The Triumph of Tito the Tourist Begins

This is the longest Man Himself so far. Read it and weep.


After a long drive home with the B Friday night, I awoke early Saturday morning and drove to school to help read questions at the local high school scholars' bowl tournament. After driving around the school looking for doors that were open, I finally found one that gave. Then a girl named Sarah showed up, and we spent about five minutes trying to navigate the labyrinth that are the doors of my high school when school is not in session. The main objective is to reach the part of the building that you think your event is being held in without getting trapped between sets of locked doors.

Well, eventually we found Mr. White, who let us in. He didn't even know I was coming, but I got to read anyway. So I read questions to people from various high schools. Most of the teams were rather pitiful, but all of them were good at catching me when I tried to cover up my mistakes. I had quite a few moderator errors, though not as many as two years ago when Cameron and I ran what was quite possibly the most mistake-ridden room in scholars' bowl tournament history.

After waiting around for quite some time, Cameron, James, Lindeman, and I all went to Captain D's for lunch. The service and food were great, good times were had, and stories of the glorious feats of yesteryear were passed around the table at Will. He, needless to say, took it all in good humor. Unfortunately, this socializing caused us to be late returning for the second half of the tournament. Instead of helping out in any way, we ended up looking at funny pictures on the Internet at somethingawful.com. A jolly good ol' time, indeed.

After the tournament, Cameron and I headed to the house of George, who was sitting in his brother's room in his underwear playing this crazy samarai game on his PlayStation 2. It was seriously the most ridiculous game I've ever seen and we were all amazed at how great it was. Half the time I didn't know what was going on, but the other half I was blown away by the nonstop hacking of footsoldiers that was taking place. Beautiful.

To end the night, I headed off to hear the Symphony play one of my favorite pieces, Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. First I had to get some T-Bell, which was delicious. I felt a little silly eating burritos in my suit and tie, though. But no matter. Off to the Symphony downtown! I arrived about thirty minutes before the concert started. At ten 'till they started selling the $5 student tickets - the main reason I was there. I would've paid the $24 for the back balcony seats, but this made the whole thing even more wonderful. I got a seat in the fourth row! Pretty good for $5.

The concert was incredible. The first piece was some crazy percussion thing by some Mexican composer named Chavez. He wrote it in homage to John Cage, which I found interesting. It was written so well that the nontuned percussion instruments blended to sound like some sort of drummer's string quartet. Plus, it had a glockenspiel. A glockenspiel! What more do you want? I was hoping for cannons, too, but let's not be greedy.

The second piece was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concert No. 3, and the soloist was intense. He was a short man who reminds me of Billy Crystal (the actor). Man, he had hands like those of a Wild West outlaw shooterman. They were as fast as 0.24c, where c equals the velocity of light in pure vacuum. The combination of the pianist's awesome and the orchestra's force created an experience which almost rivalled Beethoven's Fifth in its sheer coolness. I was relaxed to the utter core of myself and couldn't have been happier at that moment.

My elation at that time made the antics of two seperate concertgoers seem absurd. They weren't sitting together, but they both stuck out like a penguin in a crowd of grizzly bears. The man, who might have been 55 years of age, had a permascowl on his face. It takes some serious guts to sit through a concert that awesome with a serious frown like that on your face the whole time. The woman, who might have been 45 years of age, continually leaned over to what appeared to be her husband (different guy than Permascowl Man) and gave him a look that is difficult to describe. To me, this look seemed to convey the message, "Can we go home yet? I'm tired and bored. Let's go home, OK?" I was equally confused by the woman's expression, and I hope some day she learns to appreciate the rock that is classical music.

After the concerto, the crowd was so moved that we all clapped for who knows, maybe a whole three minutes. The guy came back out and rocked hard on the piano version of the last movement of the Mussorgsky piece that the orchestra was about to play for us. Woah, that was a long sentence. His encore performance was equally mesmerizing and pretty much made me want to learn to play hardcore piano like he could. During the break, I went to the restroom and ran into Mr. Sayer, a cool guy from my church.

The Mussorgsky piece was great. It was almost identical to the CD recording I bought a few days earlier, except for a few differences in tempo and formatas. Oh yeah, and one of the low brass instruments cracked a note on one of the middle movements. The trumpet guy played a high staccato rythm more syncapated than I had previously heard it, too. Pretty awesome, though. All in all, I'd say the concert was worth way more than the $5 I paid to go see it.

Sunday, I went back to College, where I went to band practice Monday afternoon. My College marching band got invited to play in President Bush's inaugural parade, so we had to work on all that parade stuff we never practice. After a near thirty-minute speech on what to expect and how great of an opportunity the trip was, we finally got down to business and practiced the music for about an hour, followed by a miserable two hours of marching around the parking lots near the football stadium frantically trying to learn to do good parade turns. Some improvement was made, but mostly we just wanted practice to finish. And so it did, much to my happiness, as I had foolishly worn shorts to the freezing practice to avoid getting hot. I'm stupid.

That night at 9 PM, the band loaded onto six tour buses for a long, long drive to the nation's capital. I spent a great deal of the ride watching Full Metal Jacket and Napoleon Dynamite and listening to the exquisite caprices for violin by Niccolo Paganini. The other parts were spent sleeping. At one gas station stop I got a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, a size which I had surprisingly never seen before. My friend BH almost got left at that gas station, and got on the bus just as it was pulling out back onto the road. 'Twas a close one.

Eventually, we arrived at our Vienna, Virginia hotel Tuesday afternoon and threw everything on the floor of our room. I considered trying to see some stuff, but we only had around two hours until time for a music practice outside. Daunted by the task of figuring out the bus and Metro system, I opted to stay in our hotel room and watch a movie instead. The film shown on my laptop that afternoon was School of Rock starring Jack Black, and it was truly as entertaining as my friends had made it out to be.

A few minutes after the movie ended, we had to go to practice, which was terrible. It was probably the coldest band practice I've ever endured. It was so cold outside that my valves froze up mid-musical phrase. All I could do was blow warm air through them and push them until they finally gave way again and I could play once more. Plus, my fingers and my toes started to hurt the way that digits hurt when they've been out in really cold weather for longer than they'd like to. Thankfully, practice was short, lasting only around thirty minutes. Then it was back inside to the warmth.

After a short meeting with the entire band, I followed the director to his room to see if I could go to the inaugural ceremony in addition to the parade. You see, my dad was working in D.C. for a short time on a company project, and managed to get tickets for him, my mom, and me to the ceremony from one of our congressmen. So I was pumped about getting to see the whole swearing-in thing live. My dreams came crashing down when my director came out of his room and saw me. "Hey, aren't you the guy with the tickets?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "Well, I talked to the guy in charge of security and he said you wouldn't be able to get through security without being with the group. Sorry." I was devastated.

To ease the pain a bit, I walked down to the nearby mall and walked around aimlessly. I found two really good CDs at FYE, which helped alleviate my spirits a little. One was a recording of Rhapsody in Blue, American in Paris, and a kicking piano concerto, all composed by the wonderful Gershwin. The other was a CD of two symphonies (the "Italian" and "Reformation") by Mendelssohn, which from what I've heard so far is excellent. I managed to get them both for the incredible price of only $8.23 or so. After this, I found the mall's Taco Bell, which cost 150% more than what I was used to. No matter, though. Those Beef Combo burritos are worth the money in return for the happiness they bring. Post-dinner, I went back to the hotel and, after once again backing away from the challenge of public transportation, to sleep.

AND NOW A BREAK FOR LUNCH...

Hey, what happens next? Maybe I'll go forward and read the second part. Maybe.

Well, who cares what else happens. This was pretty bad so far. The majik word to read more Tito adventures is: "Capyberra!"