Two days in the life (Suzanne)

Remember that post I was talking about earlier? I’ve totally forgotten what I was going to say. So instead, I shall commemorate the release of semester 1 timetables today with a comparison of my schedule last semester and my schedule during the holidays.

Last semester, A Typical Tuesday:
07:30. Wake up, walk downstairs to college dining hall for breakfast in pyjamas.
08:00. Read the Age and/or the Australian
08:35. Brush teeth, comb hair, get dressed.
08:50. Practice in college practice room.
09:50. Walk to Old Arts.
10:00. Music Techniques 1-1 lecture.
10:55. Walk to Music Building.
11:05. Woodwind Class.
13:00. Walk back to college.
13:15. Eat lunch.
13:45. Check email.
14:10. Walk to Law Building.
14:25. Arrive late to Contracts due to spending too long checking email.
16:10. Contracts finishes, walk to Music Building.
16:20. Arrive late to 16:15 Orchestra rehearsal due to Contracts being too far away from the Music Building.
17:15. Get to leave Orchestra halfway because woodwind players are only needed for the first piece. Walk back to college.
17:30. Back at college, straight to practice room.
18:30. Arrive exactly on time for dinner. Eat dinner. Hang around for too long after dinner catching up with friends.
19:15. More practice.
20:30. College arranged music tutorial.
21:30. Arrive on the dot for ‘Clubbers’, which is a twice-weekly supper break arranged by the student club. Pig out.
22:00. Head back to room. Realise that reading for tomorrow’s Constitutional Law seminar has not been done. Start reading.
11:12. Get distracted by neighbour, who wants to know if you want to watch a movie with them in their room.
01:00. Finish movie. Realise that it is now tomorrow. Attempt to finish reading.
01:24. Give up on reading. Shower, brush teeth.
01:50. Bed.

As you can see, Tuesdays were rather busy. Thursdays were even longer because I couldn’t leave early from Sinfonia the way I could from Orchestra, and because I almost always had to do Music Students’ Society stuff on those days. Mondays were the same but they started an hour later, and ended an hour earlier. Wednesdays were great, only two hours of class. Fridays were free. But I usually spent Wednesday, Friday, and the weekend working on the Melbourne Journal of International Law. I skipped class (particularly Concert Class; I can count my attendances on one hand and still have fingers left over) a lot of times in favour of MSS stuff. I didn’t skip for MJIL, but sometimes I’d be in the office all day. Every so often I’d get stuff from the Australian Journal of Labour Law to do, or I’d have some administrative task to do like fixing my enrolment or applying for an internship, or there’d be a big college dinner or a guest lecture or a big party, or I’d get some paid work. Sometimes I managed to finish all my work before 11:00 and I’d go to bed and get 8.5 hours sleep. Sometimes I slept in instead of reading the paper. Mostly I just shuffled things around to make hours in the day magically appear.

Now, compare with:
Holidays, a typical Tuesday
13:30. Wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth.
14:20. Mindless entertainment.
17:40. Go swimming or practice.
19:40. Come back from swimming or practice. Start cooking (elaborate) dinner.
20:30. Eat dinner in front of TV, wash up.
21:35. Mindless entertainment.
00:00. Bed.

… and you get the difference, yes?

I really should start practicing more. I haven’t practiced all summer. This is the first time I’ve stopped practice for more than a week since I was 10. But I’m really enjoying my free time a bit too much for that.

I am not entirely sure how I will handle this semester logistically, due to moving out and things. Plus side: should be much cheaper, so the earnings from my summer work will cover more of my costs. (Still mostly parent-funded, though. There’s only so far a $2-an-hour job in minimum-wage-free Hong Kong will take you. Plus, Hong Kong parents tend to be much more willing to pay than Australian ones. I don’t know anyone from my high school who is self-funding their higher education; my own parents actually refused when I offered to get a job during the year to become financially self-sufficient and pay more of my HECS because they wanted me to get more H1s and fewer H2As. Which, of course, is the quid pro quo of their funding: you will never be academically good enough for them.)

Minus side: now I have to add a 30 minute commute which I have to factor in, and I need to stay on campus instead of being able to dart home for meals. Because buying food from Union House is ridiculously expensive (I’m always acutely aware that a sandwich from the uni food outlets is worth four hours of work back home), that means finding a place to store and reheat chickpea curry on rice, which can be made for $1 a serve instead of being bought for $7. It also means finding a secure locker where I can safely store my instrument if I decide to go swimming, because I can’t just take it back to my room in college anymore.

Hopefully this moving out business will make me more efficient with my time, though, because there’ll be fewer distractions, fewer obligatory events to go to, and fewer unnecessary trips back to college (which, if you look at the first schedule, took up almost an hour — the same length of time as my current commute, except you can read on the tram and not while you’re walking.)

So far, though, moving out hasn’t seemed to save me any money. The sticker price of college is much higher than the cost of moving out, but nobody gives you a $5000 scholarship to live in Brunswick. And you don’t have to buy furniture in college, although it doesn’t really matter because we furnished our house pretty much entirely for free out of stuff my housemate collected from a Sydney dump (the only things we bought were a second hand fridge, second hand cutlery, and a discount washing machine). Or textbooks when in college because they’ll probably be in the library which is right underneath your room. Oh well.