Snarky Rant O' The Week Number 2- Perfection

Ugh, regionals is coming up. The time of the year for high school musicians everywhere to cease everything but practicing their instrument of choice. And when I mean everything, that excludes stopping at the nearest convenient store for the biggest fountain drink of Mountain Dew because that's the only way you'll be able to keep your eyes open. Regionals, All-Region, Regionals Honor Orchestra/Band/Choir, whatever you want to call it, of course has more purposes than to see how many teenagers we can turn into zombies for a month.

Some people audition for the challenge, some because they want to be regarded as an "honorable musician". Me, I audition because I get to blow off a day of school to do something I love: blowing off school. No matter the incentive to participate, however, we're all striving for one goal by mastering these three excerpts, scales, and hoping to Cthulhu that the sight reading isn't in a foreign clef: perfection. Though really, perfection is like the red-headed step child getting a date to prom: IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

Take this picture I drew, drenched in symbolism in all its' symbolic glory, as an example. http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c229/Swiftgirl/IMG-12.jpg . Besides it clearly representing the boredom I faced after my ecology test today, this can be viewed as what they expect of us. They, the judges, drew the left side of the picture- beautiful, unique, not in the least bit retarded looking. They expect you to duplicate it. You try, but it will never look as good as the first side. I mean sure it has some symmetrical attributes; you at least attempted to get the shading right although it looks like somewhere along the lines you had an aneurism. It's like trying to draw a pair of eyes. You draw the first eye so beautifully, you'd give Da Vinci a run for his money. And then you try to draw the other one just as good, though you really only succeed in making the person you're trying to draw look like they have downs syndrome.

We practice and practice, we get blisters tearing through the lovely callouses on our fingers (if you're a string player, at least), and yet we still manage to fuck up our audition somehow. It's amazing how you go in feeling like you're on top of the world, and a five minute audition can bring you out feeling like a fifth grader again. Though the good thing is, is that the judges know this. They expect your little wounded gazelle on the African savannah self to choke horrible, like a prostitute working around her latest gonorrhea outbreak. This is why they select the "honorable" musicians to play in the festival not by how much perfection you can muster, but by how much you suck less than the person before you.

So I believe it's safe to say that perfection=not actually being perfect, just being better than everyone else. Perfection=America?...