Time-lapsed Blogography Day

Eighteen years ago today, on April 23, 1996, I was a senior in high school. My first stop after driving to school was the homeroom of one of my crushes, to thoughtfully drop off some physics notes for bonus nice points. I don't know how kids today stalk their crushes (probably a GPS app), but back then, knowledge of a girl's homeroom was painstakingly gained through hall wandering and triangulation. Probably fifty percent of a teenager's brainwaves were dedicated to learning locker locations, travel paths between classes, and phone numbers.

I didn't go too any of my morning classes, because the jazz band took a field trip to Hammond Middle School for a double-feature assembly. I played a few good improvised solos for the youngsters, who were also impressed by the original composition, Bubba's Fried Chicken Stand.

We got back to school during fourth period, but naturally we had to take fifth period off to catch up on lunch. Since we also had seventh period concert band off because of our super strenuous assemblies, I breezed through a boring class of Calculus with Mr. Kokonis and then headed down to the boathouse early for crew, spending about an hour sitting in my car listening to a tape of Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band.

The Potomac River was the roughest it had ever been in my crew career that day, with whitecaps and the wind blowing from the southeast at 29 knots. I knew the exact speed, because there used to be a weather/boating phone number you could call from your rotary phone to get Potomac weather conditions. It was always voiced by a meteorologist who seemed pissed off to get stuck with forecast recording duty yet incapable of reading more than two words at a time, not unlike a drill sergeant with a brain tumor. "WIND SOUTH. TEN KNOTS. USE CARE. ON THE WAT. ER."

Because the water was so bad, my rowers just worked on the ergs while I surreptitiously observed the girls doing their workouts on the other side of the exercise room.

I got home around 4 PM that day to learn that I had won the $1000 Band Booster scholarship (not a big surprise since my name was on all of the plaques in all of the hallways everywhere), which bookended nicely with the $1000 Computer Science scholarship I had won the day before from Tech. Today, those amounts would probably buy a meal at the high-end athletes-only dining hall.

Later on, there was almost drama when I learned that I had to attend the scholarship awards ceremony in order to get it, in spite of the fact that it conflicted with the world premiere of The Admiral's Overture. The powers that be did not see any irony in denying me for a music scholarship because I was busy doing music, and I had to flurry between events like politician to get all of the moneys.