Happy Birthday... Abuse, Abuse!

June 24th

I love the way that things never turn out the way that I think they will.

The fact that last year I had my birthday on the annual school-wide camp-out made me think that I was in some way, shape, or form prepared for this year's birthday.  Not so!

My day started with a pledge to get up at four to see the sun-rise and ended with sleeping till the horn for breakfast at eight.  There,  everyone sang Happy Birthday *gasp, choke*  IN TUNE. For someone that does not know my school and its reputation for musical demolition, this might not seem like anything special.  It is.   I then got my first present of the day- a bag of skittles.

That morning I discovered that I had what I like to call Swelling II: The Sequel.  You see, the previous night, I had had a terrible reaction to some sort of bug-bite on my arm- my arm had swollen up almost to a third of its normal size.  Some benadril calmed it down, but failed to destroy the bite that I woke up to on my birthday- a lump the size of a golfball on my hand. 

After accumulating a bruise the size and shape of a doughnut on my thigh, and a lump on my leg from overzealously attempting to play Spoons, I decided that I was done physical activity for the day.  Sadly, my wish was not fulfilled, as my lovely friends decided that it was time for the birthday girl to be thrown in the lake.

I then received my second present: my friend Michelle caught me two frogs, which I named Matilda and Enrique.  Top off the day with perogies for dinner and ice-cream sundaes for dessert, and being a host of the grade eleven camp-fire and the day was perfect.

Orchestra and Geoffrey again

Sometimes I wonder if people have gotten tired of hearing about Geoffrey from me. Everything that I see reminds me of him, every hurt that I've ever had in my life is miniscule next to his death.

This is one of the reasons that I didn't tell anyone at Orchestra about his death. A few people eventually learned, but I certainly didn't make a public service announcement. Orchestra gave me a fresh breath from the cloud of sorrow that my school was buried in. I was able to at least pretend to be normal, pretend to be happy. In all honesty, I'm a pretty darn good actress, so nobody guessed that I was really suffering inside.

All this changed last Tuesday when I was on the front page of the paper, playing at the dedication of his memorial gazebo.

At my orchestra audition this year (everyone has to audition every year to determine placements) we were discussing ways that I can improve to be the best concertmaster that I can next year.  The panel's (conductor, head of strings, head of winds) main suggestion was to take myself less seriously, as I tend to get a little, what's the word, (perturbed, snappy, wound up?) when I get stressed.  This made total sense to me, and I agreed with them completely.  However, I made a terrible mistake.

I should have known not to mention anything to do with Geoffrey.

All I said was something along the lines of "I totally understand, and I can see why I was extra- tense this year as I wasn't... wasn't in the b-b-best state... em...em...em..." The last word, emotionally, was lost in a flood of tears that came and devastated like a monsoon- I wasn't able to coherently speak for at least two minutes.  Not too encouraging for a person who has said that she'll try to be less uptight.

However, they understood.  My conductor already knew the story, and the head of strings had brought along the newspaper article.  So, maybe it wasn't such bad thing after all.