Things which Suzanne should be doing instead of writing in this blog (Suzanne, obviously)

1. Her law skills assignment, due on Monday, which involves reading about a case where some pizza delivery kid got mugged by his customer and then sued his boss for making him deliver the pizza and get mugged. (Honestly, after three weeks of law school, you start to think that you can sue anybody for anything if you can afford the lawyers)

2. Her Aural Studies assignment, which is also due on Monday

3. Practise, for:
a) Orchestra, because all her parts are:
i) really exposed, and
ii) really difficult, and
iii) really not-learned-yet

And for:
b) Clarinet class on Monday, which she could normally bluff her way through because it’s just scales, but since it’s being taken by her teacher (as opposed to somebody else’s or a guest artist — clarinet class is a group masterclass where a guest teacher comes in and focuses on a specific aspect of clarinet playing), who she just saw on Friday, she can’t do that because he’ll know she hasn’t practised it since her lesson.

Talking in third person is confusing.

Hee. I love the program for the first orchestra concert. It’s all Russian music from the 19th and 20th century, which is one of my favourite types of music (although to be totally honest, I’m more of a Rimsky-Korsakov-and-students fan — his students being musical giants like Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Glazunov). Shameless plug here: watch the concert on Monday 26th at 8pm at Hawthorn Town Hall!

Also, would anyone more familiar with the area like to tell me where Hawthorn Town Hall actually is? ^^;;

Anyhow, it is time to move things from my other blog over here:

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

Anyway, this semester, outside of class, I have signed up for:

– some form of music ensemble which I have not yet been assigned to because the audition results are not out yet
– African drumming club
– Mozart concerto competition
– Chocolate Lovers Society
– ballet and ballroom dance, neither of which actually fit with my schedule but I figured I should get some exercise (I swim, but the swim team’s waaay too intense for me — every morning from 6:30-8:00. AM. Yes, am. 6:30am. Ewwww.)
– UNICEF Club

Am planning to:
– set up a choir at JCH! Right now our college does a joint one with Trinity College, but Trinity’s about five times larger than us and they do selective auditions so our members don’t really have a chance to sing with them. So the music tutor asked the ten music students at college to set up one together and I’m the conductor and dictator-slash-music-director because nobody else wanted to do it.
– do the JCH sports, but those are like sports day or swimming gala back in high school – sign up, forget about it, then show up on the day.
– I also want to find people to do a chamber ensemble with me.
– I also should be doing some of the law school events like Moot Court or Witness or Letter Writing Competition, where you basically get up on stage and act like the lawyers on TV. Except in the letter writing competition, where you write a one page letter of legal advice to a hypothetical person telling them whether or not they can sue the doctor who accidentally removed their earlobes during brain surgery or something and how to go about doing it. I think I’ll do letter writing and skip out on moot or witness… too time consuming.

So the newly inaugurated JCH choir had their first rehearsal on Friday. ‘Twas fun. Hopefully by the end of the year we’ll be an established choir which will become a JCH tradition for all eternity, and go on international tours and give concerts and sign record deals and such like Trinity’s. Except we’ll be infinitely more fun and cool than Trinity.

I kind of wish I was taking more music classes, because the thing about double degrees is that you feel like you aren’t really fully involved in either faculty. They signed me up for Music Techniques 1-1 by accident in the first week, and I’m kind of regretting the fact that I went and corrected the mistake with student administration, because technically, I am allowed to overload one extra half credit course (6.25 points) per semester, so I could have taken Techniques (theory classes) and Practical Study (clarinet lessons) as my ‘normal’ classes, and then overloaded Aural Studies, since it’s half-credit. I’m also taking Ensemble 1-1, but because they automatically rejiggled things around a bit to make room for Techniques originally, that’s not for credit until second semester, so I’m overloading next semester but under-enrolled this semester, which averages out to a normal workload for the year.

I think I do need to start overloading, actually, because I want to do a specialisation, and I’m technically not allowed to do one under my double degree structure. They will let you take the classes if you’re good enough to get into them, but you still have to fulfill normal requirements, which means your specialisation is extra classes that you have to somehow make room for. So if I take extra half credit courses each semester, I’ll be able to get rid of enough requirements to be able to fit in specialised classes by about the 4th year of my 6 year degree. I’m still not really sure how that actually works.

Administration really confuses me. It’s kind of like talking in third person. Especially double degree bureaucracy, because you need to go back and forth between two different faculties, neither of which really understands what the other does. Did any other double degree students here feel completely and totally lost during O-week because of this?