Fun in the Sun (what's left of it!)

Hi everyone. Things here having moving along as normal I took my first midterm last Tuesday, and I have three more in the next two weeks. I can’t complain; my roommate Tony had two midterms in one day last week! However, midterm season does mean knuckling down and studying, something I am getting much more acquainted with. In high school, tests were frequent, and covered less material than one midterm in college. What’s more, by the time you took a big comprehensive final in high school, you generally had racked up enough points in homework that, as long as you didn’t fail, success on the test was fairly irrelevant to success in the class. Not so here. As most of you know, midterms comprise most of your grade in college, and they cover a lot of material. Learning how to study for them has been a learning process, and I’m not sure that my study methods are actually effective, but by the end of the month I should know if what I’m doing is working.

Jazz band is hard at work preparing for our upcoming concert with guest artist Fred Ho, Harvard ’79, veteran of the New York avant-garde jazz scene, and social activist. Harvard commissioned him to write a piece, which he titled, “Take the Zen Train.” It is a very challenging piece, for the ensemble and the audience. However, it is very personal and full of energy, and I think it’s going to be an honor and a lot of fun to play the piece with him in November. Outside of the big band, I’ve joined a combo with a few members of the band, and we’re working on building up a repertoire for gigs. We had one gig at the college pub lined up, until our tenor sax/leader got swine flu. He’s well now, so we’re back to looking for more gigs. I’ll try to record both the big band and the combo when we perform, and I’ll try to post that information on the blog soon after.

Other than studying and music, I’ve done some fun things since I last wrote. Board games nights on Friday and Saturday are as welcome as ever, and I’m starting to get some new favorites. It’s been a while since I’ve played Diplomacy. David and I got trounced the last two times we’ve played it, and we want to work out a strategy before we face our rivals at HAPIE again. After midterms we hope to try them out, and I’ll let you know if our plans succeed.

On Saturday I went running with my friend Christian. He’s a really nice guy, and he really has his act together. He’s up early every morning, running or doing homework. He does Navy ROTC at MIT (since Harvard strangely doesn’t have a program), and he likes hiking. What’s more, he seems to be on a first-name basis with half of the freshman class. It’s a lot of fun talking with him. We ran to Fresh Pond, which is essentially the Cantabrigian equivalent of Green Lake (Isn’t that word cool? It is the adjectival form of Cambridge. Very fun, and very pretentious sounding). Fresh Pond’s major advantage over Green Lake is its high concentration of deciduous trees. They were starting to turn all varieties of beautiful colors on Saturday, but I’m really looking forward to a few weeks from now. That should be a landscape to remember.

Today was beautiful. The sky was radiant, and you could feel the presence of the sun (unlike some of the sunny-but-cold days we’ve had recently). As Conor put it, “how can you be unhappy on a day like this?” Sophie and Laura (who is on a short break) came up from Wellesley to spend the day with us, and I was glad that the weather was so nice for showing off my school. To top it all off, Cambridge was holding its annual Oktoberfest, which includes a parade, live music, and tons of food in Harvard Square. It really highlighted the crazy character of the neighborhood; the whole place reminded me of

Broadway on a busy day. There were a lot of funky marching bands from all over, including one from Seattle (unfortunately I didn’t recognize them at all). We had a lot of fun moving to the music.

After watching the festivities for a while, we took a frisbee down to the river. On Sundays, the main road along the Charles is closed to cars, which really slows

down the atmosphere and makes the riverside an even more pleasant place to hang out. There was a strong north wind, so catching the frisbee was all but impossible (at least for me), but we had a lot of fun watching the frisbee defy physics and float in the air for far too long. After Sophie and Laura said their goodbyes, Conor, David, and I headed back to our room to hit the books again to prepare for our Life Science midterm on Tuesday. Thankfully we have no school tomorrow for Columbus Day (can you believe that?) and so we have yet another day to get ahead on the busy week ahead.

I've decided to put some photos up on Picasa for you to look at. Here are the ones from the Beantown Jazz Festival last week, and here are the ones from today at Oktoberfest. Hope you enjoy them!