Thursday/Friday – Day 140/141
December 19, 2012
Today was the first of my two exams, algorithms. Up at 7:30 to practice I felt decently good going in. The exam felt fine and though there were lots of tricky questions, it seemed alright overall. How naive I was.
The rest of the day was spent in crisis mode going mad over the physics exam which, till this point I’d barely had any time to study. I was so stressed that I decided to take a ‘short’ nap and get back to studying after. This name however, ended up running overtime to a good four hours. No good. The rest of the evening I was even worse than I was before, going completely nuts over the practice exams. At around eight PM I received my grades for the algorithms exam. Not good. I was quite upset by this and so I decided to take a run and clear my head a little. At 9PM I finally started working consistently and though I made some progress, I was sure it wasn’t enough.
Tomorrow I woke up at six thirty, before my nine AM exam feeling absolutely terrible and my nerves were completely wracked. I entered the exam in a state of near panic and with good reason, I was unable to wholly answer a single one of the exam questions! After exiting the exam room in near tears I was also forced to confront another unpleasant event from the last day, the burglary of my carry bag containing my forms to obtain a new visa. Quite distraught I left the exam building to find Kostas, my algorithms professor who always had a way of putting things in perspective however, he was busy with a skype call and couldn’t meet with me. I ran back to my room to try and prepare for my weekend in New York with Mum, Dad, and Raph. I distressed slightly during a goodbye with Steph, who gave me a little comfort from the awful day and then I raced to the 1PM bus to New York.
Long story short, it took absolutely forever. I only just made it there in time for Shabbat. 4:11 I made it to the building. 4:11 Shabbat started. Phew. From there it was breakdown then sleep.
Friday – Day 99
November 12, 2012
Friday was a large buildup to the performance and as a result I hardly payed attention in classes. Even when my singing lesson hit, I was both too exhausted and too pumped up to really focus well. Despite this, Brian noted that my singing was coming along well and I too felt I had been making good progress since coming to Penn, particularly in practicing on breathing from my diaphragm.
The evenings performance was just about sold out, with the theatre full to the brim. Our numbers were well received and I even managed to catch Shabbat dinner!
Our show opened with Footloose a combined dance number:
I’m not sure which night the video is from and this greatly affect how strong my dancing is, in addition in the videos I’ll be posting I’m rather hard to spot. However, the show still looks great, even without yours truly.
Glee’s next number was a piece I truly love by American composer Randall Thompson who has always had close ties with the Glee Club. The piece is titled: “The Last Words of David”
After the show and dinner I headed straight to sleep for a huge day of performances on the morrow.
More videos to come!
Friday – Day 77
October 15, 2012
The dreaded lurgy hath returned! I’m currently quite sick and so don’t have the same amount of energy to put into blogging that I normally do. Lest to say, Friday was tiring. Evidently having a drink or two, working for a few hours and then sleeping for two more isn’t a wise strategy for good health. I barely survived Friday’s classes and then rehearsal from four to six nearly killed me.
Following that it was a quick performance with the PGC for International Ivy League students before swallowing a quick Shabbat dinner and going to meet Jonathan who was still struggling with the project. Due to Shabbat I couldn’t really code anything and so I helped him to find bugs in our code that was due at 10PM. Needless to say it was a bit of a failure and we ended up submitting a half baked project. Fingers crosses we still do ok.
After that we and a few other students went up to my apartment to drink a little of the Australian wine I had bought for my birthday and then after a glass each, all returned to get some sleep.