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What am I doing here?

As I was reading the latest school yearbook I noticed how many various clubs and sports there are. Endless after-school activities, and some people are in more than one. They range from tiny groups like International Affairs (4 members) to Drama Club (so many people that the names of the members aren’t listed). And don’t forget the various sports: football (varsity and junior varsity), volleyball (varsity and junior varsity), cross country (boys and girls), swimming (boys and girls), golf (boys and girls), basketball (varsity and junior varsity boys and girls), soccer (boys and girls), tennis (boys and girls), cheerleading, baseball (varsity and junior varsity), softball (varsity and junior varsity), track (boys and girls), and flag football. Well, that was last year. They might add one or two.

But me… am I in any clubs? No. Sports? No. National Honor Society? No. Marching band? No. Do I drive? No. Do I date? No. I don’t really have anything like that at all. So how is it that I always feel so busy?

(Rimshot goes here. The following is intended as a separate item, the former a thought in itself.)

Well, I do have one thing that sort of counts as an extracurricular activity: my band. Yes, believe it or not, we’re still around. We started the band (which has a name, but since no one ever likes any name we choose, we usually just call ourselves “the band”) back in 2001 and played our first gig in January 2002. Just for posterity, here’s the complete (?) list of our gigs (dates marked with an asterisk are guesses by me):

January 31, 2002: St. Elizabeth of Hungary school talent show (3 performances)
March 9-10, 2002*: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Spring Festival (2 performances)
May 11, 2002*: St. Malachy fair
November 17, 2002: St. Elizabeth of Hungary parish picnic
January 30, 2003: St. Elizabeth of Hungary school talent show (3 performances)
March 1-2, 2003: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Spring Festival (2 performances)
February 7, 2004: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Spring Festival
August 29, 2004: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Youth Group kick-off barbecue
August 14, 2005: St. Elizabeth of Hungary Youth Group kick-off barbecue

But things have changed between us. When we started the band, we all liked the same music. But now we realize that it’s time to play music that people will actually like. The problem is that it’s hard for everyone to get together (the five of us have only met twice, as far as I can recall), and therefore it’s hard for us to pick up new songs, especially ones that everyone will want to play. When some of us do play together, I feel that the magic isn’t there anymore. Maybe it’s just that we’re not as young and crazy. I’d rather listen to tapes we recorded three or four years ago than what we recorded last Sunday. There’s more energy and vitality in those old tapes.

When the members of a band rarely all get together, there are bound to be misunderstandings. I’m not sure, but maybe the others resent my de facto leadership of the band — after all, I’m the one who calls the practices, so if there aren’t any practices, it’s due to my own forgetting. But I applaud Sean for keeping my head from getting too big; he works to keep my “leadership” in check, and we’re all the better for it. But I also think Alex resents Mark, who almost replaced him without his knowledge. If Alex leaves the band (by force or otherwise), Sean will go too. This isn’t really relevant to what I’m saying.

Whenever we do play, we play old people music. Sean always expresses his dissatisfaction concerning this. He thinks that, owing to the fact that we’re all so different, we’ll never turn ourselves around and play real music. I’ve tried to be more optimistic, but he’s right. It’s too difficult. After four years, we can only play about four songs.

So anyway, I think we’ve mutually agreed that it’s time to put the band to rest, at least as a group that performs live. Although it pains me to see us go, I know we’ll still be friends, and it would be more painful to anguish over our state of affairs as a band headed nowhere. We’re not much more than a bunch of friends who get together to jam, so that we should remain. There’s no reason, after all, that we should cease playing together entirely, especially because we are friends.

So I think our next gig (which is Sunday if you didn’t read the list) will be our last. But to use my heroes, the Beatles, as an analogy (and that’s why my music and I are stuck in the past), they produced their finest works (including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, and Abbey Road) after they quit playing live. Of course, they’re not us, and so we probably cannot be compared. But that’s what I happen to think of.

But even after quitting touring, they did make another impromptu performance (on a London rooftop) before breaking up. So you never know about the future. In short, this is not the end of the band as we know it. We will certainly keep getting together (although without the goal of learning a song by a certain date). And who knows? We may come out of semi-retirement to dazzle… someone… once more. We’ll have to see.

Read about the J-Walk Blog Link Experiment. It should be a good experiment and a cheap method of cross-promotion. And it should be the second time I’ve been linked to by J-Walk.

Logan Whitehurst tells us How to Be Cool… just in case you ever wondered. It’s worth a read.