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”.