(diaryland) November 12, 2008 - 9:27 a.m.

Some say, particularly people named Murphy, who makes laws, that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I had a day like that yesterday.

If you think about it, if everything that could go wrong did go wrong yesterday, we'd all be dead and the universe would have been involved in some kind of vacuum metastability event (wikipedia says that's bad).

Anyway, my day was nearly that bad. I can't even describe all of its intricate details.

It began being very nearly late to a friend's honours piano recital. I suddenly got hayfever without owning any tissues. You are meant to be really quiet in these recitals, and there I was, losing brain cells at a rate of knots, sneezing inside my head in the front row and slathering snot all over my left hand (I washed it straight after).

Then I got in my car and it had a parking infringement notice on it. The whole zoning of the parking lot must have reconfigured itself in the year that I haven't been to uni, and I just assumed it was going to be the same and ran off without noticing because I was almost late.

I was so mad that I drove around with the infringement notice on my car. Then I had my piano lesson, but I spent half of it trying to figure out where I had to be next. It was some church thing somewhere. The school concert was going to be on that night.

After playing some shit that I hadn't practiced in my lesson, I got to the venue just in time, only to discover that one of my violin students' D string was busted and she didn't bring her violin. GAH.

So she had to just sit around while we all did your little performance, which incidentally went quite well (we played two swing tunes, and the children looked appropriately tiny and cute). But this is the REHEARSAL we're talking about right now.

After running around Melbourne teaching other irritable children how to play things, I headed back to the church, very hungry and worse for wear. At least I found the student whose D string had busted, and she came complete with brand new D string to put on the violin, but of course, because it was new, it kept going all floppy because they have to spend a few weeks stretching out before they stay in tune for two consecutive seconds. I knew it would go out of tune when she was playing.

After listening to many sets of children yell words to a karaoke machine, it was our turn. As soon as we started playing, another student's D string decided to self destruct. What the fuck? I had especially written these two tunes to have most of the notes on the D string so they didn't have to stress about changing strings and shit - that's kind of hard when you're just starting out. So, basically, we were fucked. That guy mimed playing through the whole thing, and everything sounded all weird.

At the end of the second tune, my students had to jump over their violins and do jazz hands (their idea). THAT bit was the only bit that went without a hitch. Their violins were so fucked by that point that if they had accidentally tripped and gotten their violins lodged in their heads, it wouldn't have made their violins any worse. We got a roaring applause.

Some guy who was filming all up in their face like a paparazzo captured our performance during the rehearsal, so that's a good thing. A lady with a huge flash took a photo of me when my eyes were shut. I was too lazy to go up at the end of the whole night and get a rose for my efforts, so I just sat there while all the other teachers basked in the glory.

I sat in my seat for a bit longer while everyone trickled out of the theatre. Then I went home, wrote some of my november novel, and went unconscious.