30 Day Song Challenge: Day 6: A song that reminds you of somewhere

At my high school, the music groups go on trips every year.  Every other year, they’ll go to somewhere closer like Victoria or Edmonton, and the other years, they go out of the country.  When I was in Grade 10, the music trip that year was to Britain for 10 days.  We had to prepare to play a selection of songs with a bunch of other ensembles from other parts of the world including a band from Armenia, which everyone thought was really awesome.  We practiced Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which was one of the most fun pieces I had ever learned to play on the clarinet, and this one: Abba’s “Thank You for the Music”, in memory of a local conductor who would be retiring that season.  I might be wrong about this but I think we only saw him on the last day of the music festival when he actually conducted us.

So imagine this song being played by an orchestra over of over 100 students.  Pretty damn awesome, and I’m not even an ABBA fan.

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #4: Coming Out

4.  August 23, 2003.  During the summer of Grade 9 year at high school, I was hanging out with two of my best friends.  I had pre-planned to finally come out to them.  After lots of dodging the subject, we finally settled beneath the shade of a great, maple tree.  I was incredibly nervous and scared that I made my friends guess it.  I told them I wanted to tell them something, that I liked someone in our grade.  The two of them were running through the list of girls in our grade, but I kept saying that they were guessing the wrong type of people, to which they asked, “So what?  You want us to list ugly people?!”  One of them must’ve caught on because she asked jokingly, “Do you like men?” and with my red cap covering my face because I was so completely embarrassed and afraid, I said, “Yes.”  (A brief amount of silence followed, which I learned two years later that during this time, one of my friends was apparently stuffing her mouth with bread to keep from laughing.)