Marginally less exciting than it should have been.

This is why I really can't complain about my school:
So perhaps you have heard of this new indie band Vampire Weekend. Ridiculous name aside, they are quite talented and also darlings of the "blogosphere," if you will (I can't believe I just used that bloody word.) Pitchfork Media, a respected yet pretentious and hipsterish music review site, gave their debut album (which came out 2 or 3 days ago) an 8.8 out of 10. The band in question is a group of four Columbia-educated preppies who play clean pop music backed by African rhythms (I'm not going to bother to parse out the theoretical implications of that stylistic choice. Get all postcolonial up in this bitch on your own time.
Man, I am using a lot of parenthetical expressions tonight.)
Well, it turns out that not only did one of the band members-- Rostam Batmanglij, the keyboardist and recording engineer, among several other things-- attend Potomac, but he happens to be the cousin of one of my debate chums. The best part is that, on the strength of their first single, I bought 2 tickets so my friend Mimi and I could see their DC show not only before
a) their full album dropped, but also before
b) the hype got ridiculous (Jesus, their website says the album is at #5 on iTunes AND Amazon right now. In the internet age, that means a lot), and
c) we found out that Yar and the keyboardist were cousins. Now don't I feel smart. We'll practically be with the band.
Potomac produced a semi-rock star. That would seem to count in its favor.

This is why I'm going to complain anyway, despite an utter lack of any reasonable justification:
For the past week, we'd been hearing that we were going to have a "mystery speaker" at today's assembly. As one of my homeroom compadres pointed out, the "mystery person" silhouette on the posters looked just like Captain Planet, but that is a moot (though exciting) point. We'd spent a good part of the past seven days dissecting verbal cues from student counsel members for any hint as to who the guest might be. The only thing we'd gotten out of anyone so far was that it was "a recent alumni [sic]" who "some of the girls will like."
As I was listening to Vampire Weekend's album for the first time last night, I had an overwhelming feeling that the "speaker" would actually be Yar's cousin, and possibly the rest of the band, and that all four of them perhaps might be singing and playing instruments. I was so sure, I almost called several people to inform them of my miraculous brain wave. The only thing holding me back was what I perceived as an extremely slim possibility that I might humiliate myself by being wrong.
That was the only wise thing I did last night (in addition to irrationally assuming that Yar's cousin would be the speaker, I blew off my homework, watched the election returns, and spent 3 hours lying on the floor of my bedroom and staring at the ceiling in a catatonic state because I was too lazy to brush my teeth and crawl into bed.) The "speaker" actually did turn out to be a male musician complete with singing and instrumentation. And he was pretty good-- his guitar work was actually quite impressive. But he wasn't, you know, Vampire Weekend. That sort of hurt.
I might get over it. Babies are starving in Burundi. And I still have the tickets for the Feb. 6 show.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite songs off the new album. Clearly, it is live. I'm mildly embarrassed to be posting a video of a band that's been on MTV, but it appears to be from British MTV, so that's slightly less dorky, maybe.
Look at Yar's cousin plinking away back there. He's tired, maybe even a bit bored, but he's being recorded for broadcast, so he's got to make it to the end of the song. After that he can sack out. Now that is a Potomac Student. Go Panthers!