The Clouds on a Sunny Day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2h0KOQLsW4 (Watch this! it's the song I talk about in the beginning, or don't watch it just, listen! I couldn't figure out how to get the video link thing to work on the blog, sorry!)

So I’m currently listening to the acoustic version of the song The Ocean by Sunny Day Real Estate, a band I had never heard of, nor have I yet to find anyone else who’s heard of it, since my friend told me he was going to their concert. Now this is particularly relevant, or should be, because I ‘m about to go meet him at this concert on Wednesday night, all the way in DC. This is really fascinating to me, because I have no idea why I’m going. Basically right now it’s because I want to do something that really makes absolutely no sense. These are the reasons that I should not go to this concert (and the very few reasons why I should go):

Con #1: Map quest says the journey will take four hours and forty-five minutes. My chemistry professor just went to some big science conference this weekend in Washington and she said it took her eight hours to get there because of all the traffic. I’m hoping she was deeper into the city than I am going and that was her main problem. I’m going to the 9:30 Club, a venue that holds a maximum capacity of 1200 people, just in case you were wondering. And this venue is supposed to be on the western side of the city, which hopefully means I won’t have to go through the city. In any case the concert starts at 7:00PM or at least that’s when the doors open, and if it takes five hours to get there, then I would have to leave at 2:00PM on Wednesday.

Con #2: I want to see my friends. And if I’m driving all the way out here for one concert of a band that I just started listening to yesterday, I should probably give myself sometime to see them. But I have yet to know when they are supposed to arrive in the city. It’s supposed to take them seven hours to get there from Columbus, Ohio. If they say they’re going to get there at five, then I will want to be there at five, which is, I know, dumb of me. This would consequently mean that I would be skipping both my English (this class) and my Biology class for that day.

Sub-con, 2a: I will miss an English in class writing assignment, thus losing points, and I would be ditching a class, well for this now known reason, which I kind of think is rude, especially since our class is so small.

Sub-con, 2b: I will miss biology, now nothing that I heard in seminar helped me on the test that I just took, but because of that it’s currently the class that I’m struggling most in. Especially since I naively believed that if I did the homework, read the chapter, and looked through lecture notes, I’d be set for the test, WRONG, by the way. Also in this class our professor, Professor Bikimeh (this is not the correct spelling), issues random attendance quizzes (because our class has around three hundred kids in it, so daily attendance would be a disaster), which can count up to ten percent of my grade, and I need that ten percent to be as high as it freakn’ can.

Con #3: The last time I talked to them they wanted to turn around and drive home immediately after the concert was over, because Ian, one of my friends, has classes on Thursday morning at 9:00AM. Now it’s one thing for them to turn around and drive back, because they have each other, there’s two of them, but I other hand will be driving solo. Which is completely starting to scare me, and might scare me out of doing it. I’m completely used to driving long distances, last month I drove the seven hours home from our Canadian family reunion, but I had my parents in the car the entire time, and it was all during the day. Wednesday night the concert will probably be over at 12:00AM or 1:00AM, and so I would be driving home until 5:30AMish or probably later.

Sub con, 3a: THIS IS PROBABLY REALLY DANGEROUS.

Pro #1: I don’t have class until 6:00PM on Thursday, and it’s my chemistry recitation.

Con #4: Wednesday night is the time of my chemistry class homework help session, which I have religiously gone to since the beginning of time, i.e. five weeks ago.

Pro #2: There is tutoring/homework help in the CLC (Chemistry Learning Center) from 12:00PM to 4:00PM everyday. So if and when I don’t understand a homework problem I can go to someone there.

Con #5: They go over every homework problem, practically step by step, in homework help session.

Pro #3: Maybe for the first time I will actually have to try and learn how to do the homework by myself, instead of just waiting for the help session and using my notes to walk myself through it.

Con #6: I will not my parents of my excursion. For obvious reasons they would do anything but approve of this plan. If it was the weekend and I was going to stay the night somewhere and come back, they wouldn’t care, but the whole driving home on the same night, on a school night, would totally not go over well. If for some reason something happens to me, I don’t want to look like an idiot, because this is clearly an idiot trip. And my parents would be incredibly angry and disappointed that I decided this was an okay idea.

Pro (more like advantage) #4: My car is my best friend and the best car in the entire world. It’s a manual, diesel, Volkswagen, Jetta, in cherry red. It’s my baby fire engine of a car, the engine sounds like a man (or a semi), because of its diesel engine, but it looks like a little bubble of big red. His name is Jerry, yep, Jerry the Jetta, and I love to drive him. He also just got 41 miles to the gallon on this past tank of gas; I just filled up this afternoon and calculated it. Which is out of this world. And also incredibly efficient for the 273 mile trip (each way) I have ahead of me, which is about six gallons of gas/diesel, which is currently priced at $2.50, an entire tank costing $28.00-the fourteen gallons would be able to get me there and back. So moral of this story, I wouldn’t be burning a ton of cash/gas.

Con #6: As previously mentioned, I don’t know the band! Except the more I’ve listened to them, I’m on about song four right now on a playlist I found on YouTube, the more I’m starting to really like them. My two friends on the other hand are obsessed! Hence them driving seven hours for one night to go see them. And everyone else ho goes this concert is probably equally as in love with them. This is the reunion tour, the bands been broken up for about four years,and they’re finally back together, so anyone who instantly got tickets has been stalking their existence. So I could feel a little, or a lot, out of place when I know maybe two songs, which I had to shove into my brain.

Pro #5 (the conclusion): I really like music and I love my two friends. They were my two favorite people back home. And I think once I’ve done it, it will be a cool, funny thing to look back on and say I did. Once my Dad drove from Nevada to North Carolina in like some crazy short amount of time (I completely don’t remember) and got three speeding tickets on the way. I want to be able to tell my family or just be able to remember crazy little things like this that no one in their right mind, or I in my right mind, would do. I want to do something spontaneous, just for the heck of it. Who knows I might have some life epiphany sometime during the ten or more hours I’ll be in the car alone. Plus I love music, and I’m seriously considering changing my major, so I can do some kind of something with music, whether it’s journalism or management, I haven’t quite thought it through yet. And this experience might open me up to whether I think this is a good career option, and something I’m completely passionate about.

So if I’m not in class on Wednesday, I completely and sincerely apologize, because I have no valid excuse, but I really want to go, against my better judgment. If someone seriously thinks I shouldn’t go, haha, please try to persuade me not to! You can be my “neo-parents”! <3