The Trip and Other News (Es Muss Sein)

Ah, what a fine day today is. . .
First, I think that I'll start with a quote of the day: "Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!" translated to mean "Must it be? It must be! It must be!" (from a Beethoven Quartet).

Anyways, the trip was super-fantabulous; there are way too many things that happened on it for me to write about. We left on Tuesday, came back on Friday, and saw, among other things:
The Gettysburg, Antietam, and Manassas battlefields,
the Newseum,
Historic Philadelphia,
a super-pretty guy who looked a lot like Peter Parker in Historic Philadelphia,
DC and various monuments including the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Iwo Jima Memorial,
an amazing theatrical production of The Beauty and the Beast (Gaston was our waiter!),
and Harper's Ferry (possibly the most beautiful place we visited).

I had a great time, as did most everyone else. The only negative parts of the trip were the journal (100 pages long) and the schedule; we would be up at 5:45 and back to the hotel (still needing to shower and change into pajamas) at 11:00 at night. But other than that, it might be my favorite field trip of all time, even rivaling the Florida Keys trip, simply because this trip didn't make me terrified of anything as the Florida Keys made me afraid of the ocean; also, I didn't resemble a lobster by the end of this past trip.

Now, more unrelated news: the EOC's and EOG's are coming up, and though I'm nervous, I feel generally prepared. The one that I'm particularly worried about is the French EOC, considering I've been in a Continuing class this year, when I should be in an Advanced class. Also, another thing that has caused me to stress is the upcoming band concert, which will be sometime either this week or next week; most of the pieces are relatively easy, but there's this one piece where I'm on the snare, and whenever we've practiced it in class, it's been a sort of hit-or-miss thing for me; I either play it really well the first time, or I kill it. I can't afford to have my last concert of my eighth grade career be a miss.

Now, I had a weird dream last night (surprise, surprise). I dreamt that there was this small town, sort of Gettysburg-ish, except even smaller, near this huge, open meadow that bordered a forest. Near the border of the forest was a picnic area, with one of those little shelters and picnic tables and everything. In the dream, my mom and dad had houses in the little town, and my mom informed me that my birthday party was going to take place in the little picnic shelter area. So, on the day of the party, we drove over there with the cake around noon, in order to wait for the rest of the people to show up. After about half an hour of setting up, tons of people started flooding in. From the approaching cars emerged basically everyone I've ever met and known. The sun had almost set completely by this point, and so we all gathered around the cake, my family members closest to me, and they serenaded me before I blew out the candles; there was this peaceful moment, the soft murmur of people talking, the general mumblings of crickets, people passing around slices of the cake (which was white with reddish icing). Then, suddenly, stepping away from the crowd, my mother raised a paint ball gun and shouted, "Time for paint ball!"
Chaos. People took a few steps back from the table, pulling paint ball guns from nowhere, and fired at each other; of course, I, being the birthday girl, was a primary target. After sustaining a wound in the left calf, I dodged behind the birthday cake, which had grown to a tree's height and a car's width. People were running around in the darkness, some unable to see because of face wounds, dripping in various colors of paint. A lot of them ran for cover into the woods after a few minutes of severe fire. Then, arriving on the scene in what looked like a hearse, was the pretty guy from Historic Philadelphia; he drew a massive paint ball gun from a trench coat that he was wearing, and let loose a massive firing of paintballs into the crowd at an incredible speed; it was obvious that he had the most dangerous weapon on the field, the closest thing to a machine gun in paint ball form. People began to run away with more urgency, and this man continued to circle the picnic shelter, cackling madly, firing some in the direction of the birthday cake, globs of which fell into my hair and into my eyes, blinding me (and this was the weirdest part: as the cake fell into my eyes, I could see it and taste it at the same time. I can now say with a straight face that cake tastes sweeter when it is consumed by the eyeballs). Then, just as it looked as though he would discover my hiding place, as he had almost reached the rear of the picnic shelter, someone just as unexpected came to save the day: the young man who had played the violin so beautifully at the church service a few Sundays back. He came striding out of the forest, in concert dress, wielding his violin case in his left hand, a sword in his right, swiftly approaching the cackling Peter Parker man. He blocked the paint ball bullets with swings of his sword, and they richocetted off in random directions, one exloding on his hilt and dying it a deep purple. Once the violinist had gotten within a few feet of the man, he stopped walking, and miraculously, the man stopped firing; the violinist set his sword down, withdrew his violin, and started to play the most beautiful violin song I had ever heard, slow, varying in pitch, sad and joyful at the same time. The Peter Parker man stood listening for a long moment, motionless, with his head cocked to the side, before setting down his machine gun and sitting cross-legged on the ground with his eyes closed, apparently in a peaceful state. Slowly, the wounded and people who had fled from his attack began to emerge from the forest, multi-colored and in some cases, bloody, gathering around the violinist and, like the Peter Parker man, sitting down Indian-style. I came out from behind the birthday cake and joined the throng of spattered people still encircling the violinist. Then, after a few moments of profound peace, the violinist suddenly stopped playing, gripped his violin by the neck, and whacked the Peter Parker man over the head with it, knocking him to the ground and causing him to become unconscious. As the crowd collectively cheered and clapped, he twirled his instrument back into position as one would with a pistol after firing, and began to play again. Then I woke up.

Last news: I made an important phone call today, and things have been decided. This week will be a trial, and if it doesn't work out, it will be mutual. Muss es sein? Es muss sein!