Finals Week

It's Finals Week, and the Men's Room on the third floor of the Fine Arts building smells of oil paint and desperation.  On campus, wild-eyed, disheveled students stagger about mumbling to themselves, attempting to retain the tiniest morsels of information within traitorous cranial sieves.

At the beginning of the semester there were twenty-four students in my Italian class. By the end, eight remained. It was like some weird survival game. I kept looking for hidden cameras. I had a perfect attendance record, even though one week I had a gruesome flu that wracked my frame like Torquemada's henchmen. I was afraid to miss a single class. Some of the younger contestants were missing three or four classes a month. If you missed a class, you fell so far behind the attrition rate comes as no surprise. The pace was so furious I thought at one point the teacher had to be kidding. This course was the intellectual equivalent of a Chuck Yeager stress-test. Material appeared on the exams we didn't cover in class, and indeed we wouldn't absorb until the following week. We were asked to conjugate verbs and complete sentences containing words and phrases we hadn't yet learned. Since this was my first semester, I can't say whether or not this is typical, or if we had fallen behind the scheduled curriculum. We covered 225 pages of the textbook this semester, as well as auxiliary material. I've been studying for the final coming up Friday, filling in gaps I may have missed on this whirlwind ride.




In piano news, I had little time to practice, but attended my lessons, which I bumped to every two weeks due to my hectic school schedule. The Painting class topped out at thirty-two paintings, an incredible amount of artwork, and my Drawing class had around a dozen assignments, which was a bit more reasonable.  One of these was an "Installation," which means you make a three-dimensional creation and then go vandalize the community by installing it in a public place. I created a statement--a mutant infant with tentacles growing from his face, crawling from a trashcan-- about how industries pour mutagenetic chemicals in drinking water and put it outside the Kelly Business school.

I have three finals out of the way and the last one is Friday.  I began learning a new piece, or rather began work on a piece I dropped about a year ago: "Over the Rainbow," and I just about have it down cold.  I also have on the table an arrangement of Gorden Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind." I found a clip of some dude playing it, and I downloaded the sheets for it:





I intend to raise a glass of fine Cognac Friday after the Italian final, and enjoy the weekend.  Summer semester begins May 8th.  I'm curious to compare second semester Italian to this first introduction. I hope second gear has a slower pace. Ciao, Ragazzi.