Friday, March 9, 2012

Post-Vienna Slump and Beethoven Haus

So I was thinking about what a rough week it had been and how busy I was, when I realized I hadn't done a blog post that covered anything since Vienna. Whoops.

Actually the last two weeks have been pretty rough, but I'm not sure why the first week was so hard. Maybe it was the fact that we had just come back from Vienna; maybe it was because we finally started differential equations and it suddenly seemed like there was so much more homework; maybe it was pre-stress for the physiology test looming in the future. Some highlights of the week were staying late at the AIB on Tuesday to study physiology with the 435 students who had a test the next day, and seeing the Beethoven Haus on Thursday. Even though I didn't have a test the next day, I stayed on late Tuesday night because I figured it would be a good opportunity to study physiology anyway, especially with a group of fellow science students who were driven and focused. We consumed large amounts of nussetti (the off-brand Nutella) and beat ourselves over the heads with our physiology books. After all, pain and learning are both associated with the limbic system so people (probably) learn better when they are tortured. Or something like that. The Beethoven Haus was very interesting. I liked learning more about Beethoven, and my favorite things to see were the original violins, violas, and pianos that were on display. It was really cool to think that those were the actual instruments he played. Also, even though I knew he went deaf later in his life, I always kind of thought it just added to his coolness factor, because he kept composing even after he went completely deaf, but now I know that he was pretty depressed about it, and it seems really tragic that someone who was a genius with music and took a lot of joy in music could no longer hear his own compositions.

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