Pop quiz!

1. What do you call the week leading up to Easter?
ANSWER: HOLY WEEK.

2. How do you act during Holy week?
ANSWER: SOLEMN.
[Edit: I will also accept partially synonymous answers such as "prayerful," "sad," or "contemplative."]

Congratulations! YOU NOW KNOW MORE THAN THE PEOPLE AT BETHEL. Yes, meine Freunden, Easter is already being celebrated at Bethel. A Christian college.

There were plastic candy-filled eggs in the cafeteria (except this one girl near me kept finding eggs filled with salad) and my teachers talk about Easter as if it's pretty much here.

REALLY, BETHEL? Are you too optimistic for that tiny matter of CHRIST'S DEATH? You know, THE MOST IMPORTANT PART EVER???

In case you can't tell, I'm REALLY REALLY APPALLED at this behavior.

Behavioral Self-Management.

Read Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. Please. It's pretty short, and one of the characters is named Margaret Cadaver.

Anyway, what this post is really about: School, for duh. In Psych we have an assignment to manage our behavior. (See post title.) We picked a behavior—say biting your fingernails or drinking water. (*Nudgenudge*, Snap.) For one week—last week—we observed how often we performed this behavior. Say we bit our fingernails 30 times a day or drank 0 glasses of water. Then we set goals for ourselves for the next three weeks: Get down to 20 bitings a day, or 1 glass of water a day for the first week, 10 bitings or 2 glasses the second week, 0 bitings or 3 glasses the third week. The point is gradually changing.

To do this, we also set daily and weekly rewards.

My behavior is writing, seeing as I don't seem to write at all. For one week I observed how much extracurricular prose I wrote, rounding it down to the nearest hundred. I wrote 0 all week. (Despairing emoticon.) So this week I'm just writing 500 words a day. If I get that before midnight, I can read facebook and other peoples' blogs. If I do it every day for a week, I can call someone. (Y'all might know how I like to talk on the phone sometimes.) Also—for every 1,500 mark I get in any particular story, I can read a chapter of Forest Born. And I don't mean I can write 1,500 in one story and 1,500 in another; I mean once I hit the 1,500 mark in a story, then 3,000 in that story or a different one, then 4,500—etc. (There are 30 chapters in Forest Born, so I'll write 45,000 words.) This ought to be incentive to stick with a story, right?

Right?*

Over the next two weeks I'll increase it to writing 1,000 and 1,500 words a day.

The thing is, I didn't get enough words on Thursday. I was going to call zAaron after this week because I haven't talked to him, but now I can't. I'm sorry.

*Why do I keep writing my paragraphs long-short-long-short? It's kind of funny. I've been doing it for a long time.

If I would complain about any part of my writer's block, it would be sprinting. In November 2008 while I was writing that novel, I could write 500 words in 10 minutes, no sweat. I'd do two 10-minute sprints and a 20-minute sprint and have 2,000 words for the day. It was kind of tiring, but I was still able to do it. And now I can't get 500 words in under 13 minutes, and it's like pulling teeth. It's been a year and a third. Please, when can I start writing again?

What is it with all this SCHOOL?

Fifth post in a row about school, and yes, I know I haven't even posted for going on two months.

So that computer program for Sight Singing & Ear Training is REALLY LAME. For SERIOUS. It makes things way harder than they need to be, and is extremely confusing. I had to just hope I was doing the right exercises because I needed to get them done and I didn't have time to troll through pages of "Help" to see if it addressed my problem. Fortunately, not only did I catch up my 3-weeks-of-homework-in-1, I accidentally did 6-weeks-of-homework-in-2, and am completely done for the semester. Whatever.

Psych is really fascinating. OT Lit as well, though it more often slips into questionable theology.

What is the definition of "friend" in college? Is it someone you say hi to in the halls, someone who'll make you a copy of their notes, someone whose dorm you've hung out in?

In case some of you haven't been checking, I've been updating my book list. It's SO EXCITING you will have a HEART ATTACK.

More happy, happy adventures in school!

Doing homework to catch up with my new class, I learned:

1. if I want to get everything right, I'm going to be a bit slow by the computer's standards.
2. if I actually do it faster, the computer says "Too quick for accuracy. Your score is 0." EVEN IF I GOT THEM ALL RIGHT.
3. —despite my teacher saying this several times—the computer DOES NOT SAVE PROGRESS.

So there's an hour lost on frustrating, tedious stuff I already know, which I now have to repeat.

I suppose I'm exaggerating a little bit... it's more like forty-five minutes that was lost. For some reason the computer DID save what I did at first. Weirdo.

Happy fun shiny times!

Sort of.

Apparently when one takes Music Theory I, one must also take Sight Singing & Ear Training I in the same semester. I'm signed up now (for 8:00–9:20 on Tuesday mornings, ugh), and have three weeks of homework to do and one week to complete it.

And most of it has to be done on a computer in the piano lab at Bethel.

Thank you, adviser, for not telling me about this class when I registered for my other classes. This is really just making my semester.

Okay, I'm going to go practice my solfege and be less sarcastic now. Maybe someday I'll blog again, and it will mean something.

School's cool.

Music Theory I
9:00–9:50 AM Monday, Wednesday, Friday

General Psychology
12:00–12:50 PM Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Old Testament Literature
1:00–1:50 PM Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Teaching Piano Lessons
2:30–3:30 PM Monday

Physical Science
4:30–5:00? 5:30? PM Monday

Voice Lesson
as yet unscheduled Wednesday or Friday

Homework
ALL THE TIME (except when I'm procrastinating)

Well... that was fun.

Through my own silly fault I was ten minutes late to my Elements of Music final, so, sadly, twenty minutes later I was not the first one done. I tied with another girl. *Sigh.* I'd been so hopeful.