Why yes, I am indeed alive.

Hello, fellow bloggers and readers. How was everybody’s holiday?

Mine was kind of a waste of time. Not necessarily a bad waste of time, but you know when you have a choice between catching up or winding down, and then you kind of try to do both, and end up doing neither? That was my holiday.

So basically, on Good Friday, I woke up at 12 pm, and realised that nothing was open on Good Friday. So I facebooked until it was Easter Saturday because I really didn’t want to work on my first day of holiday. I went to see Ensemble Liaison (it’s a trio of clarinet, cello, and piano) perform Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time on Saturday, then had dinner with a friend before visiting church for the first time in my life on Easter Sunday out of curiosity (I’m not a member of any organised religion, but my family does vaguely practice Confucian ancestor worship, which basically consists of burning fake money on various holiday dates so that your dead relatives can spend it in the afterlife and then eating a lot of food). Easter Monday I parked myself in the Journal office and edited, Tuesday I went on a tourist romp around Melbourne with a friend from Monash.

I can’t really remember what I did Wednesday or Thursday. I think I might have caught up on 80 pages of reading because it has miraculously become underlined in my textbook, which is great because now I only have 600 more pages to read before I am up-to-date for the semester. I may also have practiced. Either way I woke up in the afternoon rather than the morning so it’s all a bit hazy.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as well as today, I again parked myself in the Journal office and attempted to verify footnotes. (This is actually very fun for me. Don’t ask about my obsessive need to see correct semicolons or authoritative treaty citations). I also went to a housewarming, a 25th birthday party, and had lunch with Journal friends twice. Oh, and my clarinet lesson.

So the sum total of what I did this break:
One clarinet lesson.
One concert watched.
Four social gatherings.
80 pages read.
600 pages left.
One essay not started.
One other assignment not started.
8 hours practiced (for 10 days, this is reaaaally bad)
a few hundred footnotes beautifully re-formatted and verified
12 hours slept per day
27 cups of coffee consumed (I really like coffee. Even the instant kind. It has nothing to do with caffeine, which now ceases to affect me; I just like the taste)

All-in-all, neither a productive nor a particularly raucous holiday.

I need to figure out how to get back into work-hard-play-hard-mode.