Foolish pride.

With reseating auditions always comes a flurry of emotions by all parties involved. This time around was no exception. We all walk around the week of the auditions following our usual scripts: "I'm so bad at the excerpts. I haven't even practiced. I'm going to be last chair; I don't even care." Our actions, as we scurry about looking for open practice rooms every spare moment of the days preceding the auditions, are quite inconsistent with those statements. We all care.

It's dumb, and we know it's dumb. If we were to think really hard about it, we would probably come to the conclusion that one can still be a good person and sit in the back of the section--after all, how would Mother Teresa have fared in an orchestra seating audition? We probably all recognize that chair order has little or nothing to do with being a high- or low- quality human being, but somehow if we're not sitting where we feel we "deserve" to sit, we still end up feeling like a pile of dung. A big, fragrant, steaming pile of dung.

I keep telling myself I don't care. I don't WANT to care. So I have been sitting in the same damn middle of the section since I came here as a freshman four years ago! So people are passing me up, running me down like I'm an empty fast food bag on the freeway! So I'm not good enough at what I spend so much time doing! So I'll never get a job! So my life's dream amounts to nothing!

And that, my friends, is why we all care--even though we all pretend like it doesn't matter. It matters a great deal. This is much more than just an ego trip. This is life. We musicians are notoriously famous for being unable to distinguish self-worth and playing ability (after all, how well you play determines a great deal of how much you're worth to the world, at least in terms of dollars and cents), and so when our playing is ranked against everyone else's, we feel that we ourselves (apart from how we played that day, apart from how we know we are capable of playing, apart from music altogether) are being ranked. Those dreaded words "LAST CHAIR" carry with them the weight of knowing--or at least thinking--that one is worse than everyone else. It would be nice if we could contain that feeling to relate only to orchestra seating instead of infiltrating our every belief about ourselves.

Alas, that is not the case. So, the week of seating auditions some are full of joy and some are full of discouragement. What do you think my feelings on the matter are?