Senior Pics, Upsets, Free Agents, and Other Forms of March Madness

   It's March, cue the Madness.

    Two No. 2 seeds lost to No. 15 seeds? Thank you for busting nearly everyone in the USA's brackets, Missouri and Duke....Seriously, even the people like my aunt who knows nothing about sports, the kind who always end up with good brackets, they're toast. Not to mention everybody else.

    An American Idol contestant was kicked out for having FOUR outstanding warrants?? True, Jermaine was extremely irritating, and he needed to go home, and it's a flagrant violation of the show's rules, but it was still an unexpected way to leave.

    We saw Peyton Manning, of all quarterbacks, become a free agent??? HOW we we adjust to him in a non-Colts jersey?

   High school basketball finished up their playoffs, with all the crazy, intense pride and emotions they bring.

   And, of course, there's the inevitable spring break countdown, and the graduation countdown, and (I suppose) the prom countdown(Do people really care about proms, or is that just a movie thing?). And there's graduation parties, and senior pictures, and planning for graduations, and applications, and forms, and various other things that need filling out in order to attend an institute of higher learning in a few months. Plus, of course, there's those last pesky seven or eight weeks of high school....

   Anyway, when you add in the fact that the tornadoes are biding their time, waiting for the precisely right moment(whatever that is, I don't understand tornado logic), and that there's cute little baby goats and kittens and other animals, and memories of loved pets gone past, you get about one conclusion: It's springtime. More specifically, it's March.

   So, as part of the Madness, my small contribution(besides watching, only watching) quite a bit of college basketball, was having my senior pictures done. It's a weird experience, so....school-like and ordinary. (Laugh, it's a homeschooler thing.) We grabbed a notebook, couple cameras, an old press pass and my guitars and headed down to the football stadium, one of the few places a photo shoot would feel normal in. (Okay, I'm a guy. Girls...I don't know, seems like they'd feel comfortable shooting pictures anywhere.) So, we snapped about six hundred eighty-four pictures or so, at various places in the stands, on the sidelines, by the old football field, on the (stereotypical) railroad tracks, around the neighbor's farm, by a few buildings in our very small downtown area, and in the middle of the road. (Literally, on the center line. Right in front of a curve. Dangerous? Yep! Frightening? A little. Will it make good pics? Hopefully, we'll see how they turn out.)

   It was really weird....getting all my stuff together, heading to the field, just like it's a fall Friday night....knowing it's actually a spring Saturday evening, and we're just trying to fake the experience of reporting well. Actually, the whole thing felt like acting, really; a very peculiar type of acting, with all the action in still format.

   Fun, but a strange.experience, knowing that this means it's almost over, that it's time to actually leap out there into college, and from there, life as an adult. Just brings the whole thing of being a senior really home, you know, says "This is real. This is happening." Like being on a plane bound for Baltimore and realizing you belong to a select group of the best writers in the state. "I am? I mean, sure, here I sit, and there was that dinner last night at the hotel, but really, I'm one of the state's best writers?"

   There were a few downsides, though, it was cloudy, spitting rain occasionally(and so no Golden Hour of light as the sun drops off past the horizion), a screw from one guitar dropped loose and had to be re-tightened(it was found and put back on just fine), and I missed a good friend's graduation party.

   But overall it was a good, though strange, experience, and it was a fun time. Now to fling together tomorrow's church clothes, take a shower, cram in some extra practice of the morning's worship songs, and finish off a mocha Rockstar while rereading this blog post for errant typos.