This Month in Blogging

This month, I shared my baking exploits with the world, flailed about one of my favourite restaurants in DC, dipped my ears in some chamber music, celebrated the onset of spring, remembered what it was like to be seventeen again, went to the Carroll Round, experimented with different recordings of the Mozart Requiem, and discovered the best musical pun ever.

Work

Something I’ve wanted to do, now that I am properly settled into my job, is attend more seminars in the name of intellectual stimulation & all that.  I took one small step forward in this regard by sitting in on a Paul Collier talk concerning fiscal principles for resource-rich countries.  Incidentally, he pontificated on a similar topic when I attended Economics of Developing Countries lectures back at Oxford.  My goal has been to attend at least one seminar every two weeks.  I have definitely not been doing this so far, but it’s never too late to change, right?

Life

I continue to defy expectations by having a social life; Carroll Round was absolutely the highlight of the last month, of course.  This April will also be memorable for the attainment of the following milestone: filing taxes by myself for the first time ever.  This neither the time nor the place to get into a protracted discussion about the particulars of my finances and my employer’s status under tax law, so I shall simply say it involved forking over a goodly portion of my savings, an arm, and a leg to the powers that be.  On one hand, I was like, “Aw, yeah, look at these nicely organised forms I just totally owned.  I am such an adult, man.”

On the other hand, my bank account – it wept.

The Future

I, um, finally bought a GRE revision book?  Progress!

Diversion

Instead of moving forward on infinitely more important priorities (e.g., see above), I decided to pick up Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven as a form of independent study in music history.  It’s actually quite technical in nature – not unlike Alfred Einstein’s Mozart: His Character, His Work, another scholarly-ish work I decided to treat as leisure reading – but, with help from Spotify and Wikipedia, I am learning a lot along the way.  I am slightly less freaked out by terms like “flat submediant” than I used to be, but the fact that I need to make such an observation reminds me of how lamentably poor my music theory knowledge remains.

Regular exercise was actually happening until last week, when I was struck down with the nastiest cold I’ve had in years.

And April was, of course, the best month in the history of ever re. television: both Mad Men and Game of Thrones returned to the air, so I’ve lost hours & hours of my life watching and re-watching those episodes, discussing them with fellow fanatics, and so forth.  Oh, and Veep!  Not quite as good as The Thick of It, which forever holds Malcolm Tucker as a trump card, but Armando Iannucci and American politics make for an otherwise unbeatable combination.