Spent the budget meeting defending silence as if it were a line item

There's something absurd about having to argue, in a room with fluorescent lights and a PowerPoint, that the rests between notes are worth preserving. The third clarinet keeps edging fortissimo into the quiet passages lately, and I can't tell if it's ambition or just not hearing the room anymore. Maybe we're all just afraid of what the silence would say if we let it.