Even when I'm at band, I feel like I'm an archaeologist.

One of my favorite things to do when the game is boring, or hasn't started yet, is to inspect my trumpet. I've had the same horn since the beginning of High School, and I haven't taken particularly good care of it. So I can look at all the scratches and wear and dings in the bell and see everything that it's gone through. The rim of the bell is scraped where it sits on concrete when I put it down at games. There are dents in the bell that line up with the way it sits across a folding chair. There's a worn spot under the tubing in front of the first valve where my left thumb scrapes. The finish is eaten away by the acid in my sweat on the casing of the third valve. There are pliers marks on the mouthpiece from yanking it out. There are stained rings around the tuning slide to mark where I've tuned to.

Today I started to do the same thing with my shoes. Why did my left shoe develop a hole near my pinky toe, but my right show has a hole by my big toe? I want to say it has something to do with fencing, since that's the only activity I can think of where my feet are moving in different ways, but I don't think I've fenced often enough since I got these shoes to account for that degree of different wear.