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.