...marching band

...yes, i am a member of the marching band here. it's not exactly something that i announce to people when i first meet them, but it's not something that i try to hide. it's very much a love hate relationship, with a lot of hate and a lot of love.

the beginning of the season is just painful. 'band camp' is not an enjoyable experience. for five days of our summer we are forced to spend 8 hours at the high school, usually four morning hours spent outside and four afternoon hours spent inside. outside we learn how to march. the the underclassmen are always pitiful, but so are some of the upperclassmen which is even more pitiful. it is always unbearably hot during these five days but we're outside anyway. spending four hours outside under the beating sun sure makes me love life. we rarely learn any of our actual marching show during band camp, it's just the basics. so you think that after roughly 20 hours of learning the basics we could march forward, backward, left, and right pretty well right? nope. some of us just can't. it's not that hard.

then we move into the school year and there is band from 7am-9am daily with a great three hour rehearsal every thursday night. some kids get out of an hour of band by taking an extra class therefore filling their schedule. i highly suggest it. from my experience 90% of the time nothing extremely productive gets accomplished in that first hour so why not just sit inside and take a class? and anything that we do learn we'll go over it again so you have plenty of time to learn it. then it rains. and rains some more. and we're stuck inside. well the directors start to get antsy so out we go, as long as there's no lightning. we also get threatened with push ups, often. and have done many. it's a time consumer this marching band is.

the last two saturdays of september and the first three saturdays are competitions. those aren't too bad. the first one not judged, it was just a simply show us what you've got and we'll give you helpful suggestions. but the second one was my favorite, sarcasm-please pick up on it, we went to marshalltown. and marched in a parade all morning and then marched on the field during the afternoon. let's see we won 4A parade competition, 4A marching competition, best winds, best colorgaurd, best percussion, and overall grand champions. what's wrong with that you may ask? we were the ONLY 4A school there. everyone else was a little 1 and 2 A with maybe two or three 3A schools. we did not belong there. not at all.

after all the competitions are done, overall i'm happy with our show and what we accomplished. it was my favorite show of the three i've participated in. we played stars wars music, ya know, the new stuff. so it was kinda recognizable. the crowd kinda knew what we were playing which made it a little easier for them to get into it.

sure i may want to make a few people disappear so they don't come back to marching band because they obviously suck and need to be removed but there's nothing i can do about them. these people generally tend to be the ones who aren't really on the better end of the spectrum playing wise so after marching band i'm never forced to see them daily and i do not mind at all. ...i do prefer marching band to concert band though...concert band gets old fast. even though i'm usually fed up with marching band half way through the season i know that i'll be back next year.