Fuck other people's lives.

Okay, so as some of you know, I'm in marching band, and this year they've started a new tradition of holding a competetion where all the different sections of the band get to design and perform a little show of their own. We're a pretty small band, so some sections had to combine with others. There are five people in my section, the low brass, and by adding the trumpets and saxophones, we managed to get the number up to twelve.

My friend and I made the decision to do Tetris for our show. I had been stringing together the Russian folk tune used it in, and we thought it would be a pretty cool idea. We agreed that he would arrange the music and I would write the drill (the pictures and formations the band makes). I was really glad we ended up having twelve people, that way, we could have three tetrominoes. So I put the four saxophones into one shape, four trumpets in the other, and then the low brass with one remaining trumpet into the last shape. I let everyone choose what shapes they wanted to be or I chose for them if they didn't care. I wanted it to kind of look like a game of Tetris, so I had the three shapes march down the field one after another, do a rotation or two, flank (change direciton at a 90 degree angle) a couple of times, and land on the bottom of the "screen." Once the three shapes were congruent to eachother, they would form into a line and do a press (boldy march towards the audience in a unified formation), then half of them would get in front of the person next to them and form a block, and then finally rotate one last time.

So, I guess you could say there's some pretty "creative" kids in the band too. One of the saxophone players and best friend of the person I was collaborating with is a pretty creative kid. He's started various projects over time, though none have ever reached completetion as far as I know. He called my idea the dumbest shit he had ever seen and thought that we should be using a drill program to write it and not simply tell the people what to do. He went on to say that he had seen human Tetris before (who hasn't?) and said that we would need many more people to pull it off. Well of course we need more fucking people, but we're lucky enough to get twelve. No one is going to do anything spectacular with twelve or less people. The sheer idea of us being able to pull off what I had in mind would be more than enough awesomeness for this competetion. Even so, by the competetion's standards, it's not supposed to be a long show (48 counts is required but if the show needs more time, a little more will be granted). However, he managed to convince a few others that a drill program is absolutely necessary.

What really pisses me off is that he decided to stage his little coup d’état after we had started production. I could tell not everyone in the group was pleased at my idea at first, but they swallowed thier pride and accepted that it was my decision to make and that for the sake of the greater good that people be cooperative. Hell, they even left it up to me to decide what the theme should be, ultimately. I know this is easier for me to say since I'm the one pulling the levers, but I have shoved aside my personal opinions in situations like this in the past when I was not in charge and I would gladly do it again here.

We decided to change the drill into something more conventional so everyone would be cooperative.

I know I'm probably getting too upset for something as insignificant as this competetion, but it always pisses me off when someone shoots down another's idea without taking it into perspective. I don't mean in the sense that everything has its own "beauty," but in the sense of what is appropriate to the conext of what is going on. We don't have much time to work on this, so a decision had to be made quickly. We were even ahead of the other groups. I guess there's two kinds of evil in things like this: the apathetic who laugh at those who see things as opportunities rather than trivial pursuits, and then the opportunists who are too caught up in their own opinions to cooperate with others.