I’m making myself promise that I will tidy my room after I make this post: it’s been transformed into an inefficient workspace lately, and I should really put away all the things that I need to step and skip over! I would post a picture, but it’s a little too shamefully messy. To begin with, my forearms are resting on a pile things covered by a tent of paper just to reach the keyboard to type. My mouse only has about 5cm’s worth of space to move in each direction; the bed is completely covered by a pile of clothes, and I’m no longer sure which are clean and which have been worn once or twice. The only space I’ve really paid much attention to has been the square metre in the corner where I’ve moved the chair to, and propped up a music stand, just in arm’s reach of the amplifier… along with my WESC headphones. Those things come in handy for when practise drags into the early hours of the morning – the only problem is I’m unable to plug my headphones into my amp and my metronome simultaneously. I’m sure had mum been less sleepy, the constant ticking heard through the wall would’ve driven her to insanity like it has to me. See – I don’t even make sense today!

My left wrist is now bound by two loops of tape, it feels like it would fall apart otherwise. I know, I know, I need to be careful with my technique and pressure placement so that I don’t strain it, but all this last minute practise has really put me to the limit. That’s the thing I’m really hating about a practical degree – you can’t cram practise, like you could cram for an exam. If you don’t know something well enough to recall it from memory instantly, when it is requested of you to play it, there is no way in hell you could dawdle your fingers for a bit, look around the room, and eventually get a “lightbulb moment”. You can’t erase your first answer, change it, then re-change your mind and decide you were correct to begin with. No, no, no. Once your hands are committed to playing something, the sound is out there, for the judging panel to mark down a number in accordance to its precision.

I’ve always been really terrible and leave things to the last minute… you’d think I would’ve learnt by now, but it still keeps happening. It’s not that I neglect things entirely until it’s too late, it’s just the fact I ignore all the details that I’m unsure of – which is the biggest trap of all! Anyway, I just had my technical jury assessment for electric bass today, and it went ooookay. By that I mean that I know I will pass, very averagely, if even “passing safely” at all. But how I did today is a million times better than how I sounded a week, two, or three weeks ago, so the pain is kind of worth it. Maybe.

Also, I decided that I’d post a playlist today – it’s just 9 random tracks that I like, that I happened to listen to today – so it’s certainly not one of those overtly well thought-out, deep and meaningful mix-tape type things, haha. Enjoy.