Things
Okay, it’s time to do this. I need to get a few things out of my head and into this little box. Not important things, mind you, just day to day stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about. This might be a long one.
Thing One: A couple weeks ago my taiko group played at a local community college’s Japan Festival. It was a teeny tiny thing, probably just the school’s Japanese Club and a few community groups they had connections with. The college didn’t advertise it at all—I couldn’t find it mentioned on the internet anywhere, and even the school’s event calendar listed nothing for that day—so our entire audience was pretty much made up of other festival participants, maybe 50 or 60 people.
We were in the “Commons,” a cafeteria-type room with a twenty-foot ceiling. The audience sat on the floor ten feet in front of us. Halfway through the first song, the audience all seemed to react to something at once. A second later, I heard a crash behind me and felt bits of something spray up against the backs of my legs. What? Did someone throw something at us? There wasn’t anything behind us except some chairs and a bunch of our equipment. I looked down and saw broken glass all around my feet.
I cast my eyes sideways to see if we were going to stop playing and check it out, but no one else stopped so what the hell, I guess we won’t let a little bit of flying glass keep us from rocking out. HARDCORE.
Turns out part of a light fixture had shaken loose from the ceiling (twenty feet high, remember?) and landed about five feet behind me. Did I mention that our drums are loud? Oh yes.
No one was hurt, luckily, (though I did manage to cut my finger later while holding a piece of the glass and marveling at this lack of injury). We kicked some of the glass aside and finished the set; our only concession to the mess was that we didn’t start our next song from its usual kneeling position.
So that was close. I imagine that hunk of glass (or was it plexiglass?) and its metal frame could have put a nasty dent in someone’s head. I think a girl in the front row might even have gotten it on video—she was taking video on her camera for most of the song, and she was sitting right in front of me. I couldn’t find her after the show, but it would make my whole Christmas if she would put it on YouTube and tag it with our name.
Thing Two: My Contracts exam was last Thursday. This was my favorite class this semester; I never brought my laptop and didn’t take many notes so I could stay engaged in the discussion. But I didn’t feel good coming out of that exam. I knew the material about as well as I could have, but even though I churned out sixteen pages in answer to the single essay question, I felt that I still didn’t address all the issues and bring up all the topics that I could have. I spent the last fifteen minutes haphazardly trying to jam in things that I couldn’t discuss in the detail they deserved. Argh.
But then again, people say that the way you feel coming out of an exam has no correlation whatsoever to your score, so we’ll see.
Thing Three: I put pictures of my Ren Fest skirt on Facebook, so if you know my real name, you can find them there. If you don’t . . . I might post them on Flickr sometime, if I get around to it. Sorry.
Thing Four: It snowed! In Houston! It was crazy. Last week, the day after a 75-degree day, a cold front blew in and it snowed for three or four hours. Big, fluffy flakes. They didn’t stick at all, of course, because the ground was still warm and I don’t think the air temperature even dropped below freezing, but still. Snow! This is only the fourth time in twenty years that I remember it snowing here, and it’s apparently tied for the earliest snowfall ever in Houston.
Sam absolutely hated it. You’d have thought it was raining hot lava from the way he strained homeward on his leash. He looked handsome all flecked with snow, though. Handsome and utterly pathetic.
Thing Five: Torts, yesterday. I misread the exam schedule and showed up half an hour after the exam ended. I talked to the dean, and instead of failing me out of law school for being a moron, she let me take the exam by myself in a conference room. Phew! So that one worked out pretty well after all. I felt better about the exam than I thought I would, since I spent half the class reading blogs and playing Word Challenge on Facebook. I pretty much finished the essay, which means either I nailed it or I missed a whole bunch of stuff. Who knows?
Thing Six: This happened before some of the other Things, but cut and paste is just too much effort right now. I’ve had to write this post in two shifts, and at this point it’s all I can do to keep myself typing. It’s like walking across the Antarctic alone; you can’t stop or you’ll freeze to death.
Point is, we (Kaminari Taiko) are going to be in a music video. What kind of music video? Erm. It’s a rock/heavy metal/world music/singing children/taiko video based on a comic book about cyborg-werewolves chasing a girl into a rock concert. I think. I’m not totally clear on the concept, but the guy whose idea it is seems to know what he’s doing.
The weekend before last they brought in a whole camera crew and a bunch of equipment to film part of a “making of” documentary-thing for the music video. We all thought they were just going to film us doing our normal practice and maybe talk to us a little on camera, but no. When I got there the dojo was all decked out with lights and backdrops and candles and video equipment. Apparently we were actually filming the creative process wherein the taiko group and the guy who wrote the song get together and figure out how to add a taiko part to it.
So they crammed like fifteen drums into a tiny space; this part took probably forty-five minutes, arranging and rearranging, trying to fit everyone and every kind of drum into the shot simultaneously. I wasn’t originally going to be in the video because I’m still a newbie, but one of the regulars had to leave halfway through, and I got to take his spot! Squeeee!
It was a blast, but very very hot under the lights, with no fans on. I wonder how impressive our sweat will look on camera.
I don’t know when the actual recording or filming will take place, but I’ll keep you posted. Once the video’s made, we can use it however we want, so I’ll probably be able to link to it somewhere. Neat!
Okay, that’s enough Things for now. I think I’m sufficiently caught up on my bloggy responsibilities. Back to reading the CivPro book.
Tags: exams, law school, taiko, weather
