How cool is that?

More reasons you should stop reading immediately and never return my emails...

In seventh grade while seated near a boy on whom I was crushing, I sneezed and plugged my nose. It's apparantly completely true that that pressure must escape from somewhere (dot dot dot).

Later that same year I was drinking something near another crush-receptor and choked so hard it sounded like the set-up scene for an episode of House. Did you know you can blush while suffocating? Y'do now.

In my first recital at Manhattan School I played a five-movement solo viola piece by Hindemith. It's dramatic, dark, intense, moody, sweaty music. When I got to the middle of the third movement I had to stop because I had forgotten to arrange my pages on the stand to see the rest of the page. Stopping in the middle of a long, unreleased solo passage would be bad enough if I had just done it quickly and kept going, but I heard myself begin to mumble. Uh... I need to set up the page and forgot to before so sorry don't hate me heh snort heh. Yeah, so, the mood- it broke. And then I began to sweat. Nothing like the scent of nervous sweat in a degree recital performed in a small hall. My poor poor teacher.

I saw Ben Harper play in Tokyo once and really liked the show. No, I mean I really liked it. And the beer I'd had. A lot. I liked it all a lot. So when he said, Thanks for coming out tonight! like the rock star he is, I shouted, No, Thank YOOOU! I thought I was being cool. After all, I had been here! I thought I was hip. Judging by the scowling faces and the admonition to "have some respect" I was just being drunk. Big shock, then, that the bouncers at the end of the show picked ALL the other groups of foreign chicks to the afterparty. Too bad- that may have yielded some interesting blog fodder content.

Just one more.
It's not really me, but it makes me chuckle because my heart is a shriveled little charred thing. Sometimes the string players will decide to set our bows in our laps during a long passage played pizzicato. It just looks prettier than all those random sticks flailing about, and we can play faster and cleaner. So in the middle of one of those sections, my poor stand partner was really having a time of it. He was a short, squat thing perched on a too-tall chair. So he would set the stick across his ample thighs, raise his hand to pluck the string, then snatch the bow just as it was about to roll off onto the floor. This happened at least ten times. It would have just been a quiet embarrassment for the dude, except that I accidentally caught the eye of my friend Tom. We were wheezing, gasping, tears streaming from there on out. I am not a mean person. Am NOT! Lucky for me, the bow roller was genuinely laughing backstage afterward.

Let's face it, if he had cried the rest of the violas would have just beaten him with our g-strings until he saw it our way.