Brutal & Fantastic

I’m not popular and I’m not disliked. I’ve never been anything but the “middle-guy”, the person who gets along with nearly everyone. I often stick up for people who don’t defend themselves and I’m usually the last person you’ll find to be breaking a rule. At school I’m the president of student council, the voice people here all day over the announcements and the Emcee to most school assemblies. My life is pretty water tight, but there’s one thing that I’ve never been able to do … I’ve never been able to control my own anger. When an individual (or group of) upsets me, I have an incredibly difficult time placing my feelings of rage aside and letting things go. Instead I often have moments where I quickly need to pull things into control, a situation that I have power over. Last week I did something that I’m quite disappointed in.

I live in the country and I don’t drive a car, which means the bus is my main transportation between school and home. I sit in the middle of the school bus because the back is usually full of the “I’m bad ass and you know it” type students. This doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t think it matters where I sit for my 15 minute ride and avoiding trouble is probably best anyway. The other day however, something happened that probably changed me as a person. Before I write another introductory paragraph, let me jump right into what happened.

It started out as an ordinary day. Nothing special or exciting was happening. The only thing that I really remember from this day is how tired I was. I was really looking forward to going home and catching a few hours of rest. The day at school ended fairly quickly and I was ready to get on the bus for the short journey home. I climbed aboard and flopped down into my seat. I think I put my head against the window and closed my eyes. A few moments later a group of 5 guys loudly clambered on the bus too. Already they were being obnoxious and rude. They were pushing each other, swearing like pirates and breaking probably every rule a bus has. The whole ride home they would shout incredibly dirty words to random pedestrians on the street. I was fuming inside, but I didn’t quite know how to tell 5 guys (who were much larger, although younger than me) to stop.

What should have been a 15 minute ride felt like weeks. My heart was racing from the rage and I was pretty sure I was thinking of the best way to seek my revenge on them the whole way home. Luckily I’m the first stop on the route, because what I decided to do was to address all of them on their horrible misdeeds.

Concerts galore!

As some of you frequent readers may already know, I work at a theatre in my city that hosts a lot of live concerts (among other things). Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week marked the Empire Theatre’s 5th anniversary and Empire Square Live’s 2nd anniversary … which means we were busy putting on a show for 3600 every single night! It’s quite an amazing job, but it’s also very tiring as well. The Empire Theatre can seat 700 patrons indoors, but these past three nights have been outside in our special venue. This allows us to pack the place with many more party-type customers and guests.

Thursday night Peter Frampton played and the crowd absolutely loved him! It was a wild time, I tell you. Hands up in the air and beer sales going through the roof of course. I’ve never seen a more rowdy crowd these past two years at the Empire. Rock and roll music always draws in big crowds, but it was nothing compared to what we saw the night after…

Friday night we had one of the country music’s most beloved superstars – Randy Travis. The whole venue was PACKED even before the show started. Country music folk are always really kind hearted and considerate for the most part, so we didn’t have a huge mess to clean up after the show was over (big enough, but not insane). Compared to Frampton the crowed almost seemed docile, but I could tell that they too were having a lot of fun. I liked the kind of music that Randy Travis played the other night. For some reason the entire night seemed to drag on a bit though. I kept thinking it was much later than it actually was. Country music can be kind of slow I suppose. Travis seems like a great person though, he signed autographs for about 10 minutes after the site shut down, which is pretty uncommon for someone to do in a crowd as big as the one we had.

Saturday night we had some local bands playing, one of which was Photograph. This is the band that my boss plays in and it always gives me a strange feeling to think that he’s so awesome. I mean, come on – how many bosses in the world run huge businesses during the day and play guitar on stage at night in front of a thousand or so people? That’s pretty awesome in my mind. He must be living a great life! Saturday night was my absolute favourite because it was all general admission standing tickets being sold. What this means is that we didn’t have to take down chairs tonight in order to clean up all of the garbage left behind…it was sort of just done for us. The chair company that we rent from offered to clean them up for us, and I definitely couldn’t have been happier with that decision of theirs.

All in all I think it was a great anniversary celebration. I worked a lot of hours, but I also made quite a bit of money too. I’m definitely looking forward to going back to work inside the theatre though. As great as our outdoor venues are, it’s just much easier to manage 700 people than it is 3600.

I’m no incubator!

I’m pretty sure I’m getting the flu or something. I woke up this morning and my throat was pretty sore. I’m sure you recognize the feeling when you think you’re getting sick but you’re not quite there yet. I’m right at that stage and it’s getting on my nerves. Hopefully it will just pass and I won’t have to give it another thought. I feel like I’m just a big incubator, keeping all of these germs safe from the cruel cold world. Well, pack up and get the heck outta my system please and thanks! ;_; I simply can’t afford to get sick these next two weeks.

We had two school assemblies today and I was required to speak at both of them. The student council president usually gets to give a bit of a speech at the start of the year, but I sensed a problem when I was asked to do it this time around: I’m not the student council president. At least, I thought I wasn’t. Apparently I’ve been thrown into the position this year again even though it was something I wasn’t particularly interested in doing. I mean…I was planning on helping out here and there, but somehow now I’m the leader of this organization? My word, there’s something definitely wrong with that I think. I wasn’t a very good president in previous years and, well…frankly I found it boring anyway. This is my last year as a highschool student though so I might as well lend my new found strengths to the student body as much as I can. For some reason this year I’m having an amazing time talking to large groups, performing and just being a generally well liked guy. I’ve been pretty lucky with that I suppose…I’ve always sat right in the middle of groups. Never quite the most popular, never disliked…just right in the middle.

Oh, I ramble.