Came back from lessons and I'm slacking between now and choir rehearsal later. Or maybe not. I might should start doing a bit of studio compo stuff after this I guess.

Text was a bit less boring today than last week, but I think people might have become a bit irritated by one classmate who has become ultra talkative since around the start of this term. This person was just making remarks and comments to lots of things said during class, and trying to answer the questions etc. That's good I guess, it shows the person's enthusiasm. But at some point it got a bit too much and I remember last week someone said, 'you talk too much'. Just now another person asked, 'do you actually answer everybody's questions?' This has happened quite a few times, e.g. when the teacher directs a question towards a classmate and this person blurts out the answer either cos he didn't realise the question was for someone else or... maybe he was way too enthusiastic.

One of the entertaining bits of the lesson was the comical second movement of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks. The opening sounded like some cartoon opening music or something. And there was this part where the teacher played a bass line, and it sounded like some cool jazz bass line. Most of the lesson was still sian as usual, but at least there were some less-dull moments. At the beginning of the lesson one classmate was saying something... imitating someone? Or whatever... part of the sentence was 'I will do anything for you, blahblahblah.' Another classmate, who's a bit blur/slow sometimes, was staring at her at first, cos she thought the first classmate was actually saying that to the teacher. And when she realised her misunderstanding, she burst out in laughter and her laughter was quite infectious larh... another classmate was also giggling like mad and the rest of the class were smiling.

I dunno why I'm still blogging even though I don't have much to write. Everything is about lessons, how much more dull can it get?

After the sunny, cheerful week previously, it suddenly turned grey and cold on Saturday. Sighs no sun, gloomy, rain/sleet/snow, wet, chilly...

On a happier note, I watched the Incredibles with the kids today. Great! Regular hero-saves-the-day cartoon, but still good. You get a family of heroes even. =)

Oh ya, I was supposed to blog about how nerdy poot and I were last week. On Friday, we went to the music library at the Barber Institute, and then to the Selly Oak library, and then to the Birmingham Central library, for one single purpose... borrow books for our next essay! Uh, and to return the books for the previous essay. But that's not the point. I now have 12 books on my table waiting to be read. (Ah, the nice module tutor decided to extend the dateline by two weeks... phew.) One of the books is for text, so okay, 11 then. But today, after studio lesson and before I went to babysit, I went to the Selly Oak library again to borrow one more book. So it's a total of 12. Just nice, a dozen! Ya ya, go ahead and call me a mugger.

While we were in the city on Friday, we also went 'to take a look' in Waterstones... (haha KK should know that 'to take a look' is a phrase that doesn't exist when applied to bookstores!) We both ended up falling for this 3 for 2 offer, which basically means you choose three books, and pay for the two most expensive ones. I think both our choices ended up having all three books at the same price. So we paid like 5+ pounds for each book. Quite cheap compared with Kino la, but this Wednesday, when we were at Tesco, we visited the book aisle and one of the books we both bought was selling for 3+ lor! ARGH. Where to find new books at such a price in Singapore?! At least not all the books I bought were available in Tesco lah, otherwise I think I'll be banging my head against the wall.

LOL ranting on and on about borrowing books in 3 libraries, then complaining about disparity of book prices, just sticks an official label on me that screams 'NERD!'

Poot's complaining that I haven't blogged for a long time. Hmph... your blog was dead for longer than mine lor =P

Anyway, just dropping by for a short note before I leave for my studio composition lesson. Planned to go to school in the morning to practice, like I usually do on Thursdays. But I guess my brain or body just couldn't take it anymore after having very little sleep since last Friday when I was pia-ing the essay (again). So I'm still at home now! But not slacking la, I was still doing the studio stuff just now, but I decided to blog a bit before I have lunch and go for lesson.

This time I didn't have to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to finish up my essay, but I still got quite little sleep. For both Friday and Saturday I slept at 4 am and woke up at 7 the day after. Guess that really helped, so that I didn't have to sleep so late on Sunday. But I still woke up super early on Monday morning, cos I decided to read through the essay and probably find some musical examples before I went to school to print it. Monday night I went babysitting, and after the kids were asleep I started doing my string quartet exercise on the sofa but nodded off after only doing like 3 plus bars. Reached home at 12 plus and luckily I managed to become more awake by washing my face with the super cold water. The string quartet was not that bad except for the last phrase, which was quite irritating after a while. Lol I think I spent a bit less than 1 hour doing that phrase alone over and over again! In the end I still wasn't satisfied but it was already 2 plus so I decided I better sleep.

Had to wake up early on Tuesday cos my lesson was at 9. And I hadn't read up on Stravinsky for my text lesson in the afternoon. Scanned through a short paragraph about him, although we were supposed to go borrow some more substantial books about him and not read some stupid book that's more like a summary of the history of music. Luckily some of my classmates were too busy doing their essays to be so hardworking also. But I better go borrow books before next Tuesday, cos I know my classmates are super hardworking and enthu, they are scary! This was also an abnormal Tuesday, cos I was supposed to play at this early music concert. I was totally crap. Argh. I'm still hating myself for letting my nerves get to me can. Sighs.

K larh, gotta go liao.

I woke up at 8.25 this morning. My new record! =P

My lesson was at 9, which means I had only 5 minutes to dash out of the flat, which was quite impossible so I took 10 minutes instead, grabbing a mandarin orange to eat on the way to school. Lol. Was supposed to meet Poot downstairs at 8.30 so I had to call her to inform her not to be punctual. Heh luckily she hadn't left her room yet. Poot said I should blog about this hahaha. I guess I don't want to break this record. I shudder to think what time I'd wake up if I ever managed it. Hmm... 9am perhaps?? I just realised that in Singapore I never had the privilege of waking up merely 35 minutes before my lesson hahaha. If I were ever in that situation, I think the only way I'd not be late for school was if I made it out of the house in 5 minutes and got a cab straight away when I got downstairs.

It's that time of term again... when the blues start to get to me. Essay's due soon, and I'm still convinced that I stupidly chose a question that I'll probably not be able to answer. The books I borrowed seem to be out of point too... I'm sooooo dead can. ARGH.

Got back my paper composition too. Lots of comments about my 'weird' use of accidentals. I must concede that some of them were careless mistakes on my part, e.g. writing an augmented 5th interval instead of a minor 6th (G-D# instead of G-Eb). Fine, but some of the rest were not that hard to read what. C-C#-D and C-Db-D... like what's the HUGE difference lor. And actually, for that augmented 5th interval thing, I think it's alright for me to leave it as such cos it was what I intended to write, an augmented 5th interval. So why in the world would I think of turning it into a minor 6th until I got the score back and realised/remembered that oops, they prefer 'normal' intervals. Whatever. Lesson learnt. I think I have to like keep this in my memory forever, so that I won't do foolish things like that again if I ever take composition in my next two years. Which is very very possible cos it means I'll have less essay-based modules to do!

Now it's usually the instrumental lessons I look forward to, and there are so little of them... 10hrs per year for each instrument, pathetic! Sighs. But at least I'm enjoying them. The pace for piano is also picking up a bit, now we manage to go through more pieces each lesson. Loving harpsichord loads... it's so... I dunno? I guess Poot was right in saying that it's the vibes our teacher gives off that makes harpsichord lessons so enjoyable. She's so enthusiastic about everything, new pieces, old pieces, etc, even discussing fixing spoilt strings/parts of the harpsichord, which she does in addition to tuning at least two of the harpsichords each time she comes! Quite sad that this will probably be the only time in my life I'll get to play the harpsichord. I must make full use of this chance! =)

Text is boring as usual. But once I realised why I couldn't figure out the tone rows in the first movement of Webern (I didn't know there could be overlaps, stupid me...), I found it quite interesting. It's like solving a puzzle, like crossword puzzles (not the fill-in-the-blank type, the circle-the-words-you-spot type, what's it called again?) or sudoku. I also really admire Webern for actually coming up with such highly compact movements that made sense once we figured out the structure in class. Gosh, he's mad, in the words of one classmate... or maybe he's a genius, or maybe a mix of both. TMP is going along fine too. It's the usual cycle of 1) do exercise for homework, 2) teacher plays through exercise during class and comments, 3) look at the composer's actual harmonisation of the exercise, name chords etc, 4) give out new exercise, 5) listen to some music and guess the composer (this one's more for context, but our teacher's just trying to give us more exposure).

Ok, enough rambling and slacking, I guess I'm going to make a start on my text and studio compo homeworks (I finished TMP, yay!). Hopefully, if I finish those two by today, it leaves me ample time to finish my essay without having to practically not sleep the day before it's due... like the previous two times.