Nose Removal Increases Productivity

Of all the things that I anticipated would leave me paralyzed and motivationless at the end of the semester, the one I didn't see coming ended up doing me in.

Allergies. I hate them so hard. I've had them my whole life, year-round, every year, without fail. Before coming to this university, I lived in a state with next to no seasonal changes. I didn't think I even had seasonal allergies. Living through spring in a state that has a full palette of beautiful seasons has taught me the error of my assumption. I find this rather depressing, because it means that I'll be debilitated by allergies during exam time every year! Every morning I wake up, immediately have an allergy attack, pop pills, chug tea to chase off the fatigue, and wander through the day in a haze of exhaustion brought on by my wiped out immune system. I've never needed so many naps before. Reading dry academic texts is difficult on the best of days; with my body is exhausted and my eyes falling shut every few minutes, it's nearly impossible. More caffeine doesn't seem to be helping, it only makes my body feel even weirder. You'd think after all these years, I would have found a solution! I tried opening the window to air out our moldy, dusty townhome, but then pollen blew in the window and covered my desk. So. Best I can do is take a pill every 12 hours on the dot and buy up whatever other over-the-counter symptom treatments are available.

While I'm here, I may as well give a progress update. I'm roughly halfway through my English paper on Promethea. Not all of it has been formally written yet, but I've been making semi-informal annotations to get myself writing. I have a lot of trouble with editing while I write; I won't commit a sentence to paper if it isn't perfectly crafted. That obviously makes for extremely slow progress, which is why I've started doing annotations in blog format. It really helps me a lot, since it seems to take the pressure off and lets me just dump the ideas out of my head without worrying so much. It seems dumb and simple, but it's a huge step in the right direction for me. I'm hoping to have this paper mostly done by tonight, with just editing and formatting left for tomorrow. Then it'll be time to launch straight into my Spectralism paper! Thrilling, really. Wish me luck.

All's Quiet on the Blogging Front...

Is there anyone academically-affiliated that doesn't hate this time of year? I see both students and professors shuffling around campus in a burned-out daze, and I'm right there with them. Everyone is stumbling around with armfuls of books, looking despondent and exhausted, hardly noticing the beautiful weather that's finally graced us with its presence. Even the frat boys are hunched over their laptops in the library, looking sober and focused. It's really a depressing time to be on campus. If you aren't already worn down by your own work, seeing even the most cheerful students repeatedly slamming their faces into a pile of nasty books will sure do it for you. It passes eventually, though, and midway through next week half of these kids will have already flown home for the summer.

Today is the last day of classes. It's also the last concert of the year, and I unfortunately volunteered to perform on it. Gotta go out with a bang, I guess, filling this last day with as much work as possible. Time to move into serious paper crunching mode.

First up to bat is my final paper for Narrative & Time. I've decided to write about the comic series Promethea, written by Alan Moore and penciled by J.H. Williams. Specifically, I've decided to go all hardcore comic scholar and analyze Williams' panel structure as a method of portraying temporal and spatial instability. This one will be somewhat difficult, as most of the resources I need are already checked out of the library with no hopes of recalling them, but I think I have enough information to lay a firm groundwork and overlay it with lots of my own analysis. It's due on May 4th, but the professor has begged us to get them done as early as possible. My goal is to finish by May 1st or 2nd, leaving time for...

...paper number two, the one for my Spectralism class, and the one that is likely to kill me in my sleep and drink my blood. The good news is that all of my interlibrary loans have finally arrived! Let there be confetti and ponies on this happy occasion! The bad news is that I have no thesis statement for this paper yet. I have a topic, resources, and examples, but no argument to make yet. My professor assures me that as I do my analysis, an argument will present itself to me. I sure freaking hope so. The analysis will take long enough by itself without me agonizing for three days over what to write. This paper is longer and more in depth than the previous paper, so once I start writing I need to churn it out fast.

I'm so ready to write 40 amazing pages of analysis in the next two weeks. And grade a bunch of final projects for the Music & Computers class. And move to a new house halfway across town.

Bring on the caffeine!

Can I Write My Paper About Space Monkeys?

Some very hard-working people have inspired me to stop feeling sorry for myself and just get to work. When I talk to my grad student friends I know from other departments, they sound like I did in undergrad. They talk about how swamped with work they are, how much effort they're putting in, but in the end everything gets done and it's all good work. Right now, they're all going nuts with the end of the semester looming, frantically researching their final papers and climbing toward that staggering page count. I've been having the opposite problem since I got here; since I've been so unhappy with everything they're forcing me to do here that it's killed my motivation. They work so hard, but I just don't care anymore. Without motivation, and without a topic to care about, I find myself freaking out at the last minute trying to churn out some bullshit, and it ends up being subpar work that I'm not proud of. I used to enjoy (as much as anyone can enjoy) writing academic papers for two reasons: I liked the research phase of collecting tons of books and learning a bunch of new stuff, and I liked the "job well done" feeling that came with writing a paper and knowing I did the best I could. I liked being able to go back, read a paper, and be proud of the conclusions I had drawn. Now, I feel like I can't make myself work, no matter what I do.

Well, I'm just going to try harder now. I have two final papers coming up. One of them I know I can enjoy writing, because I have three topics in mind that I can get into. That paper, of course, is for my English class. If not for that class, I might have gone crazy and left by now. Of course, it only has to be 10 pages. Figures that the one I care about is the short one. My other paper has to be 20-40 pages, and it's going to be really hard to find a topic that I give a damn about that will actually fit the class. For the most part, I've found the music we're studying to be pretty painful to listen to. The thought of listening to it enough times to write a 20+ page analysis of it makes me sad inside. I have a meeting today with that professor to brainstorm paper topics, and he's the only professor I've felt comfortable talking to about my give-a-shit issues, so he seems on board for helping me find a topic I care about. I hope we can come up with something without me having to tell him that I hate the music he's devoted his life to studying. I really want to do a good job with this paper, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I still have the ability to work hard. If I find a topic I can really get into, then I'd love to use this paper for the big paper I have to turn in at the end of year two to prove that I can write like an academic. That paper is apparently a really big deal, so most people try to write it as part of a class so it goes through lots of editing. If nothing else, that idea serves as some extra motivation. Less work further down the road? Yes, please. In fact, it's time for that meeting right now. Here's hoping it's not painful.

Something Smells Like Burning...

I took this weekend to do some reading for pleasure, rather than seeing just how close I could get a match to the pages of Bakhtin's "The Dialogic Imagination" without setting the pages on fire. I always forget how much my favorite pastime relaxes me (the reading, not the fire). It's like a 'reset' button on my brain, but not one of the ones you have to push by shoving a paperclip into it. That's more what school feels like. I read some comics, immersed myself in a young adult fantasy series by one of my favored authors, and scored some great deals for future reading at the used book store. As usual, this has lead to me spending way too much time managing my Shelfari page, but even that has a certain relaxation factor to it. I should require myself to read at least one book for fun each month. When the school year hits, I tend to stop reading anything fun that isn't fanfiction. Allowing myself one novel per month would likely go a long way toward alleviating some stress. The only problem is stopping once I start! I've blown through three short novels in the past few days, and my Kermode reading for English is starting to get jealous. Maybe I'll see how flammable it is after class today.

So, not that I'm counting or anything...but the last day of classes is only 21 days away. The last day of exams is May 8th, but I keep forgetting that this university is huge, and thus has an exam period of almost two weeks, most of which has nothing to do with me. My undergrad university took about five days, and two of those days the campus was nearly empty. So, freedom and sanity are far closer than I originally thought, and I'm feeling a bit more hopeful about my chances of finishing this semester alive. If someone takes the matches away, I might even make it to the end without burning any particularly nasty theory texts.

I think I'm going to buy one of those giant desk calendars so I can draw large, satisfying X marks over each day that passes. Maybe using a razor blade. We'll see what kind of week I have.

Proverbial Shit, Meet Fan (Part 2)

((Continued from previous entry))

After re-reading the e-mail in which my independent study bid was rejected, I've realized some things.

What irritates me most is that he rejected my independent study request because he thinks I need to do more writing. He said: "There's a serious writing component to the program, & for most people it's the most difficult component. So if you have a chance to work on writing in the context of some academic class, that's helpful. At the end of next year, you'll have to submit an academic paper, typically incl. fairly rigorous analysis, some 'big ideas', a 'clear thesis', and so on. We tend to be pretty demanding about the quality of that paper. It's a big plus for you if you've already basically *written* the paper in some other class."

Now, this makes me very angry for several reasons. (1) I suggested that the independent study have a writing component. (2) Last semester I wrote a paper on my own, not as part of a class, submitted it to a conference, and had it accepted. I had no support from the faculty on this whatsoever. (3) That paper was actually the SECOND academic paper I had written and presented at a professional conference. No other student in my department has done that. Add to that the fact that I'm 8-10 years younger than the average student in the program. I'm not saying my writing is perfect or that I have nothing to learn, not at all. What I am saying, though, is that I don't need an analysis-based class to force me to write. All those classes do is make me churn out bad papers on topics I don't care about. I can do research and write papers on my own about topics that actually interest me, and if I have a faculty advisor who actually cares and is involved then I bet the paper would be even better.

I haven't given up the fight, but I'm just too worn out to pursue it further right now. I'm going to present the above points to him and see if he'll reconsider, but I'm not all that hopeful. I'm more concerned with getting through the semester with my sanity and health intact at this point. I've been sick three times in the past four weeks. I haven't been that bad off since my sophomore year of undergrad, the same year I had a nasty struggle with depression. I've felt myself slipping back to that time, and this recent bout of illnesses has really brought it home how close I am to being back at that point of my life, a place I never though I'd be ever again. Mr. Dead has been quite worried, as he was there for it last time, and has convinced me that I need to schedule a meeting with the composition professors to try and set things right. If it looks like things can't work out for me here, he's made me promise that I'll look for other programs to transfer to.

It scares the crap out of me, because I don't want to have wasted this entire year of work. We're also just getting to the point where we're making friends and having fun here, and now we're talking about leaving. Of course, my biggest fear is that if I leave here, I won't be accepted to any other programs, and then what will I do with my life? Ultimately, though, if I'm miserable here, is it worth it to stay? Even if they offer to change things, will I be happy if I stay, or have I already become too bitter towards them?

Maybe I'll build us a hobbit hole and become a reclusive artist who lives off the land and bites anyone who comes near. That sounds way better than getting some fancy piece of paper.

Proverbial Shit, Meet Fan (Part 1)

There's a lot going on right now, and I don't really know how to start writing about it all. I guess we'll start with some basic facts.

Fact One: My plea for an independent study got rejected.
Fact Two: My health, both physical and mental, has seriously declined over the month of March.
Fact Three: I'm going out of my mind because I hate this department so much.
Fact Four: Mr. Dead has finally convinced me that I need to look in earnest for a different program.

Fact One brings up some major problems, and has been at least partly responsible for Facts Two through Four. As I've complained about before, 4 out of 4 seminars thus far have been analysis-based; I feel like we've gone over method of analysis derived by someone with a typewriter and a need to pad their tenure portfolio. Add the fact that most of this analysis has centered around music I don't even enjoy listening to, and you have one big ball of unhappy, repressed Megan. Most of my classes might have been fine, perhaps even really interesting, had they existed on their own in a mix of different types of classes. I'm in a creative field. Ultimately, this is a music composition Ph.D program. I'm supposed to be making my own art and learning how to write about it, but in reality I've done almost nothing of either one. When they were trying to recruit me here, they told me that I could take my art in whatever direction I wanted. Sure, I can do whatever I want...on my own time, with no support or interest from them. In the meantime, I need to write this type of composition, compose for this ensemble, and analyze these pieces.

I really thought coming to grad school was going to mean more freedom. I thought I would be using this time to develop my own thoughts and opinions, to hone my artistic skills, to find the path that most suits me. The only progress I've made in those areas was done completely on my own, no thanks to them. This place is trying to box me in, instead of help me grow. What's infuriating is that the director of the program keeps insisting that they don't do that, that they're totally open. Maybe that's true at the dissertation level, but I have to survive three years of this bullshit before I get there, and I'm not sure I'm willing to put up with it.

I'll elaborate on the above listed facts as soon as I untangle everything going on in my head. Influx of nasty, pissed off posts, coming right up. To be continued.

Christmas in March! Presents?

My professor and advisor from my undergrad university knew me way too well. Though I tried to play it off as a common trait of serious students, he saw through me and announced it to the class: "Registration is Megan's favorite time of the year. It's like Christmas!"

Okay, so it used to be true. I used to spend hours looking through the course offering book, writing down the numbers for every class that interested me, and making elaborate charts that detailed which graduation requirements I still needed to fulfill, which classes would meet the requirements, and which classes conflicted with each other. I loved classes. I admit it. It's one of the reasons I decided to go to graduate school; I wasn't ready to stop! I took some of the most random things in undergrad that had nothing to do with my degree or career path: Latin I, Human Sexuality, Religion Seminar, Biology 101 (for science majors...ouch!), Love & Sexuality in World Religions...the list goes on. I graduated with something like 152 credits in four years. I was DUMB.

Right now, I could use some of that old dumbness back. Registration time has come around again, and I find myself pretty apathetic. Part of it is the simple lack of options. I'm required to take two seminars each semester, and the composition program is so small that there are usually only two seminars offered, one analysis and one creative. Oh dear me, however shall I choose? True, I'm also required to take two seminars outside the department over the course of two years, but I've already taken one and I'm saving my second one for a creative writing class offered only in the spring. Thing is, though, that every single class I've taken here so far has been analysis-based, due to some weird scheduling issues and professors being on sabbatical. An entire year of analysis. No creative classes. Even my composition lessons have been more focused on technique than creativity, and I've not gotten the chance to do any work on the projects I really want to be devoting my time to. This is a problem. This is one of the big reasons I've been going out of my mind this year and hating my program.

Good news is, I may have found a solution. Independent study! I have an e-mail out to one of the professors asking if he'd be willing to save me from eternal torment and give me this opportunity to have two creative classes next semester. Think of how much I could get done! I might actually get to tackle some of the projects I've been dreaming up since I got here!

It seems too good to be true, after the way things have been going here. But I'm going to hope! A lot!

...and maybe conduct some creepy rituals to ensure the professor agrees. Accept my request for independent study, or the voodoo doll gets it!

Sanity is an Endangered Resource

I spent my morning being terribly academic, sipping a chai latte in a localorganicfairtrade coffee shop, listening to Depeche Mode, and furiously highlighting and annotating my hundreds of pages of reading. Then I went to the basketball arena to watch the inauguration with thousands of other people. Then I came home and dropped a class.

Okay, so the reading for Musicology scared me. A lot. Not the content so much, though a rant on that will be coming soon enough. I realized that while this week I may only have 20 pages of reading for my English class, before long I would have a total of 500-600 pages of reading between the two classes. On top of all that, I would be expected to write a lot and continue composing extensively. Today I realized that there is no way I can possibly do all that and retain my sanity. 

I've been very sensitive about my sanity lately. I've gained a lot of perspective since graduating from undergrad, and I see now that I pushed myself way too hard and sacrificed my happiness way too much for grades. I spent a good deal of undergrad strained to the limit, on the verge of breakdown, constantly taking on more and trying to be perfect at all of it. In the end, I missed out on a lot of life, but had a lot of really great work to show for it. I've gone in the complete opposite direction since then, and I'm having a hell of a time trying to strike some sort of balance. I have seriously burned out from going so hard for so long. This year, instead of dying because I'm working so hard, I'm dying because I'm having trouble forcing myself to work, to care about what I'm working on. It doesn't help that I'm really unhappy in my current program. I'm hoping that with a better lineup of classes and a more positive atmosphere, I might be able to turn things around this semester. I'm happy, I have a great home life, and I love nerding out with Warcraft and my D&D friends and reading. But I need that other kind of happiness, too. I never feel more fulfilled than I do when I work really hard on something and have a professor tell me that it's excellent work. It's not so much the praise that I need, though I do require the occasional affirmation that I don't suck everything I do. It's an artistic and intellectual satisfaction that I'm missing. 

If I don't get that by the end of this semester, I think it might be the end of my time at this university.

And now, without all that scary reading ahead of me, I can devote my full time to my conference paper. Time to grab a beer and dig in.

 

Playing Catch-Up: Fall 2008

So, as the end of the fall 2008 semester tried its best to grind my face into the ground, I tried my best to keep blogging. I obviously failed, as the low post count for December will show, but that isn't to say I didn't churn out some material. In fact, I have several text documents full of post fragments, topics to cover, and notes on events that I fully intend/ed to post eventually. I may get around to elaborating on some of these at some point in the future, but since most of them will likely never see their own post, I give you: December 2008 in review, Ph.Dead style. 

-- What the hell is up with students friending me on Facebook? 

-- I am going to dissect the next person who tells me what I should do with MY compositions.

-- How to talk about John Cage, one of my heroes, to an indifferent class: "He was a composer and music philosopher who specialized in skull fucking tradition." Can I say that?

-- "Grades should be submitted within forty-eight hours after the final exam." WHAT?! What about my own exams? *cry*

-- What happens when you pick a bad topic for a 20 page paper and it's due in two days...

-- I never thought I'd actually be wistful about saying goodbye to my Music 101 classes. 

-- A gift from a student? For me? And it was shipped here from China?!

-- End-of-semester crunch time...what fun.

Time for my first meeting of the semester. *deep breath* 

First Day Back Blues? Or Purples?

New semester, new posting season for Ph.Dead. 

No, I did not actually die at the end of last semester. It was a particularly unrestful winter break, however, due to excessive traveling and excessive our-apartment-is-falling-apart-but-they-won't-let-us-move raging. Now, the fateful day has arrived: the first day of classes. Time to brace myself and charge headfirst into chaos. 

So, what does the new semester hold for me? Well, hopefully it will mean increased motivation above all. I'm taking some classes that I'm terribly excited about, and the class I'm teaching this semester is not only NOT at 9 AM, it is also NOT a non-major class, NOT a 100-level class, and NOT 120 students large. Instead, it starts at a very reasonable 11:00 AM, contains all music and computer science majors, is a 300-level class, and is capped at 30 students with 10 students per lab session. The lab is what I'll be teaching, and the course material is right up my alley. Intro to Music and Computers, AKA Intro to What I'll Supposedly Be Doing for the Rest of My Life. I'm actually looking forward to this, and it'll mean I get to brush up on lots of material I should know like the back of my hand anyway. 

The professor I'm TA-ing for this semester is a visiting lecturer from Berklee, and I have to admit that I was nervous at first. All the professors around here are so snobby and anti-idealist, I was starting to fear that all computer music professors at the graduate level would be the same way. Not so. Within the first few minutes, we were pretty comfortably chatting, he was asking me for book recommendations for the class, and we jointly expressed our frustration over the crappiness of this school and the disorganized nature of the program. I thought it was just me that got kicked into the middle of everything and told to just "figure it out"; well, turns out they extend that same courtesy to faculty members. This guy has restored my hope that maybe you CAN stick with this field and not let academia turn you into a jaded, pretentious asshole. Ah, the light at the end of the tunnel. Fortunately, I also have this same guy for my composition lessons this semester, so I'm looking forward to working with him in that respect as well. 

One thing that I think will help keep my sanity as well is that my schedule is much more cohesive than it was last semester. Most of my classes occur in the 11:00-2:00 range, with a few exceptions, which makes sharing the car with the husband-unit much easier. Less evening classes also means I might be able to keep up a light raiding schedule for World of Warcraft this semester. Yes, I know, not exactly top priority, but it's one of those small bits of social interaction that I value very much. I'm also auditioning for the choir at our local Unitarian Universalist church ((What? Me in a church?! I know, crazy. But it's all non-religious and relaxed and fun!)), so that will hopefully be another fun and social activity. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high, but overall, life seems on track for a much healthier and happier semester.

I'm going to kill whoever has been making that annoying beeping noise for the past TEN MINUTES in the next cubicle. 

Healthier, happier semester.

There's about to be blood. 

Beep....beep....

The light is so close, but so far...!

I am mere hours from being (mostly) done with this god forsaken semester. I find it ironic that I'm spending this time analyzing a piece filled with church hymns. 

Once my oral presentation on this piece is over, I can relax considerably. Yes, I'm definitely still busy. I have a buttload of papers to grade before Thursday. I have to administer and grade the final exam for my students. I have a paper due on the topic of today's presentation next week. But it's not all NOW, and that's what matters. I don't have to spend every waking second working on something. I can actually, you know, maybe pick up a book over the next few days. Maybe play some warcraft. Maybe sleep without having dreams about school. (No...really.)

It can be Wednesday now?

Picking my Poison: Spring 2009

So, my course schedule for next semester looks like this:

MUSI 725 – Performing Antique and Modernities
ENSP 545 – Narrative & Time
MUSI 892 – Supervised Research
MUSI 782 – Composition Lessons

Respectively, these courses are:

• - A musicology seminar that “focuses on how people perform themselves as part of a modern world” and how “technology and intercultural dialogue play into the construction of modernities”.
  
• - A special topics course in the English department about fictional narrative and the construction and deconstruction of time. Involves reading many novels.
  
• - An independent study where I can research and write about whatever I want.
  
• - Just how it sounds – private composition lessons with one of the composition faculty.
  

I’ll also be TAing MUSI 339, Intro to Music and Computers, taught by the new visiting lecturer. I’ll TA the lecture portion, then I’ll be teaching the software in the lab portion. I’m a little nervous being the only TA, but I honestly think this’ll be a HELL of a lot better than the class I’m currently TAing.

I’m ridiculously excited about this English class. I e-mailed the professor to make sure he wouldn’t mind having a music grad student in his class, and his response was: “Would I mind having a music student along for the ride? Are you kidding? Couldn't be better. Music, in fact, lies at the heart of my thinking. From time to time I've thought of a course in Music and Narrative, though the way that particular body of ideas was practiced twenty years ago seemed to me to miss the point, and since then, it seems to have been out of favor. So yes. I'd love to have you in the class.” Lawl. Just reading his syllabus and exchanging e-mails with him makes me really excited to take his class. He sounds like just the creative type of person who is still excited about art and life that I really want to be around and learn from. Of course, there’s also the whole fact that this class plays perfectly into my current independent research. Overall, next semester is looking far more interesting! It looks like I’ll actually be kept busy, too, instead of having a slack class like I do this semester. I’m one of those dumb people that either needs to be completely free, or so busy I might die. I don’t do the in between well at all (ex. this semester). The good thing is, though, that I’ve found a way to turn my slack class into something much more interesting so that maybe I can finish out the semester on a strong note. I’ve managed to shoehorn the project that my husband and I are collaborating on into that class, essentially making the planning stages of it into my final project. Win. I’m really looking forward to next semester, now. But first…I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving break. /headdesk

A Break from Negativity

Last night, I had an hour and a half long phone conversation with my professor and mentor from undergrad (we’ll call him “N”) about all the issues I’ve been having with the composition program here. I have to say, I feel immensely better now, and I no longer feel the need to bolt and go find a program that’s better suited to me. I was able to talk out a lot of the problems I’ve been having, and he really helped me figure out which were stupid things I just have to put up with and which I need to actually do something about. N reminded me that if there’s something wrong with the program here, something lacking, I have a voice and I should use it. I’ll go into detail about some of these issues later; they deserve their own entry. Ultimately, he gave me a lot of great advice, and it was so helpful to be able to just talk to someone I trust who’s been there.

Out of all of this came a decision about next semester that I was already leaning toward: I’m not taking any composition classes other than private lessons next semester. Not only do I feel like the composition courses here are horribly dry, but I actually feel like they’re sucking the life out of my compositions. When we were talking last night, N pointed out that it’s what you do outside of composition that feeds back into it as inspiration. I realized he’s absolutely right. When I was in the digital arts department, I was constantly surrounded by creative people doing all sorts of really interesting, non-computer music stuff. Video art. Installations. Improvisation. I was also in liberal arts classes, and those fed into it, too. Very little of what I did was actually studying computer music. While this has left me with huge gaps in my knowledge, I feel like a much more well-rounded and creative person - a perfectly viable trade-off, in my mind. I’m suffering by immersing myself in all this dry theory of computer music. I need to have the knowledge, I don’t deny that, but I can’t let it stifle my creativity. I feel a lot more motivated now that I have a direction, and I really think that if I can just survive the end of this semester, I’ll be able to make it. The number one piece of advice that N gave me was to find a project I care about and throw myself into it. That’s what he did when he was in this first semester slump in grad school, and it made all the difference. My husband and I actually have a collaboration we’ve been starting the research for, and it’s looking really exciting. I think we have a really good, solid concept, and it’s something we’re both really into. I’ll have to devote an entry to that project sometime soon.

I’m going to use this newfound hope and motivation to go register for next semester’s courses and get some work done. It’s so nice to make a post that isn’t overwhelmingly negative!