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Monday, May 10, 2004

this is why I should never volunteer for anything

I just made a flyer for our community chorus's concert coming up next week. (you all are invited. It will be awesome, of course. Plus then you get to smell my very favorite smell: high-school auditorium. YUM. Wish I could bottle it and wear it.*) ANyway. I am, let's just say, less than great at making flyers and stuff like that, which is exactly why I'm the PR person for the chorus, right? Or maybe it's because I showed up at the committee-forming meeting last summer, and EVERYONE who showed up got a job, and it was that or secretary and I genuinely, utterly SUCK at taking minutes. SUCK. So. I am the PR person, and as such my job was to make this flyer to stick in windows around town to beg people to come pay $4 for a rather amateur concert. And this was the hardest job I have done in ages. Potty-train? easy. Teach multiplication tables? A total cinch. Put together my awesome and wonderful porch swing? really a lot of fun. But it took me a mouth-breathing two hours to finally produce a flyer that didn't make me want to throw myself off a cliff so as to never have to see anyone in the chorus again. And even as it is I may have to wear a disguise next time I see them all.

First the flyer was just this plain vanilla boring THING, so I was furiously searching the Internet for clip art that a) was free b) did not depict cartoonishly-stupid people singing with their uvulas showing and c) had something faintly to do with music (this is harder than you may think). I got the brilliant idea to use a staff of musical notes at the top and the bottom, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, because of this: I discovered just tonight that I have a major pet peeve, and that is staffs of music used for decoration that are absolute rubbish and aren't real music. I always knew that I liked to take my Peanuts comic books and play the music above Schroeder's head on the piano (it was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor once, which is, I have to say, the only piece of music ever composed for the organ that I actually like), but I never realized the depth of my obsession with this until I couldn't bring myself to use the usual mumbo-jumbo meaningless tripe for a stinking BORDER, which nine-tenths of the people who view it will simply absorb as background without fully seeing it. All was happy, however, when I found an online source for sheet music and was able to use a staff from an actual song which we are actually singing. And now I can go to bed, musical integrity intact, although I'm not going to be applying for a job as a graphic designer anytime soon.

*you know how everyone always says this about fragrances they like? I was in a perfume outlet store in Florida and saw that someone has actually TRIED. They had a little display of bottles of perfume scented like dirt, grass, rain, and an assortment of even more bizarre things which I can't remember offhand. I thought, huh, what a neat idea, and sprayed one, and you know what? The whole idea of wearing the scent of grass is really scary when it comes right down to it. That stuff STANK.

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