Graduate School

So i have like 1 more trimester of this semester (haha, its funny that we refer to this hellishly fast academic dash as a semester) left before i'm done with the first 4th of my masters. I'm so tired and i really dig the material, but the pace is really intense.

I've been thinking about what I want to do. I guess I'm just as indecisive as ever, probably because things have been going really well in too many different directions. For all the complaining I do about how hard Middlebury is, it's been going really really well. better than I expected, academically, especially because even when I like a subject and usually do well in it, it's rare that I'm consistent with anything... maybe I'm jinxing myself and my next round of papers/exams wont go so well. that would be humbling. But i'm really enthusiastic about music these days. I think about it nonstop....but its been demonized in my mind somehow as this vice that distracts me from all the practical real-life things I should be paying attention too instead. Everyday I meet more people that I can't talk to about my non-sense musical ponderings, everyday I spend less time listening, contemplating, not to mention practicing, which has been on the back burner for well over a year at this point.

I did something really stupid in my contemplations this morning: i decided to read 2 essays I wrote at the end of my sophomore year, the exact midpoint of my college career, the critical prelude to spending a year abroad. One of the essays was on an italian director's use of operatic forms in his films, and the other was on the social/artistic intersections between brazilian capoiera and american jazz. It was really strange to read something I'd written in english from so long ago. i was sort of taken aback by my written voice, by how i verbalize intellectual thoughts, not even because they were well-worded (cuz sometimes they weren't) but more because I haven't done that in english in over year. (side note-senior year is going to be an academic shit show...) It was also even more confusing, because I really enjoyed working on both of those essays a lot, and it only made making a decision between the two even more confusing because clearly, right now, I'm in the middle of improving my italian, but even when I write an extensive research paper in Italian, I'm still referring to music, my passion, the thing i feel i know the best. Then in my music paper, I wasn't even really discussing music itself at all, I was talking about social structures within musical communities, talking about the cultural roots of artistic development, how african diasporic art forms become fetishized by mainstream (often white) communities. In the end, both papers were wildly multi-discipline...so what the fuck?

I think what I'm trying to say is this. I like learning and i like music and italian, but it doesn't stop there. I'm too eclectic academically, I need a master's program that lets me study everything and compare everything and talk about things that maybe don't appear to pertain to Italian studies directly...and thats why this program feels weird. I love Italy, i love italian, and i like reading and writing. But i get a mean case of writers block when something I'm writing seems irrelevant, when analyzing that unknown passage of Indian Nocturn for 4 pages seems like a meaningless exercise in grammar and fluency instead of stylistics, literary criticism, or expressing an idea worth reading about.

I guess a lot of things I do are really meaningless though.

Only in vermont

or more specifically, only in middlebury do chef-hat in-dosing dining hall staff expertly navigate narrow cement paths on john deere golf cart/mini-tractors. while walking the campus this afternoon, that was a view i had the pleasure of seeing. It happens rather often here. In fact, there are some hilarious personalities that ride hilarious forms of transportation all over the campus. For instance, there's this one guy that drives a segue. It's pretty epic and always provides a good opportunity for a much needed laugh in the entirely too busy lives middlebury grad students live for 6 weeks.

I have very little to complain about these days. i am entirely too busy, enough that i'm unable to find time to listen to music which hasn't happened to me in a very long time and is very unnerving. I've been laughing a lot, especially on the weekends, and that keeps me in good spirits. If it weren't for that, I'm pretty sure i'd be really unsettled by all this work and intellectualism around me, but the only choice i have is to muscle through it. It's just a little too much.

Weekends here are like nothing else. There is always something fun to do, usually to the point that I can't decide what I want to do. the social reality at midd is so unrealistic it's frustrating, because you meet so many incredible people that you live with night and day for 6 weeks and that you may or may not see again. I'm living with one of my best friends from last summer's program, and it's just weird to think that when i come back next summer, she won't be here.

In less than 3 weeks, i'm going back to california for the first time in over a year. That's the longest i've ever been away from "home," wherever that is, and I have really mixed feelings about going back. I can't wait to see friends, but I guess I sort of see it as a lily pad for my more final arrival in boston.

I've been thinking about when the soonest would be that I could go to italy again...i wish money generated itself while i slept or something....

Porto

A month ago, i was on my way to portugal with Angela. One of the most amazing trips of my life. 3 plane flights, many cities, and lots of contacts all over the world later and I'm in Middlebury, Vermont doing things like watching the world cup in a random vermontese's living room with his hilarious family, and going to the nearby lake on days when class is cancelled 'snow-day' style because it's too hot to have class in the aircondiitoned classrooms. Whatever, that one i still haven't understood, but i'm never gonna question cancelled class.

Point is, its been a weird, long, slow transition. i'm still in the middle of it, i can feel it. When i think about how recently i was on another continent, i almost get a sense of veritgo. none of this can possibly be real. I can't possibly be studying organized crime with the leading mafia expert on the face of the earth, not to mention writing papers to be read by him, and answering his very daunting and complicated questions in another language in class. Too many things seem unreal, not even because they're positive or intimidating, but mostly because its too much too fast. i need a moment....

a year ago

at this same program, i was doing grammar exercises and writing short 1.5 page essays every week in the slow grueling effort to learn and speak italian. i was basically speaking english with my friends, but using italian words. I was having a lot, likely too much, fun on the weekends (and lets be honest, usually weeknights too). I was finding academic shortcuts and loopholes.

This summer, i'm taking 2 of the most thought provoking and globally relevant courses I've probably ever taken in my life in any language. The language of the texts I'm reading is so difficult, i can't even understand the definitions of most of these words in english. Heavy intellectual theoretical models about identity, intersection of culture, identity, language, and state, power structures, gender constructions in language, political corruption of the state and its cooperation with the mafia, societies that live under mafia control, the 'historic novel' and how fictional narratives based around important historic events become our own cultural memoirs of that time, extremely polarized literary academic disagreements over books like gattopardo, gomorra. instead of writing 1.5 pages, i'm writing 12 page final papers for 3 classes in 6 weeks, reading 18+ books (articles, chapters of other books) and watching on average 5 hours of film each week. No grammar. just sheer content and increased expectation of quality intellectual thought processes. fuck.

I dont know how much of that you understood. me either. Thats the sort of malgamush thats rattling around inside my head in not just one language, folks, but two. I've been here less than a week, and may or may not have already lost my mind. It could also be the fact that i'm hungover and in the library. who knows. add the deep sinking of feeling that is culture shock and you have a clear idea of how i'm feeling/doing right now. the culture shock feeling is not good....very very very bad in fact. makes you wonder why you do what you do, and why you didnt/couldn't stay, and what it would have been like. a bunch of useless what ifs, i guess.

I realized I never wrote a travel post about portugal. I'll try to put it up soon. I should take this pledge more seriously, but I'm in the mood to chat. (when am i not in the mood to chat...)