piano exam et cetera

The piano exam went well—at least that’s what my teacher, who had been listening at the door not so covertly (maybe she was allowed to be there), told me when I was done. Personally I didn’t think I did too well: I made errors here and there that I never made during practice, so that was a disappointment. Secondly, the piano was intrinsically loud: it was really hard to play all the soft notes. Thirdly, I totally screwed up sight-reading, which is no surprise, because I always hopelessly sucked at it. Goodness knows how I managed to learn my pieces. My pieces were, I have to say, great. The examiner or whatever they called that guy was British, a fact nobody had told me about. Maybe I should have seen that coming, what with this being a Trinity Guildhall exam and all. But anyway, him being British kind of gave me the impression that his standards were high. Plus he was pretty vague, deliberately careful not to give me the faintest idea as to how he thought my performance was. All he said was “Thank you,” whenever I finished something, and when someone says “Thank you” the way the British do, you don’t know what’s on their mind. It’s like one of those commonplace phrases that are used for propriety’s sake and have no meaning by themselves.

But anyway, here I am, back at home, much earlier than I’d expected, with five days’ worth of vacation-time ahead of me. Who am I kidding? I’ve got a nasty Phase Test on October 3. That’s what sucks about my school. It’s like they’re on a mission to make every student’s life hard as hell and deny them even half a moment of repose. The more conservative teachers (like CMNR, who’s the biggest douchebag I’ve ever seen) are of the opinion that a student lives to study, and expects people to study until they drop without (ironically) dropping. I don’t know how far his claims about being such a student in his younger days are true; not very far, no doubt. Which reminds me. A couple of days ago I managed to get his email address and password, and all I had to do was ask. Like, just ask, out of the blue, casually, randomly, without pressuring him in any way, and he relented, or rather, willingly gave it to me as though it were the most normal thing to do. Here’s what happened: One of my friends and I were at his cabin since we (obviously) had nothing better do and a shitload of time ahead of us to kill, and he (the friend) asked him random chemistry-related question, as if he didn’t know their answers already, and a third guy walks in and says something to which I paid no attention. CMNR in response handed him a piece of paper with what he told him were his email address and password. I couldn’t suppress my laughter, and neither could my friend, so we went outside, laughed our lungs out for a couple of minutes, before I returned, put on a straight face, and made something up regarding why I needed to check out the contents of his inbox (apparently it had some kind of presentation re chemistry), and he gave them to me, without saying anything about my having laughed the first time, as I thought he would, since he’d noticed. So yeah. There ends the tale of the stupid chemistry teacher.

I’m still waiting for Bleach 375 to come out.

As regards Episode 238, it wasn’t as interesting as I’d expected it to be. They didn’t shed any light on Byakuya’s questionable presence in places where he shouldn’t have been, nor did they show him again. Senbonzakura, however, was shown to be in its Spirit form, so Byakuya could not have regained control over it. Which in turn would mean that it wasn’t Byakuya who’d attacked Ichigo at the end of Ep. 237. Maybe he was trying to hunt down Senbonzakura…?