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.

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Okay, so maybe I missed a couple more days there. Whatever. I was busy (1) recovering from Memo Time and (2) playing taiko at the Brazos Valley Worldfest in Bryan. For the non-Texans, Bryan and College Station are smushed right up against each other, so I’m visiting John and playing a road gig in one easy trip.

The “WorldFest” was . . . comprised mostly of Texas A&M student groups, but hey, A&M is effing huge, so they can put on a smallish international festival all by themselves.

The stage was tiny, and I was right on the front corner next to the stairs. I tried not to jump around too much.

Thanksgiving this week! Nom nom nom.

Today was a sleepy day. It’s 9:40, I’ve just woken up from an evening nap, and I’m about to go to bed. Sam had a poop emergency at 5:00 this morning; John was the first to wake up and was wonderful enough to take him out, but I think I still lost some deep sleep on that one.

This morning I had a conference with my Writing professor about my memo. I thought signing myself up for one of the earlier conferences would motivate me to have a draft done by now, but I’m still going through the research. I had plenty of questions, but I feel like I kind of wasted a good opportunity.

We had another taiko performance yesterday afternoon, this time at the new Discovery Green park downtown. Real quick, just twenty minutes . . . part of some arts showcase, I think.

Yup, that’s the news from today. I didn’t promise quality, remember.

The trip? The trip was fabulous. We met with a few misadventures on the way to Tupelo. You can watch the story unfold in hastily-edited-on-the-bus detail here. The good news: we made it to the venue before showtime with all of our members and most of the bus intact.

Depending on how you count them, we played either three or six shows, most of them with different set lists. It was a good deal less organized and polished than TaikoFest, but I got to play a bunch more, so I’m not complaining. I messed up twice in ways that were totally obvious to the audience and at least a dozen times in less obvious ways. My crowning achievement, I think, was when I miscounted one section of a song, transitioned four measures too early, and brought two other people down with me. Believe it or not, I think we looked good enough doing it that almost no one noticed.

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The Taiko Festival was every bit as awesome as I’d hoped. The performance went well, the crowd was great, and I had a blast. I love performing, but I don’t have many performable talents (I imagine I could command an audience no larger than a dozen from the entire city of Houston to watch me proofread), so this was a rare opportunity for me. Definitely the highlight of my whole year so far.

After the show on Friday, three or four little girls came up to me separately and asked me to sign their programs*. Seriously? Since when does anyone want *my* autograph? I totally didn’t see that coming. They came up to me, I’m sure, not because they liked me in particular, but because I was halfway out into the audience talking to my parents and friends after the show, and I was wearing the same costume as all the people who are actually *good* at this taiko stuff. At any rate, I still felt like a very, very small-time rock star, so that was fun.

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Okay, so I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before*, but I’ve been playing with a (the) local taiko group since April-ish. What is taiko, you ask? Taiko is a Japanese flavor of awesomeness revolving around big loud drums. You get a lot of people, you give them all drums, and you blow audiences away.

I was a total taiko fangirl for a couple years before I actually started taking lessons with Kaminari. Why? Because taiko is super-awesome, y’all. It’s harder to explain why than to just show you this video.

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