You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is.

Good things: Haircut!  Parents + brother visiting!  (and installing a new kitchen cupboard, yay~)  Screencaps from the Grunwald episode AHHhh.  (this makes me want to do some sort of lietpol things, but, like, in an undefined way.)

Other things: errghhh there are a bunch of non-uni-work busy things I need to do, some of which kinda snuck up.  Concert series stuff (a lot of it), two choirs' worth of Christmas build-up and first-year assessments in a couple weeks, and all this kinda expands to take up All The Time...  What I really need to get on with, of course, is finishing a decent bit of music and seeing my supervisor (annoying circumstances happened and he had to cancel, but that was nearly month ago; emails back and forth and then he was still busy with stuff and never replied and then I sort of let it drop which I shouldn't, but now of course I feel like I need to have a lot more to present. Aaand I keep getting distracted/finding stuff isn't as quick to write as I want when I do get on to it.  The usual.)

I've been bitten by the Hamilton musical bug, did I say?  Majorly going round in my head!!  Wasn't sure about it at first and now I'm listening to Aaron Burr, Sir / My Shot multiple times on repeat before moving on. 

 Today the  five of us sat around after work eating food at tables and drinking wine (almost as if we'd gone to a restaurant instead of working in one ^^ … and were those annoying people who stay REALLY LATE all by themselves) and it was really nice. Normally I think I'd just expect I'd prefer to just go home but they're a really nice bunch. And Fran and I played guess the tune with soundtracks and classical throughout service :)

Made cannelloni yesterday!! OM NOM NOM.  Very nice and not difficult or even that time-consuming; don't know why I've put this off years since the last time I cooked it.....

also tidied up more - my parents are bringing a record cabinet/bookshelf from their clearout which will be nice and I've made space - we really have too much stuff though!  Also I guess I am still totally procrastinating, ugh.

played violin and oboe today -- speaking of: Vivaldi, lol, this is supposed to be an oboe piece right? not a violin with a nice rocking-bow flddling technique? do you MIND?  Eh, it's fun!  I shall get there!  This piece.  I've just barely started.

Some problems/lots-to-organise things around and abouts...
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...Apparently we're meeting at the absurd hour of 10am tomorrow morning for this rehearsal/auditioning newbies day.  ABSURD hour, I say.  (Because it's a ways' away too, I mean...  Otherwise I would still complain but not feel at all reasonable in doing so ^^;)

I think I really must be short on sleep.  I've completely forgotten my PIN to log on to internet banking.  (Which I've been doing regularly for years.)  It's just.  Gone. I have a sort of idea what it's close to but I'm not sure why it would be that and not what I just tried!  I.  Am going to try again tomorrow maybe, hopefully it will have magically come back into my brain.  

I really wish I hadn't stayed up til 4am yesterday sort-of-working on a proposal for a thing... (I was working on it but I should have been all done by, like, 1.)  Hm, I hope I get it - I have no idea what proposal for a composition is supposed to be like, really; having talked to people it seems like programme notes only more so, and they're not my favourite either.  I had a real long lie-in this morning though so hopefully I can pretend none of it happened and have no excuse for falling asleep this afternoon.

So..... this has been looming for a while: I have a meeting with my supervisor Friday and not a proper plan of what I'm going to talk about with him -- still sort of intend to write two whole new things in the next couple days.  But!  Have a (I think?) really workable idea for one of them.  So.  Going to go into department before seminar and try to bash out a bunch of it in the piano room, assuming I don't fall asleep. Coffee flask.  Mmkay.  

I also 'redid' my website, which is to say basically took it all down and stuck up a "come back soon anyway here's soundcloud" notice.  Listened to a bunch of old things in the progress and again lamented my (not-so)-recent crisis of confidence about everything...  Actually, I think I can recognize that I'm always feeling this mix/alternation of "hey that's awesome" and "i'm a complete failure"..  But also I think there is something that I used to be more just 'go for it' in my attitude and I need to feel able to do that, not just when I'm running out of time!

speaking of music and that, I wrote a passacaglia week and a bit ago.

For the last few days, since being back in Bristol, I've been getting up early (for me) and going to this research students conference.  Aaand today is Sunday and I stayed in bed till 12. Never mind.  

The conference was kind of interesting!  I mean, the overall experience. The papers were a mix of really interesting to not that interesting. It was a real mix of topics, and I'm not a musicologist anyway so it was quite nice just to be able to listen to the things and Learn a few Things in the abstract without needing to. Also since my uni was hosting this year it was free and since it was free I didn't feel I had to attend every single thing I possibly could.

Some of my favourites were a paper on presentation of death in Nazi and Stalinist cinema in the 30s-40s (broadly: do not show it directly, and like jump cut away immediately to a montage of the glorious collective victory, spectacle music rather than identifier..); this composer Ambrogio Minoja who did very well out of all the rapidly switching regimes in Napoleonic era Milan (also I'm now kinda interested to look into there/republican cisalpina in general); and Atomic Bomb Music in Japan, and how, according to the speaker, it's been a little absent from scholarship when it actually has some different perspectives.

See?? Quite a variorum. ...although now I look at that list, they're all the kind of political ones.

Anyway. We also had a concert yesterday with Schola Cantorum (dept women's choir that sings basically medieval chant or very contemporary stuff!), singing for student compositions including mine. And it went really well :) like, not completely perfect and one moment was a little scary BUT I'm still really happy, to me it sounded the most convincing and expressive we've done it.  

...and the I went to hear a rehearsal for the sax and piano piece that's being played in a concert today and that pretty much killed my good mood dead.  It sounded really bitty and incoherent and I feel like the performers didn't really like the piece, and where I'd been pleased with what I'd written last term I was thinking ugh maybe it doesn't make sense, why'd I do that, etc etc.  However. I am holding on to the fact that it was a rehearsal, and the end of the session, and they were tired, and they will want the piece to sound good.  Also that I've had this same experience before, in September; went to hear the rehearsal, not great at all, wondered how I'd written such apparently difficult but also inane sounding music. Got really sad and stressed out and various things, started crying uncontrollably in the car with my parents who thought it was their fault for telling me to look p eople in the eye and not mumble... and then in the concert itself or was pretty much fine. 

So. I'm gonna go with that's what will happen tonight. Just waiting for my family to get here for lunch now, should be a nice afternoon.

This... makes our sound like I just have people perfo rming my pieces alllll the time...  yeah, no, this is an unusual weekend! I'd like to think that if that was the case I'd have gotten a bit more used to the experience...