Monday, October 31. Day 65.

As usual, Monday came all too early. I tired to offset the awfulness of Monday by doing things completely unrelated to school, as my only class did not start until 7:30pm. I had been neglecting to pick up my (new) residency permit for some weeks, so I decided that today was a good day to do that. The Immigration and Naturalization office is not really in Amsterdam, however. Well, it is technically, but it is like and hour bike ride outside of the city, so I had to take a train. Naturally, my chip-card did not have enough money on it, so I had to top it up, but of course none of the machines take cash or American credit cards. So I had to stand in a ridiculous line to put 10euro on my silly little card, and board a train for all of a 5 minute ride. Once at the IND, I had to put up a bit of a fight to convince the workers that I had a residency permit, on which THEY printed my name incorrectly, and THEY told ME to pick up the FREE replacement. Arg, bureaucracy...

Next I went down to Vondelpark to my friend's -aunt's bookstore to pick up my ordered copy of Effortless Mastery. Unfortunately, since the book is a "textbook", it was rather expensive.

After that, I came back to my room to book my flight to Milan. In December, instead of my parents visiting me in Amsterdam, we are all going to Milan (which I am more than fine with). Next I went to school to practice a bit before my live electronics class. Practicing is always such a battle with me, however, my new book is supposed to help me with that, aiding me in becoming an "effortless master". We'll see, haha.

Live electronics. Oh how I loath thee. Really, it is like the fourth week of this class, and we have yet to play anything (and it is supposedly a performance class). Admittedly, I would probably not like it any more if we were playing, as I am more interested in the compositional/technical side of electronic music, but my schedule has been set in stone for many weeks and it is too late to make any changes. Anyway, we are still dealing with meaningless computer issues, mostly incompatibility with windows computers, and I am really getting tired of it. Maybe some day it will be less miserable, but for now I am just trying to get through each class.