Conan Knows

Conan knows all about socially awkward trombone players.

The Socially Awkward Trombone Poem

Just to be clear, I have never been a big poetry fan, and I do realize that I'm probably missing out on something. So many people find poetry beautiful and inspiring, but I have to admit that Shel Silverstein has been the only poet that I took great pleasure in reading. I don't hate poetry or anything, I just don't really get it. Maybe i'm not "deep" or something...

Having said this, I will now present an original trombone poem by yours truly. It is still a work in progress, but it is the first poem I have written that was not for a school assignment, and I can promise you that when I started the blog I never thought I would put a poem here. I just had the dumb thing pop into my head while I was playing late in a practice room. Weird things happen during 2am practice sessions.



The Socially Awkward Trombone Poem
by Rebecca Clemens

Band directors call it condensation,

But trombonists know that it’s spit.

Some say trombone’s our vocation,

But rarely do we commit.

We sit in the back and tell jokes,

Pretending our horns are light sabers,

Laughing when a soloist chokes,

And harassing our trumpeter neighbors.

Our horns are used for experiments,

Growing mold that’s black, blue, and green,

You look upon mold with resentment?

We see it as pretty darn clean.

The noises we make are improper,

So cover your child’s ears.

We could use mutes as a sound stopper,

But you’d have to hand over some beers.

And have you looked down at our feet?

We can’t tie our shoes.

We’re a little off-beat

Prob’ly from all the booze.

(Have you noticed this poem changes meter?

Just like trombonists often do.

We can’t read key signatures either,

Which makes us all sound like poo)

We love yelling loudly and playing with fire,

Hooray! For a huge conflagration!

If you ask us, we’re always for hire,

If you can risk your reputation.

We’ll even play events free,

If you’ll give us some food.

We’re desperate, you see?

It doesn’t have to taste good.

We don’t want real jobs,

Trombone works just fine,

We aren’t music snobs,

We just want a good time.

Mom and Dad are still wondering

What they did wrong

To end up with a blundering

Trombonist that plays for too long.

They wonder if they will ever be rid of its sound.

If their kid will move out before fifty.

They look for trombonist jobs and ask around.

What they find looks downright shifty.

We’re very easily side-tracked

And we like staring at shiny things,

We’re louder if we’ve snacked,

Watch out or we’ll make your ears ring.

But one thing’s for sure,

We’re all proud to play.

It’s our key to a cure

For long crummy day.

-The Socially Awkward Trombone

A Socially Awkward Childhood

It's been way too long since my last post, and I apologize for my tardiness. I spent four awesome weeks traveling with the men and womens basketball teams (If you don't already know, I'm in the UNC band). My travels included going to Albuquerque, NM and Spokane, WA and I was having waaaaaay too much fun to even think about writing a blog post. But I'm back.

Since I have only been covering socially awkward situations that happen to everyone, I have decided it is time to share a personal story about my awkward childhood antics. There were many.

I know what you're thinking,

"Becca, how could you possibly have had an awkward childhood? You're so normal."


OK...maybe you aren't thinking that. I'll pretend. Here goes.

Before I even knew North Carolina existed, and before the thought of playing trombone had ever crossed my mind, I lived in California and attended kindergarten at a school called St. Phillips. At St. Phillips we were taught to read and write pretty early and were periodically asked to write stories that would later be read in class. My class would be led to the computer lab about once a week, and we would write our stories.

Because I have always lacked an imagination, I would briefly search through clip art before writing my story. Finding a picture to write about helped me come up with a few ideas (after a while, I only searched through clip art to kill time, knowing full well that I would use the same picture as before).  At the time, I was aspiring to be an astronomer just like daddy (I have since realized that I can't do math or physics). So naturally, the first thing that I would type in to clip art was "space".

This was always my favorite out of the pictures that came up.

After choosing my inspirational picture, I would then begin to write my story. There was only one problem...

No one ever taught me to use the space bar.

onceuponatimtherwasanaleinnamedbob.bobluvedtocokhotdogswithhisastronatfreindjoe.onedaytheywercokinghotdogsandbobexploded.theend.

Roughly translated to:
Once upon a tim ther was an alein named Bob. Bob luved to cok hot dogs with his astronat freind Joe. One day they wer coking hot dogs and Bob exploded. The end.

My stories always happened to be way too eloquent for my teachers. So eloquent in fact, that one day, after a few attempts at starting to read my awesome stories, my teacher called upon the author to translate. It was then that I realized the awesomely constructed story, one that rivaled Ralphy Parker's "What I Want for Christmas" theme, was illegible.

I stood paralyzed at the front of the class trying to make out the words of my story, unable to figure out what went wrong. This was about as traumatizing as it gets for a four year old. Not to mention EXTREMELY awkward. I couldn't read it. No matter how hard I tried. Eventually I gave up and hung my head as a walked back to my little piece of carpet where I would listen to the rest of my classmates' stories.

The next few trips to the computer lab I continued with my same story writing techniques and was called up to read my story at least one more time. I was so embarrassed that I resolved to figure out what was wrong with my stories the next time I went to the computer lab.

I picked out my alien picture and then took an awkward peek at my neighbors keyboard (I'm pretty sure she noticed. Awkward). She was hitting this big button at the bottom of the key board an awful lot. I decided to press it too. The cursor moved forward, but there were no words. "SPACES!" I thought. That was what my story was missing. I needed to put space between the words. From that point on, my stories were legible. My teachers read them and I beamed with pride when the class laughed at my story endings that were usually "he exploded". Thank goodness for kindergarten humor.

To this day, I don't know why I had to figure out the space bar myself. Most teachers would probably have corrected me after my first illegible story, but no one did. In the long run though, all of this turned out to be beneficial. Since then, I have had no trouble talking to groups of people because now everything I talk about is prepared. I have not yet encountered anything worse than getting up in front of people with a story that can't possibly be read.

And that's one of my many awkward childhood stories. Hope you enjoyed it.

-The Socially Awkward Trombone