So one of the things that have been stressing me out recently is my school club. Because the girls can't stay cooperative with each other for very long without the pressure of an upcoming gig, I told them after our last show during the summer cultural festival that we would be playing another show around Christmas. So because of this, I have had the pressure of trying to negotiate with all the teachers and put together a concert.

Of course, this is a total pain in the ass, because all the teachers have their own little turf and don't really like cooperating with others about stuff outside of their domains. The second grade teachers are especially uncooperative, although their kids are particularly problematic so I kinda understand. However, until 3 or 4 days before, I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to pull it off and get a show on at all. As it is, they wouldn't cancel an afternoon of classes, even the week before Christmas, so I could have a concert with all the students like I had wanted. But since the last few days were half days anyway, they let me have it after school and made attendance voluntary. I figured that only a few students would come, but actually 50 or 60 students showed up. A lot more wanted to come, but their teachers wouldn't let them miss their clubs or extra math classes or whatever.

And it's a good thing that they didn't, actually, because we kinda sucked. Actually, everyone who listened had a good time and said that it was good. But there were a lot of mistakes. There was a lot of bickering and so forth, so they didn't really get serious about practicing until less than a week before the show. Even the very morning of the show, they were still deciding how to play some bits of the new songs, and trying to remember how to play the old ones. But I think that we pretty much pulled it off. The Brass Band club also played a few songs at the beginning, and they were even worse than us so we looked good by comparison. And I set up a bingo game with a bunch of prizes and gave everybody snacks, which goes a long way towards earning the goodwill of an audience.

So the show was successful, if not great. And I really enjoyed my part playing bass. I'd really like to be in a real band, but I'm actually not good enough to be a band made up of anything other than junior high schoolers.