My OperaWednesday again
Thursday, October 11, 2007 5:19:20 AM
I should have been keeping myself busy with SATs and schoolwork - all that. But last night, when I was lying on my bed and reading my English assignment, I suddenly realized how tired I had been. It's true that after a while you just get used to having minimal sleep during weekdays and normal - note, normal - sleep at weekends. Your endurance does improve, but maybe not as much as you think. After 1 month having 3-5 hour sleep every night except for Fridays and Saturdays, today I came back from school and fell asleep on my desk until 3:05 pm. When I woke up, "One" by Metallica was played. As they shouted "absolute horror", my eyes caught the sign of the clock and I realized that I was late for CAS (that's almost absolute horror, perhaps).
I really love Special Olympics. But since the moment I woke up, I had had this feeling of emptiness whose cause I did not know of, and nothing interested me. Metallica's "One" kept playing inside my head, and I must have looked extremely bored, despite all the funniness going around. Feeling like a fish out of water, I head to the music room - they somehow decided to go there as well.
I looked at the keyboard, in the frenzy of chaotic sounds from all the instruments. If only I could play something. Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata Movement 1 or Moonlight Sonata Movement 3 were really good ones - that was if I could play them smoothly and expressively without worrying about the next notes. And my improvising skill was not that good to improvise something fast and intense - what I wanted to do at that time.
Inside my head, "One" by Metallica urged to be played. With two unmatched drumsticks, I drummed on the snares and attempted to reproduce the machine gun's sound in the heavy part of the song. It lasted about 15 seconds in which nothing existed in my world except for the beats; and I stopped it just at the point where Anita and Jenny shouted out my name and asked "What are you doing?" - because it was Royner's turn to play the piano, and everybody was supposed to be quite and listen. Right, I'm sorry. The urge had it, and drumming was all I wanted to do. What was I doing? If only I had known.
You might want to call it a kind of stress - although I extremely hate saying that I'm stressed. And I'm too old to be able to cry out of plain sadness or physical pains. That was why I came back to the music room after CAS, and put all of my strength to the drum kit. Drum it louder. louder. And even louder. Faster. I wasn't good at constant accelerating - that's why I never played drum in the band. But that moment at which I was soloing, constant acceleration didn't matter as much as the intensity of what I could express.
Sometimes you know that you shouldn't do something, but do it anyway - and this was one such occasion. Exhausted, I turned on the 8 beat style drumming of the organ and played along, slow tempo, to practice the fill - when I should be studying for my math test. So, by 6:30, instead of being half way ready for my math test, I was able to do the fill and come back to the normal beats smoothly without any speeding up or down. Drummin' after the organ was not that exciting though, comparing to my so-called freestyle just before. However, it took me away from my inexplicable uncertainty, and counting "1 and 2 and 3 and 4" mindlessly was more or less therapeutic.
Had I been a better drummer, I'd have forced it all on my drumsticks to play "One".
Louder.
Nick always called me "weird". Well, maybe I am.
When I arrived at my room at 9 in the evening, I was wet, physically hurt and mentally confused. Silly thing, it caused me so much pain, but I wouldn't complain. In fact, I was in no position to complain. I did have choice - and again, an example of how people often do things they shouldn't do.
His - someone's - neglect bothers me a lot, and not just because of my own interest. I saw something, and I don't know if people saw it as well. Maybe he himself hadn't seen it. What if he weren't white? What if he weren't European? Maybe he too, took things for granted. And maybe he hadn't notice that either, but he was like me. A lot like me. Incredibly. But maybe he wouldn't know it - and I wouldn't want him to.
Right now, he doesn't even know who he is.
I really love Special Olympics. But since the moment I woke up, I had had this feeling of emptiness whose cause I did not know of, and nothing interested me. Metallica's "One" kept playing inside my head, and I must have looked extremely bored, despite all the funniness going around. Feeling like a fish out of water, I head to the music room - they somehow decided to go there as well.
I looked at the keyboard, in the frenzy of chaotic sounds from all the instruments. If only I could play something. Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata Movement 1 or Moonlight Sonata Movement 3 were really good ones - that was if I could play them smoothly and expressively without worrying about the next notes. And my improvising skill was not that good to improvise something fast and intense - what I wanted to do at that time.
Inside my head, "One" by Metallica urged to be played. With two unmatched drumsticks, I drummed on the snares and attempted to reproduce the machine gun's sound in the heavy part of the song. It lasted about 15 seconds in which nothing existed in my world except for the beats; and I stopped it just at the point where Anita and Jenny shouted out my name and asked "What are you doing?" - because it was Royner's turn to play the piano, and everybody was supposed to be quite and listen. Right, I'm sorry. The urge had it, and drumming was all I wanted to do. What was I doing? If only I had known.
You might want to call it a kind of stress - although I extremely hate saying that I'm stressed. And I'm too old to be able to cry out of plain sadness or physical pains. That was why I came back to the music room after CAS, and put all of my strength to the drum kit. Drum it louder. louder. And even louder. Faster. I wasn't good at constant accelerating - that's why I never played drum in the band. But that moment at which I was soloing, constant acceleration didn't matter as much as the intensity of what I could express.
Sometimes you know that you shouldn't do something, but do it anyway - and this was one such occasion. Exhausted, I turned on the 8 beat style drumming of the organ and played along, slow tempo, to practice the fill - when I should be studying for my math test. So, by 6:30, instead of being half way ready for my math test, I was able to do the fill and come back to the normal beats smoothly without any speeding up or down. Drummin' after the organ was not that exciting though, comparing to my so-called freestyle just before. However, it took me away from my inexplicable uncertainty, and counting "1 and 2 and 3 and 4" mindlessly was more or less therapeutic.
Had I been a better drummer, I'd have forced it all on my drumsticks to play "One".
Louder.
Nick always called me "weird". Well, maybe I am.
When I arrived at my room at 9 in the evening, I was wet, physically hurt and mentally confused. Silly thing, it caused me so much pain, but I wouldn't complain. In fact, I was in no position to complain. I did have choice - and again, an example of how people often do things they shouldn't do.
His - someone's - neglect bothers me a lot, and not just because of my own interest. I saw something, and I don't know if people saw it as well. Maybe he himself hadn't seen it. What if he weren't white? What if he weren't European? Maybe he too, took things for granted. And maybe he hadn't notice that either, but he was like me. A lot like me. Incredibly. But maybe he wouldn't know it - and I wouldn't want him to.
Right now, he doesn't even know who he is.
