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It's incredibly weird that ESem is ending. In many ways it has sustained me this semester. All of the performances this afternoon provided such great insight, representation, and fodder for thought about our individual and collective journeys. I was blown away with all the creativity.

Okay. Our group decided to try and perform the segments of evolution that we've studied this semester in song. We each took a section and interpreted the prompt in our individual ways. Genesis sang her creation story in Spanish; I sang a song about Universal, Physical, and Biological evolution; Aijingwen sang a song in Chinese to portray cultural difference in language, but similarity in music; and Christine sang/rapped about her individual evolution in our ESem class. In the end we were going to present streams of consciousness, or pre-meditated thoughts on perceptions and consciousness to background music (vocal repetitions of "Evolution") in order to represent the final section, but we ran out of time!

Thanks for sharing all of your stories with me, and for letting me share mine with you. I have new ones now.

I haven't written sheet music, but here are the lyrics for my song if you are interested:

13.7 billion years ago,

Matter just exploded with a mighty blow.

The universe began as a bunch of gas;

Overtime it formed into larger mass.

About nine billion years

Down the line,

Our solar system started to refine.

‘Course it just consisted of a bunch of rocks:

Newly formed planets that were piping hot!

The Earth

Cooled down,

Bacteria started to grow.

But don’t get too excited,

We’ve barely even started:

This was still 4 billion years ago!

Roughly three-thousand million years later on,

Soft-bodied creatures started to be formed.

A third of the Earth’s surface was now continent.

Everything was changing relatively quick!

In the space of seven-hundred million years

There were five times that several species disappeared;

Biology transformed in seventeen new ways;

Geology underwent nine clear phases!

AND then

The dinosaurs

Had their three eras:

Triassic and Jurassic,

Then extinction in thalassic

Saw the end of the Cretateous

Then 13 billion

Six-hundred and thirty-five million

Years after

The universe was formed

Our era was born.

A mere five million years after that date

Saw the birth of the mammalian primate;

As Darwin would later speculate

They’re our grandparents with a lot of greats!

But it wasn’t until

Fifty-nine mil-

Lee-on, nine-hundred thousand years on

That the greatest thing

Happened in history:

The modern human was born!

In a hundred thousand years we’ve come so far,

We have complex societies and fancy cars!

Surely we’re the best in the universe?

But Schröedinger says this is all a farce!

Because everything is random:

Sub-particles do not move in tandem.

Man cannot seem to command them.

So what do we do?

Are we all just a fluke?

Could we just disappear in the blue?

We don’t really know. It’s up to you!