Opera in the Library

I enjoy playing music on the computers in the library.  First of all, I love getting funny looks from people when they realize what I'm listening to.  Secondly, I enjoy listening to music while I surf the rather limited spectrum of unblocked sites that I can reach with the school's computers.  

I especially enjoy playing opera.

I actually like listening to opera.  I love the vocals, the orchestras...  And I really like watching the freshmen craning necks to find out who's playing "that noise."  

I'll turn up the speakers as loudly as I dare without aggravating the librarians, with whom I've found some amount of favoritism.  And then I sit back to peruse the interweb.  

When the sopranos hit their blaring high notes, which are acoustically louder, the "studying" kids at the tables adjacent to the computers look up from their cell phones to glare.  Not that the dozens of other conversations aren't more disruptive than a relaxing C two octaves above middle (which can be devilishly hard to hit, let me tell ya). 

Kids these days just don't appreciate classical music for all it's beauty.  They don't realize that the rock and hip hop that they love all came from essentially the same origin.  Chant, madrigals...  

Makes me feel hard core.  When kids talk about how they loved that band when they were underground, but then they "sold out."  Well I'm so hard-core I listen to original underground music!

Mozart created the "rock and roll" lifestyle!

In any case... I feel like playing opera in the library will eventually be the bright spot in the days of all those within earshot.  And if not... then too bad, because I'm going to play it anyway!

The Random Turn Pro...

Ah, high school!  The pungent and emotionally effusive hot-house filled with the various saplings of budding youth.  The disturbingly over-crowded hallways, the cacophony of overzealous cursing and gossip, the various unnameable liquids puddled on the tiled floor of the cafeteria , PMS, sexually frustrated barely-pubescent boys, frustrated and under-paid faculty... Torture.  Pathetic torture, but torture nonetheless.

I am J. Pabst, high school student, and unpublished but hopeful writer.  I'm nothing special.  Average grades, average friends, average ability, average cynicism.  The difference?  I'm going to share the experiences I have during my last semester of public school with the world at large.

I know, you're probably sick of all those "teen fiction" books.  I can assure you, this blog will not be like those stories.  For one thing, I am not a middle aged woman, writing the observations I have of my own teen children mixed with my vague and out-of-date memories of my high school years and popular teen soap operas like The Secret Life of the American Teenager.  For another thing, these experiences are not fictional.  Names will be changed to protect the identities of my friends, who could be potentially humiliated by things I share here (a tempting thought... but my conscience would never allow it), and every story I share, I will have permission to share.

So... sit back, enjoy it or not, I don't care.  Tell your friends!