So when I was in high school, I played trumpet in the school band. Our band director usually picked pretty good pieces for us, but every now and then he would make us play these "modern" experimental pieces that didn't really work. One of them, I think it was called "Paper Cut," involved, first of all, playing along to a prerecorded track of electronic noises (which pretty much doomed the song in my opinion), and second, called for the band to periodically crumple and rip up sheets of paper. This was a catastrophically stupid idea, because the paper was never loud enough (and had it been, it would've sounded dumb).

Anyway, every time we rehearsed this piece, we would dig through the recycling bins to find a shitload of paper to rip up. Usually we'd find Word documents and similar, boring stuff, but one day I pulled out a piece of paper that just had a picture of a cheetah printed on it. You know, I just couldn't bring myself to rip it up, so I kept it. I put it in my locker, and eventually I taped it up in there. I named the cheetah Lily, after the Who song.

I still have Lily; she's on the wall by my desk. And now you know a random, small fact about me.