Another rainy Saturday

It feels like the beginning of a new age after last Tuesday. One of those days when your professor says, okay, we're starting the next unit after your midterm, so you can now draw Two Big Lines in your notes. Like waking up for the first time in a new city, ready to start a new chapter in your life. The day we said Yes We Did instead of Yes We Can.

I can't tell you how thrilled I am that the first presidential election I voted in actually went the way I hoped it would. I was quite cynical in the weeks preceeding the election, and my family and friends did a good job of ignoring me. And I'll never forgot that night, seeing the streets filled with shouting, cheering college students at midnight, fireworks, car horns, an impromptu parade up and down State Street.

...

In the past three hours I've been over two hundred years of history review. I am now an expert on Renaissance Mass settings, madrigals, and Italian and French secular song of the Renaissance. I still have to go over Reform in the Catholic Church, 16th century instrumental music, and Radical Humanism. But hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll be ready for my second big music history exam. I'm taking a break here at Memorial Library, refreshing my ears by listening to a CD of pop/jazz standards sung with ukulele accompaniment (all that vocal polyphony starts to sound the same after a while, and there's nothing like a little ukulele to clear out the melismas). Lately I've been keeping busy with music history, German essays, and Trying Not to Fall in Love--the last one tends to require even more effort than music history.