taking a brief respite from writing up my psychology of music paper. believe it or not, usually i try to produce a well written blog entry unless its a one-liner that i send in via cellphone. this entry however seems to be more of a stream of consciousness how-my-day-went i am a teenage girl blog entry.

Today started out horribly. In my head anyhow. I set my alarm for 8, which is for others i know just a normal time in the morning but consider that i've been going to bed at 6am for the last month or so and I hope you will agree that it is not exactly... agreeable.

I had to get up so early so that I could go to the concert hall where jeff works so that i could pop some balloons. yes, pop some balloons. I was recording impulse responses for an acoustics project. Acoustics is my horrible class this semester. it seems every semester i have one class that is just horribly horrible and destroys my will to live. ah well.

after bringing the equipment i had back to school, i decided i should go to the library. and i did. i was reading this book on auditory scene analysis and everything was horribly horrible again. i am not a violent person but seriously i was ready to destroy this book. Bregman (the author) is not very big on the old academic writing "first you tell them what you're going to say, then you say it, then you tell them what you said" bit. so the book can get a little hard to follow. 40 pages of talk about whether or not there's such a thing as a trajectory grouping and i had no idea WHY he was talking about that.

after i got to a certain point (and after i got to a certain point) i left the library. I went outside. i had a cup of coffee. and then i came back into the library. but before i started again, i did this old concentration/meditation/self-hypnosis thing i used to do before every show. and WOW did it work. my head cleared, i found myself able to focus, and more importantly able to regain focus if i lost it. for the first time in a week i didn't feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown. i took out anotebook, and started going through the chapter, actually taking notes. and now i have pages of notes in front of me which i am transcribing/fleshing out into my paper on schema-based auditory scene analysis.

Meanwhile, I also have to present on this topic tomorrow. And not just my paper: 2 other people's papers as well. It's a "group" presentation given by one person, which is pretty dumb because it's not like you can come up with a presentation as a group. actually the professor used to do group presentations but they were inevitably disastrous. I'm kinda peeved i got stuck with it. my other group members wanted to meet to make the presentation, but other than the general "no exit" quality of making a powerpoint w/ other people, the amount of time it would take me to travel to nyu to meet with them and then go back to queens is about as much time as I plan to spend putting it together. of course, the standards aren't very high. the presentations we've had so far have mostly sucked. actually, i taped myself donig a bit of the talk the other day, and was a bit annoyed because i'm a much better presenter in my head than i actually am.

ugh my computer setup is the worst in the history of the world. the orthopedist doesn't think i have carpal tunnel... yet. "minor nerve irritation." the good part was he has me on 4 aleve a day. yeehaw for drugs. i think i'll take some now.