This next week will be one of the most important weeks of my life.

I have back-to-back music auditions on Friday and Saturday, and it's been an interesting setup thus far. I have ties to both schools, but they have very different audition standards and admissions offices.

One requires a piano audition, which I'm not excited about—not that I'm not competent at the instrument (far from it), but that I'm afraid I'll be judged in that area against full-time prospective piano students with whom I would be competitive were I not also a composer. Basically, my piano repertoire is a little more offbeat than the usual and I haven't the slightest idea how much the piano portion will weight my overall audition.

The other has had a few mishaps in the admissions office. I'm not particularly concerned about that since everything has been straightened out, but the fact that it was straightened out so close to my audition means that it only takes one thing to slip through one crack for the audition to have complications.

I don't know what the deciding factor will be in this matter. I don't know if there will even be a deciding factor. There's no clear-cut favorite at this point.

Oh, and then the day after I'm in full-on recital mode, including a rendition of the only piece I've written that I've also memorized, because my brain somehow has a hard time remembering things that I write. I suppose that it's because I write them.

Musically, I have every reason to be confident in what I've done. My orchestral pieces have been compared to Haydn in humor, and my piano pieces to Chopin in scope. Something outside of my control going horribly wrong, however, is not something I'd be able to take, mentally speaking.

The little time I've had in recent weeks has been devoted to:

• putting my fourth orchestral piece into notation software
  
• editing my complete piano pieces as a gift for my piano teacher at the end of this semester
  
• composing a new choral-ensemble piece (featuring a libretto partially by Sumiki's Dad)
  
• sketching ideas for a piece for cello and orchestra, partially as an experiment in orchestration (cello concerti are notoriously hard to orchestrate), but mainly as a gift for a cellist friend (who is one of three people on the planet to have beaten me in a pun war).
  

It's somewhat hard to focus on these various things, but it's kept me from stressing over the auditions more than I already have, so I guess that's something.

In other news, my neck scar is healing quite nicely (the stitches come out for good tomorrow!), my grandmother is walking around as well as she has in about three years, and my senior year of high school baseball begins with a practice on February 9th.