From "Metronome"

One time, before a performance at Longy, a classmate gave Jin a beta-blocker to help him with his nerves. “You won’t sweat,” he said, dropping two pills into his already sweating palm. The boy’s name was Dave and he’d since gone off to work for a hedge fund in Madison, Wisconsin. And he wasn’t a boy anymore, he was a man- a man with a wife and an adjustable rate mortgage and according to his pictures on Facebook, a rheumy-eyed maltese and a four year-old boy.
The performance in question was the Spring Concert of Jin’s junior year. He was to perform Beethoven’s Septet in E-Flat, rearranged as Op. 38, and he was ready, technically speaking. He’d gotten to a place where he could play it on the T, his left thigh and right thigh standing in for two halves of the piano.
Lots of the students took beta-blockers. Acebutolol, atenolol, nebilolol. LOL’s, they called them. Laugh out louds. Jin had never taken anything for his performance anxiety. He avoided coffee the day of a concert and ate calming foods that would stay in his system- a heaping bowl of buttered rice with scrambled eggs on top.


The piece didn’t go as it should have, although Jin didn’t realize it until later at the reception when people kept their backs to him at the punch bowl. His fingers had felt heavy, and his nerve endings, numb, as if he was suffering from a particularly bad hangover. Because of this, he had been three to five milliseconds late in his articulation of the notes. And the humor, the tactile witticism that was the hallmark of the piece, Jin had thrown a comforter on top of the joy of this rare and shining thing that everyone had been looking forward to. He had kidnapped something marvelous, and no one wanted it back. Not from him, in any case. It was after this performance that Jin realized that he simply wasn’t good enough. When other students gave a poor performance, the Jaquelyn Wu’s and Tony Higgins of his junior class, people approached them with pinched looks and furled eyebrows. What….happened? There was a real sense of disquietude in the aftermath of such a letdown- the shared sentiment that the bystanders couldn’t let a rising star fall. Jin didn’t experience anything like this at the reception after his performance. People were embarrassed for him. He’d ruined the last piece of the program and left them with a bitter taste in the back of their throats that would probably end up causing them an ugly feeling of inevitability when their steak arrived medium instead of medium rare later that evening. I’ll eat it anyway. What does it matter?