My brain hurts...

kind of literally. I feel like I have the beginnings of a headache, and I never get headaches. I just practiced piano for an hour and a half or so. "Clare, that isn't a very long time." You're right, it isn't. I'm far from done for the day. At my piano lesson yesterday my teacher asked me how much time I'm putting into the Beethoven every day, and I said maybe an hour or an hour and a half. She told me that when she was preparing to play a concerto she practiced maybe three hours a day. Which is good. Good, good, good. I hadn't had a lesson in a few weeks, and I needed someone to crack the whip. I've realized that I need a certain amount of structure in my life, like a lesson every couple weeks, or else I don't get work done. And with this performance coming up in (hopefully) December, work needs to get done.
I say "hopefully" because Sharyn, my youth symphony director, told me that if I don't feel prepared in time for the December concert, we can push my performance of the first movement of Beethoven's first piano concerto back to the next concert in March. I would normally take the March option, but the December concert is at McIntyre Hall (REALLY nice hall, REALLY nice piano) and I'm pretty sure the March one is in some church somewhere (questionably nice, piano of questionable quality.) So I really hope I can have this learned in the next couple months.
Anyway, maybe my head hurts because I was practicing the same 6 or 8 measures over and over and over. I have realized, with the help of my piano teacher, that the only way to learn this is practicing it SLOWLY with the metronome. If I think I already have the passage down, practicing it AGAIN and AGAIN SLOWLY with the metronome.
It's a really beautiful concerto though. I'm excited to have it all learned. :)

Dude, FML.

So I'm driving home from the football game, and I'm about 10 minutes away from my house and I turn left at this light. I'm in the middle of turning, and my car fricking STOPS in the middle of the road. The wheel gets really hard to turn, and I barely manage to get to the side of the road (there was no shoulder) and it just coasts to a stop, and it won't go at all so I turn it off. I freak the @$%# out and call my dad, who, along with my mom and sister, is conveniently out of town for the night. He tells me to try to start it again, so I do, and it starts and I stay on the phone with my dad while I drive over the bridge. There is only a tiny bit of gas in the car, so I think that might be part of the problem. I'm almost to the gas station, when it does it AGAIN. So I pull over onto a side street and restart it AGAIN, and cross the road to the gas station. As soon as I got gas, it was fine. But the thing is, I wasn't completely out! My dad said that he thinks that has something to do with it, though, and that it's not good for the car to run on only a little gas.
So that was not fun at all. But I got home, and now I'm fine. I'm home alone though, and just a little freaked out, which I know is stupid. I don't think I would be if it hadn't been for the car incident. Also, about half an hour ago I heard A NOTE ON MY PIANO. I freaked the @&#$ out again, and I walked into the living room and it was my damn cat. I related this story to my best friend on facebook; her response? "Clare, it's ok to say fuck." I'm like, wow, thanks for the sympathy.
Other than these two incidents, I've had a pretty decent day. I think I'll blog more tomorrow; I should probably get ready for bed.

First day of school tomorrow!!!!