April 11, 2004 at 3:11 AM

To use my best friend’s favorite adjective for a terrible event, this week has been “interesting.”

A while ago, I got the lunatic idea it would be fun to graduate from high-school a year early... Now I’m struggling to wrap up my freshman year by the fifteenth so I can start attacking tenth grade over the summer. Finishing a schoolyear, of course, means loads and loads of semester exams, and this year is no exception...I have sixteen end-of-year essays to write this week alone. “Discuss the process known as the Four Modernizations” - “What role has the concept of nationalism played in the life of Russia in the past and present?” - “Explain how epics reveal a civilization’s customs, manners, and values” - “Describe how a rocket works” - and the list goes on and on. Because I obviously don’t want to write any of these essays, and because I also want to appear like I’m doing something constructive about them, I’ve decided to do some calculating using my handy dandy computer calculator.

If I finish my essays in five days, it equals out to...

3.2 essays a day
.13 essays an hour
.002 essays a minute
3.7037037037037037037037037037037e-5 essays a second.

Amazingly enough, this was a big inspiration to me. “Wow, I only need to do 3.7037037037037037037037037037037e-5 essays a second, Mom! Gee, why didn’t I start tackling them earlier?!?!?!”

For interested parties in the Minneapolis area, Sarah Chang is coming to perform with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra on April 23rd, playing the Dvorak violin concerto. Lucky for me, tickets only cost twelve dollars through my orchestra...incredibly enough, the treasury is absorbing at least half of the ticket price. So two Fridays hence, I’ll be boarding a bus that will, I’m sure, mainly consist of gossiping woodwind players, achey and paralyzed track veterans, and the occasional nut wearing earphones and listening to Chang’s Dvorak concerto (namely, me).

As a side-note, it amazes me that the two cheapest concerts I’ve bought tickets for - this one with the SPCO, and another fifteen-dollar one at which James Ehnes played the seventh Beethoven violin sonata - are the ones featuring the most famous artists. Hopefully this cheap-tickets-to-see-great-violinists trend will continue!

Happy Easter or Passover or second weekend in April or whatever holiday you might be observing right now... Practice hard and gorge yourselves with chocolate-covered, rabbit-shaped prunes! As for me, I’ll be investigating how rockets work.

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April 11, 2004 at 3:11 AM

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