Month and some

What is there to say when someone dies? Everyone stops their life because someone else's life stopped. Very often, this is good. It helps to step back from where you've been and think about it: to pull off the road and look back from where you and everyone else came. On April 4th, a sophomore named Chevis Jackson was at home in the Galbraith Pointe family of condominiums, and some guys came over and got in a fight with him and shot him. He died. I found out about it the next day in school. That day, we were silent. In first bell nobody did anything: we all sat and stared at the wall, or at our desks. I knew Chevis from photography, which was second bell. He was the guy who always turned his iPod up way too loud and sang with it even louder. That day in second bell, people were crying, and some of them were guys. Some people were hugging each other and people were just losing it. Throughout the rest of the day we learned to talk again, but it was a day with a shadow over it.

I am glad that I'm going to be going to college someplace far away from Finneytown. Earlier this year, another student from my school, Derwin Murphy, was walking home from Kroger when (I think this is correct) he got mugged and shot in the leg. He survived, but it's clear that we're not living in a safe place when two students from my school have gotten shot within one year. And it doesn't speak very favorably to society in general. What kind of species are we that we kill our own when they've done nothing to merit it and can do nothing to defend themselves? Animals kill to stay alive, or (in pack systems) to avenge treachery. Humans kill for fun or out of rage. Sometimes I don't feel very proud to be a human.



Recently AP tests were the story of the day, every day, for several weeks. I only had AP history, so I got off fairly light, but next year I have five nationally-administered AP exams. History is a very hard one. It's not solid fact that you can arrive at by logic, like calculus, but there again it's not a field composed of opinions like psychology is, so you can't just BS your way through the test. We had four after-school study sessions, and I went to the last two, because (1) I needed to study and (2) there was pizza. The test was on May 5th, in the library. It was hard. There are 80 multiple choice questions, and Mr Volz has advocated leaving about ten of them blank, because the test is created so that no one can get all the answers. The knowledge is just too obscure. The good news is that under Mr Volz's excellent coaching, Finneytown is well above the national average for how many pass the test; the average is about half, though I don't recall our figure. I think I did quite well on it. I don't know if hoping for a 5 (highest) is too ambitious, but a 4 is well within expectations.
-Hm, let me browse my journal to see what else has happened recently.
-Oh yes: the band went to State contest. Of note is that just like the Marching Band State Contest, this was in Columbus, so we had an invigorating two-and-a-half hour drive in buses that produced an incessant 80 or 90 decibels, without even counting the 40 or 50 kids jammed on each one and contributing an extra 20 or so to the average. I hate buses. I also hate staying in large crowds or crowded places for a long time. Whenever I do, the words of Agent Smith come back to me:
"I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
We got in the building, which was the colossal Gahanna Lincoln High School. I'm going to be frankly honest here: we weren't ready to be at State competition. But we got into some sort of groove, or at least kind of felt like we did, when we were in the warm-up hall (a gym). Then we got on stage and did what we could.
-Fun fact: our State concert program was 27 minutes long, and was followed by the sight reading thing, which was an additional, like, six. The sight reading judge was weird. He was a last-minute replacement and he reminded me of a priest. He said all these vague emotional things like "So just make that note come up and... hold the next note's hand." He talked at us for about ten minutes, and then we left that room too.
-Back in the rooms where we left all our cases, Mr Canter broke from tradition and told us not that our performance was totally perfect, but that he heard some intonation problems where he was. He did think our sight reading was the best we had ever done, but he also said that with the way Father Bandjudge was talking and all the esoteric stuff he was criticizing, he expected a III from him. Anyhow we went back to the cafeteria. We waited, and then we got our rating. It was an overall III. An overall III. Like I said, we weren't ready to be at State competition.
-Now, we are a resilient band. We got over it pretty quickly, though I think Mr Canter took a lot longer. We were having fun on the ride home. (By "we" I mean everyone else, because I hated it on the bus, for two and a half hours.) Then back in Finneytown Mr Canter let off a lot of steam by yelling at people for being rowdy on the buses, and then we went to our respective homes.

I have other stuff to write, but it's coming up on three o'clock, so I'm going to go to bed and tell you about it tomorrow.