Practice, seedy back alleys, clarinet shopping, and a rather good week (Suzanne)

Hello all. I figured you all deserve an update on my oh-so-fascinating life, which I’m sure you all follow religiously and voyeuristically, so here we go: right now, I am supposed to be practicing (surprise, surprise?) because I decided to trial a new practice regime that involves doing four hours of practice every day – two hours before breakfast and two hours before dinner, since both of those times I have no class or other commitments (last semester, I was having massive trouble fitting practice into my day because things kept coming up during the day and at night I was too tired to do it, so I’d do six hours one day and then nothing for a week). This involves getting up at 6 am in order to practice from 6:30 to 8:30 at the practice facility on Berkeley Street.

Needless to say, after one day, my new practice regime has broken down.

It’s not actually the getting up at 6 am part. It’s the walking to Berkeley Street alone in the cold and dark that caused problems. See, Berkeley Street is not lit very well. Grattan Street and Royal Parade are, and there are actually a lot of people around at 6 am so I don’t worry about that part of the walk, but the last 20 metres to the practice room are in pitch dark and in an area that’s slightly seedy-looking. It’s also very cold in Melbourne at 6 am in the morning. So I wake up at 6 am, look out, stick my hand out the window, and decide that I’d rather not walk down a seedy back alley as a lone female in the cold dark early morning, which depending on who you ask, is either a prudent or uber-paranoid act. I know there’s a very good security service that will walk you to places, but I’d rather not wait for someone to walk me to Berkeley Street, and I also feel like it’s a bit of an abuse of the service to call someone every morning all semester.

So instead, I mull around and do nothing productive until the kitchen opens at 7:30 am and I can eat breakfast. (Six o’clock in the morning is far too early to do law reading. My philosophy is that you don’t do anything that will ruin your day until you don’t have much of your day left to ruin.) And then I end up back at square one re: finding a time of day to practice to which I can consistently stick.

The one day I did manage to get there early, though, there were two or three people practicing already. So I guess it can’t be that dangerous, but I’m pretty paranoid and also not the bravest person, so I’ll have to find another time during the day or practice early evening instead, even though mornings are so much more productive. Hopefully once the sun starts rising earlier I’ll be able to use the 6 am times, though. A friend tells me that she did that kind of practice schedule last year in Semester 2 swotvac, and the sun was usually up by 5:30.

Apart from that, though, I’ve been having a good week, though busy as ever. I’ve been ‘promoted’, so to speak, to an Assistant Editor for the Melbourne Journal of International Law, which means I get to boss around my own team of little General Members for our next issue, and also that I have slightly more editorial control and a swipecard to the Journal’s office (exciting!). I also got free chocolate in Contracts today for being a geek and answering the lecturer’s questions (he bribes us with Freddo Frogs in order to get a lively discussion class. It doesn’t work because basically people like me end up monopolising the discussion in an attempt to hoard a massive post-apocalyptic-nuclear-shelter-supplies-sized stockpile of chocolate, but it’s a nice gesture anyway). I’m actually kind of enjoying Constitutional Law, although the Contracts reading is epic — a dozen cases a week, each four or five pages long, which doesn’t sound like much until you see how small the font of the textbook is. I’m getting a lot faster at churning through them, though. So law is going pretty well.

College wise, we had our Literature Dinner last week, which is an event where we all read a book and then invite the author to dinner to discuss it. This year, it was Peter Singer and The Ethics of What We Eat (coauthored with Jim Mason, whom we didn’t invite because he wasn’t in Melbourne), and it was pretty full on, with an appropriately chosen three course vegan meal (apparently, meat contributes to global warming, rainforest destruction, and oil shortages, as well as the standard animal welfare issues, because of all the fertilizer and grain needed to raise it and the subsequent land degradation, which was the topic of the book).

Music Ball is on the 14th of August. We’re (‘we’ meaning the Music Students’ Society) selling tickets for it right now, we had a free BBQ last week, and we’re also scheduled to talk to the Dean about certain things relating to Faculty club memberships which I won’t disclose here. I have my Australian Youth Orchestra audition on Sunday, so the lack of practice these few weeks is really going to come back and get me.

Also, I’m in the market for a new A clarinet. I need it to play in the Bruckner symphony the orchestra is playing this semester. I am disgusted at how much a new A clarinet costs. $3800 is double what I paid for my B-flat clarinet (which admittedly was a bargain because I bought it direct from the manufacturer). It’s $5000-ish for a premium model, which isn’t worth the money because the $3800 one is still a professional level instrument, just not one with silver plating and Gore-Tex keypads. I’m pretty lucky as a clarinet player because if I were a string player shopping for a new instrument $5000 would be a rounding error, but still. I could buy a car with that money. (Not that I’d want to. I’m a public transport and feet girl, private cars in a metropolitan area are morally offensive to me. :P)

Which means that I am in the market for a job, since my tutoring student apparently doesn’t want any more lessons this semester.

I think that’s all. Sometimes I wonder whether I put too much personal information into these blog posts.