Goings On About Town

I had not meant to see the new middle school--had refused, with defiance typical of persons in more dramatic situations, to see it of my own violition until the need to visit my teachers was too pressing to be ignored. And somehow, I managed, my fate with its typical perversity, to see it on the very day it opened: yesterday. It was not until I was actually on my bus, not til it was veering down the road, ignoring the ordinary fork to our usual transfer station, the fire station, going to the middle school that I realized. I felt a thrill of panic at my helplessness for a moment, but it passed into passiveness even before we reached the Welcome banners, stuck in the monumental snowbank by the front drive, decorated with cheerful flowerpots. The drive is long and winding, much longer, I thought in my spitefullness, than it has to be. After a few curves the trees opened to reveal our new middle school, square, boxed-in and tall, and I thought all at once of what a hatred I have for new places, places with no history, and the way they dare to exalt themselves against the years of tradition, the many lives, the many people who have passed between the walls of older buildings. I felt no emotion at all except for a strange sort of annoyance, a fear, and a hatred all combined. Strange; I had expected a sort of new-school feel; but the new school left me emotionless...
~
It is cruel of me perhaps to expect activity on a Tuesday morning from anyone at all, and yet the morning left me so bitterly disappointed I cannot help but think perhaps I am only being cruel to myself in my expectations. Nonetheless, the fact that half the choir can arrive at rehearsal--eighty percent late--and half of them spend more time talking or staring in sleepy oblivion into the carpet at the center of the room than singing--why, it is preposterous, it is a scandal--or ought to be--it is an affront to the few of us who sang, who expended any effort, to the auditions required to get into the group. The phenomenon continued in Chorus, which is more reasonably not auditioned; fortunately, an exit for my frustration was forthcoming: spirituals are predominate in the program we are rehearsing for the spring concert, and though their passion was notable today only in its prevalent absence among the lumps calling themselves my classmates, it was an outlet. Although--I am being unreasonable again. The fiery heat of anger has, once again, taken hold of my better sensibilities. Still; I am one of the quietest people, one of the quietest singers, anywhere, and I could hear only myself and Linea next to me. I'm not supposed to be able to hear myself, not as the course normally runs itself...the whole situation calls to mind a quote I've recently read by Virginia Woolf from The Evening Party, a short story in a collection of such I borrowed from the library:

"Ah, we're an ungrateful race! When I look at my hand upon the window sill and think of what pleasure I've had in it, how it's touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the Atlantic spurt through its fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums, never for a second since I was born ceased to tell me of hot and cold, damp or dryness, I'm amazed that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerve to write the abuse of life. Yet that's what we do. Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent." -