Holy shit you guys, the senioritis is real. First week back from winter break was rough: I'm on fucking autopilot. I care just enough to keep my grades up, because that's all that matters at this point, and usually that means not doing much work (because it's unnecessary: I studied for 10 minutes for my chemistry midterm and made a 96). I've mostly given up on learning interesting/useful things, except in my physics class. Oh, and how ridiculous is it that my school has the last two weeks of the second semester after winter break? It's like, "Guess what? You have a 3 week break to forget everything we've taught you so you can bomb midterms! YAY!"

Of course, it didn't help that I was out with the flu for the first three days of last week, and I still feel awful (psychologically, not physically) because I went to a new year's party before I knew I was sick and gave literally all my friends the flu. Seriously, every time one of them coughs I feel a little pang of guilt. And before you say it wasn't my fault because I didn't know: that's true, but I was dealing with a couple symptoms, and I told myself that I was fine because I was really looking forward to the party. So my selfishness directly led to all my friends missing 3-4 days of school. Ugh.

On the bright side, I recently learned about a huge improvement coming to my jazz band (class) in the second semester: rather than just spending half of every rehearsal sitting around while the pianists try to get their shit together, I and the sax player are going to spend half of our rehearsals working like normal, but the other half playing more advanced tunes with our teacher (a professional jazz trumpeter) and various pro pianists from around town while the piano students work with another teacher. So that's super exciting. I can't wait to play real jazz.