Decompression

Sigh, Spring Break has come and gone, and, as is apparently my wont (see last year's "Diminishing Returns"), the ambitious week-and-a-half gauntlet of self-improvement and discovery I had dutifully worked out for myself in the days prior has been reduced, during its attempted realization, to so meager a skeleton of the original, that it almost shames me too much to even disclose my initial grand aspirations. But, this being the blog-o-sphere (Wham-O! must really be kicking themselves for not having nabbed that one), I can pretty much write what ever I want, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever read any of this, ever (in fact: RACIST INTERLUDE!). So, anyway, here, in no particular order, are the things I wanted to accomplish:

• Read Faust (Parts I & II) in German
• Write songs
• Work on the latest installment of the Solidering Valiant/ Cosmic Cricket saga.
• Meet up with visiting high school teacher
• Meet language tandem partners
• Meet girl whose Masters thesis I'm proofreading
• Cross things of list of things to do in Berlin
• Watch movies
  
• Travel someplace interesting
• Plan end of year trip

As for how I actually did:

• I breezed through Faust I (it's pretty short and easy), but I am only just now through with act 2 of Faust II. In retrospect, thinking I could power through 218 pages of 200 year old lyric German (accompanied by nearly as many pages of annotations) in the span of a week, was, if not downright hubristic, then at the very least, shortsighted.
• Tim and I recorded a few demos, but as for actually writing songs, it's actually never been something I could schedule, and I really never got motivated to dive in.
• HA! The problem with this, in addition to it being a stupid, desultory, diatribey piece, is that I have to actually make myself angry to be able to work on it, which, despite all outward appearances, is something I don't really like to do, so this one is definitely (maybe) on indefinite hiatus.
• Meeting the illustrious Herr Hausfeld was a resounding success. I went out with him and his partner for Thai, and then we went for a couple more beers. I probably drank more than I should have though, since I lost track of time and missed the last train home, so I ended up crashing on the couch in their hotel in Wittenbergplatz. This provided me the added perk of pulling a St. Xavier High School Faculty partner two-fer when I met my freshman English teacher's husband (an English-man, oddly enough) at breakfast in the morning. Woo. Hoo.
• They all cancelled! Ha!
• Another splashing success. We chatted and walked through Sansoucci and ate ice cream and talked about grammar and usage!
• Maybe if I had a physical list, I would accomplish this more.
• ibid.
• I really could barely be bothered to leave the house most days, honestly, especially since long periods of unstructured time pretty much destroy my sleep schedule, so starting your day (much less your day trip) at 4pm is not exactly conducive to accomplishing this goal.
• Meh, sort of.

All right. Well. I'm lookin' at that and I see that I'm 2.5/10 (the half being Faust). Means I'm batting about .250, so above the Mendoza line, and if we count those two "successes" as home runs, I'm lookin' at about a .900 SLG, so, not too too bad. The most important thing, I think is that it was relaxing, just what I needed to sort of take the edge off. Not that I feel particularly refreshed now, back in the swing of things, but still, it was nice to pull myself out of the quotidian stream. Final analysis: As my old German prof. Kai Hammermeister used to say, breaks are important to be able to do your own thinking. I couldn't agree more.