2009 in retrospect

I feel like such a tool right now about posting this.  Remember the time before the advent of the digital camera where you couldn't reminisce over a moment immediately after the moment had passed?  Well, I'm reminiscing before the camera is even into "review" mode right now.  I feel like a tool because I hate people who do that, for the record.

Most of my judgment of how fantastic a year was is determined by the greatness of any previous years.  The problem with this, however, is that typically my "years" end up slicing themselves into "good" and "bad" halves, with the bad half typically starting in the right-now region of the calendar and the good half beginning around may and lasting until November or December.  Keep this in mind.

2009 was by far the most demanding year of my life.  January through May was spent almost completely away from social interaction, because I was juggling immense loads of schoolwork and music.  I've already told the story about my frustration with school that year, so I'll elaborate on the music aspect of these months.  I had to balance both Legends ensembles that I was in, and since both required me to practice a shit-ton, I spent a great deal of time after school doing so.  Winter Legends usually doesn't require that much practice, but for some reason that year we got music extremely late in the year that was quite difficult to play, so I became extremely frustrated with the whole scenario.  Somehow I ended up getting duped into another partial season of KJSO, which ended up being a huge time-sucker as well.  Summer Legends left me barely able stay afloat, so I had to practice a ton for that as well.

June through mid-August, of course, was spent entirely with Legends.  I still don't know whether or not my experience was what it was supposed to be.  I was told probably about 10,000 times over the course of the summer that it was the absolute best thing to do with your life, but I don't feel that that was true for me.  While I really like playing music (obviously), there were very few moments that could actually be described as "fun", and most of the people involved didn't have personalities anything like my own.  Don't get me wrong, I really like everyone involved - it's just that most people thought of themselves as total badasses for doing what they do while I didn't give half a shit about how cool we were, since... well, since I have never given half a shit about how cool I was.  When by the end of the summer I still didn't really "gel" with everybody else by being self-righteous, I felt like self-improvement had failed.  One example would be way back in March/February when I was on the verge of not doing drum corps.  The amount of work I was putting into the activity made it feel like becoming a stronger player was not enough reason to stay involved.  Then, one of my friends suggested other reasons to stay involved, including making new friends and maturing.  Cockiness, frankly, is not and never has  been my idea of maturity - this made it a bit hard to recognize any traces of self-improvement as I am still quite critical of myself. (Read the rest of this blog, for god's sake!)

By the way, don't misinterpret my complaints about this summer - it was chock-full of memorable moments and allowed me to improve quite a bit as a musician.  It was far from regrettable, but it's just that I still feel like I'm missing some crucial aspect of the drum corps experience that makes people fall in love with it as much as they do.  Since I am strongly considering another summer in Legends, I'll just stick with hoping that these doubts arise from me being a bitch and that next time will be way better. 

When I got back home until about four weeks later was possibly the happiest time of my entire life.  Seriously, I hung out with incredible people almost every day and never had a worry on my mind for more than three seconds (aside from some frustration with marching band, which is inevitable).  But since I have no complaints from this period of time, I can't really elaborate on this.  I just strive for my life to be like these few weeks - no stress, good company, enjoyable activities (these weeks included band camp, which is always a blast.)

After band camp though, I started getting sick of the section leader job... a lot.  Despite my instructors' reassurance that I was doing quite well in my position, by the end of the season I just wanted to shoot myself - just as we had settled into a groove, everything started changing haphazardly in the show and didn't even stop in the very last rehearsal for that season.  It doesn't really help that I am one of the most temperamental people on this earth, either - I left almost every rehearsal prepared to strangle something.  So despite our last few moments together as an ensemble being quite fun and relaxed, I left the season with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.  When Winter Legends came around again, I frankly just didn't want to play anymore.  The horrendous previous season and my tragically unfortunate hatred of leadership gave me a huge mental block of sorts, and I spent the past few auditions/rehearsals essentially sucking ass, because I was so afraid of being obligated to step in as section leader.  Luckily for me, there is a girl involved who plays just as well as me if not better, so my guess is they just shooed her in once I somewhat reluctantly admitted that I'd rather suck donkey balls than be section leader again (although my confession was more along the lines of, "No, I'd rather not be section leader.")

In summary, I suppose this year was a bit disappointing musically despite the fact that the sheer amount of time I spent playing enabled me to play much better, which may or may not be more important than my gripes about the ensembles I was in.  I'm not going to decide right now. 

On the plus side, this year is much easier than last year academically.  However, some of the events of last year left my social life a bit crippled - my life is like Gossip Girl sometimes, except nobody ever really gets mad at me because I, unlike seemingly everybody else in the world, don't try to piss anybody off.  The main problem is that people get stupid and seek drama despite the fact that they claim to hate drama.  It all affects me because I am almost incapable of having a centralized group of friends with the shitstorm between the friends I already have.

Another sorta-plus is that my love life is no longer stagnant.  To an extent.  I'm trying to set myself up for epic success in the 2010.

So relative to other years, this year was definitely better than 2008 (except for the summer - sorry, but drum corps ain't got nothin' on Philmont), in which spring was dominated by the worst period of depression I've ever suffered through, and the fall featured a lackluster marching band season and fears/regrets about my course selections for my junior year of high school that ended up being justified.  It was only slightly worse than 2007, where my spring was both stressed and depressed, but not nearly to the extent that the latest springs were, where my summer was quite laid back, and where I got my first taste of the life-changing marching band experience in the fall.  I'm most excited about the fact that this is the first year since I was probably 10 years old where things haven't been progressively worse than the previous years - which leaves me optimistic about 2010.

I am generally a huge pessimist, but for whatever reason, I think 2010 will be my year.  I'm a senior in high school, and I'm definitely going to college... somewhere.  Any college experience will be a miraculous improvement over high school for me, so I will probably spend the entirety of my fall elated.  This spring will allow me to slack off some in high school - I've already been accepted to many colleges, so I'm not worried about my current classwork so much anymore.  Right now, I've got no plans for the summer (I do have a full-time job potentially lined up that pays insanely well for someone my age), and I think it'll otherwise be quite stress-free.  As I mentioned before, I think I might find some success with romance this year too.  Although I'm not getting my hopes up. That's just foolish.