I came to school today because I thought the low-distraction environment would help me focus on studying for my exams.

I’m in the journal office right now. It’s the best place I’ve found to study, at least when it’s not too busy, because it has lots of semi-enclosed workspaces with big desks. And, unlike in the library, I can eat in here.

Today there are three people in the office besides me. Two are studying quietly at a table together. The third is bravely attempting to induce carpal tunnel syndrome by playing a computer game that involves incessant high-speed clicking.

I’m pretty sure wrist injuries won’t get you out of taking your exams. Why are you here, clicky-person? Over the last forty-five minutes, not thirty seconds have gone by without a barrage of clickclickclickclickclick. Can’t you clickclick at home?

What’s that, voice of reason? Ask clicky-person to stop? You mean, like, go over there and say it out loud? No, that’s crazy. I will put in my taiko earplugs and fume on the internet instead.

My sleep schedule, such as it was, got all shot to hell when I stayed up all Monday night before the Property exam condensing an Emanuel’s book and typing it into my notes. This may well be the absolute worst way to study for an exam, but when you’ve put it off all semester and the prof doesn’t allow commercial outlines, sometimes you find yourself in an unsavory position.

Around 3:30 in the morning I got to a section on mortgages, and I didn’t recall us talking in class about mortgages in any depth, so that bit of my outline looks like this (pretend it’s indented properly):

C. Financing Devices: Mortgages, Deeds of Trust, and Installment Contracts

1. christ i hope this doesn’t come up on the test

First question? “If Bart mortgages his house to Mort, and then Bart sells the property to Pam….” Argh.

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Our three back-to-back weekends of taiko performances wrapped up with Saturday’s pushing-the-hot-end-of-bearable show at the Dragonboat Festival. The organizers moved the festival from Buffalo Bayou to Sugar Land at the last minute due to flooding on the Bayou, with the happy result that instead of pushing our drums up and down a steep hill, we only had to drag them across a dozen yards of grass. I wouldn’t mind a bit if the festival folks made this change permanent.

And it’s just in time that our spring season ends, because I have four finals coming up in the next two weeks, starting on Wednesday. They happen to come in order of increasing difficulty, at least as I see them now. Writing, the easiest final of all (because writing the brief was hard enough), was two weeks ago. I’ll go through my thoughts on the rest, not because you care, but because later I’d like to know how I felt about these exams before I saw them.

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Okay, it’s time to do this. I need to get a few things out of my head and into this little box. Not important things, mind you, just day to day stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about. This might be a long one.

Thing One: A couple weeks ago my taiko group played at a local community college’s Japan Festival. It was a teeny tiny thing, probably just the school’s Japanese Club and a few community groups they had connections with. The college didn’t advertise it at all—I couldn’t find it mentioned on the internet anywhere, and even the school’s event calendar listed nothing for that day—so our entire audience was pretty much made up of other festival participants, maybe 50 or 60 people.

We were in the “Commons,” a cafeteria-type room with a twenty-foot ceiling. The audience sat on the floor ten feet in front of us. Halfway through the first song, the audience all seemed to react to something at once. A second later, I heard a crash behind me and felt bits of something spray up against the backs of my legs. What? Did someone throw something at us? There wasn’t anything behind us except some chairs and a bunch of our equipment. I looked down and saw broken glass all around my feet.

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