for directions
It’d be easier if I knew where we were heading
But what a bore that’d be.
And if my only desire is to

Fulfill your desire too
How my paltry needs
Will kill the “me and you”.

Last ten days of 17

I can’t believe I’m almost turning 18! In barely ten days’ time I will legally be an adult, be able to buy alcohol, go to pubs, clubs, R18 movies, etc!

It’s a really exciting prospect, yet at the same time scares the crap out of me. Considering the amount of things that have changed since even my last blog post (staggeringly busy, no time to blog, gah!), it’s amazing to think back on the transitions and growths that I’ve experienced in the past 17 years… at the moment I just keep thinking “holy crap!”. My friends joke and say that I’ll “finally be the age that everyone things [I] am” – because I’ve been sneaking into (mostly mates’) gigs in town for years, and have been awaiting the day when I can actually flash my drivers license at the bouncer!

Today’s been the hardest day of my week – it started bright and early at a little past 6am, and saw me go from running warmup laps around the hockey turf which I didn’t actually feel warm after; to attending two classes; leaving school for “year 13s’ half day Wednesday”, only to return for a 3-hour-long seminar by an Australian speaker, Darren Pereira; then I had two hours’ of concert band practise – yet another 12 hour day doing school-related things! In addition to all the stress of my AS Music exam on Tuesday, and internal mock exams all this week and next week, I got informed today that next Friday, on the eve of my birthday party, not only will I have to set up art at school for the annual 1st XI Hockey fundraiser, but then I have to race over to another school, play jazz for a charity gig, and rush back home in time for my own birthday party. How sad is that?! I’m furious at the music teacher – he has asked the stage band/jazz combo whether or not we’d like to do the gig, and most people weren’t keen, especially since half of them were coming to my birthday; but this just makes my already tight schedule even worse.

The thought of my birthday/arty is the only thing that’s getting me through these couple of strenuous weeks – the highlight is, though, I get to countdown to my 18th birthday with all my friends and family :D.