YIPPEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

No more essays for the term!

I ate so much rubbish since last Thursday that I must have put on tonnes by now. In any case my face is already rounder :( And my hand's still too used to typing two spaces after each full stop. So spastic.

Although both Pohning and I tried very hard to do our essays as quickly as possible so that we wouldn't have to do the whole last-minute thing again... we ended up sleeping even later than last time. Guess the main reason is that this time the questions we chose were harder than what we did last time. And I think once we started on the essays we began to regret our choice of questions! After the chamber choir concert on Sunday I tried to finish up on Holst whilst Ruth and Zhuomin proof-read what I'd written on Vaughan Williams. So stressful! Their english is too zai already. After their suggestions the whole essay just sounds so much more convincing and un-amateurish. Wah... *shakes head and sighs* must improve on my english!

The Holst part of my essay was so obviously crap compared to Vaughan Williams. There was so little things to say about him... plus I only had two books on him, one of which is a biography by his daughter... which is quite unuseful for my essay. The only other book I speed-read at the conservatoire library was purely on his Planets. And it had lots of talk on his rhetorical gestures and less on the influence of English/French/German/Russian on his music. I think all three writers emphasized a lot on the influence of English folksong on his music so I ended with practically nothing about his influences from abroad.

So just when I was heaving a sigh of relief at finishing the essay except for typing out the musical examples... Zhuomin called and said, 'What where the foreign influences in Holst's music? You have written on the English influence but your question is on combining the influences of home and abroad.' I totally freaked out! And even in the end when I finally called it a day and went to sleep at 4am, the Holst was still crappy, lame sentences strung together in the hope of answering the question. Lame things like, 'Debussy and the Symbolists probably influenced Holst in his rhetorical ideas yet he created his own rhetorical gestures. Blah blah.' I'm so going to die.

Whatever. I'm just glad it's over!