Serenade No. 13 in G Major

Half an hour ago, I bought an album called "250 Minutes of Mozart" off iTunes. Four hours and ten minutes of music seemed like quite a bargain for ten bucks. The Theme from Figaro went very well, but now Serenade No. 13 in G Major is reminding me how much I hated Mozart when I was twelve, because he wrote such monotonous viola parts. The second violins didn't get it much easier, either. The first violin section gets all the fun, while we're stuck playing "D" in eighth notes for, like, five minutes. Sometimes I'd get bored and stop looking at the music and then I'd realize I should've switched to playing, say, "F" for the next five minutes.


Violas are slightly larger and deeper than violins.
I have one in my house that I never play.
In 2004 I was broke and considered playing Christmas songs
in the subway, possibly while jingling bells on some part
of my person, but I didn't really have the nerve.

Mozart is very boring when you are a twelve-year-old violist who works very hard and just wants to play something that does not make her cerebral cortex melt from sheer monotony, because if she wanted that, she'd have taken up child factory labor, not playing orchestral music partly in order to hang out with the cool upper-middle class kids whose parents sent them to summer orchestra camps, which I'm sure weren't quite as exciting as American Pie would have us believe band camp might be*, but which nevertheless were a high and mighty aspiration that led her to Serenade No. 13 in G Major, and then, in the tenth grade, after seven years involving up to thirty hours a week of practice, suddenly realizing that it really wasn't worth it, and that she preferred listening to classical music while doing something else, such as watching a movie with a well-matched soundtrack, or, as now, drinking inexpensive Pinot Grigio from an East Harlem liquor store while wearing the new polka-dot dress** she bought and was trying on before getting distracted by a familiar stretch of violas playing "D" and blogging about the whole mess before she got caught up in the Pinot Grigio and forgot.

* Violas are not only bigger than violins, but also substantially larger than flutes.

** Total number of polka dot dresses owned: now five.

This is a photo of me on the first day of tenth grade. If you think I look cool here, imagine how awesome I looked carrying a hard-shell viola case. I do mean that self-deprecatingly, although, if I were a middle-aged man, I'd do her. I mean, certainly there would be hotter girls in the school, but if you're a middle-aged man screwing high school girls, you might want the added wholesomeness-meets-perviness of screwing the girl who carries a hardshell viola case on the bus. But from the perspective of my current self looking back at my former self, maybe I could've skipped the viola, gotten some better glasses, and declined to pose for first-day-of-school photos in front of the family bookcase. Also, no one looks good carrying a backpack.