Don't cry for me, Schmindiana

I started this blogging project with a few distinct motivations: about 60 % to work on the craft of my writing in a non-intimidating venue before entering PhD World, 30 % to narcissistically detail the events of my life for friends and acquaintances without, you know, having to personally correspond with them or anything, and 10 % to have some kind of emotional outlet because I am too broke to afford therapy but GAH I probably need it because these past few months have been unrelentingly dramatic on all fronts and mostly in good ways but sometimes shit has to happen before the bright shiny new paths open up and sometimes the person subletting your apartment turns out to be mildly psychotic and bars you from entering your own living room at any time because the two of you have different cultural notions of space ownership and vastly different notions of how to speak to other human beings and then a screaming altercation breaks out and you're cast from your apartment into the parking lot in 98 degree heat with nowhere to go, tears streaming down your face, shaking with indignation, a total HOT MESS. 

But anyway. All I really meant to say was that this post may lean more toward the personally therapeutic than the eloquently styled. This is why: I have left Bleep U. after having been a student there for seven years, and have just moved to tropical-storm threatened YDC (You Dork City) to strike out in a new field. I know, I KNOW, what an obnoxiously stereotypical Young Person thing to do. Couldn't I have been a little more original in my life trajectory? Everyone does it, or talks about doing it, and I'm sure that there is absolutely no new observational ground to be broken in the genre of smallish-town-girl-uproots-herself-and-tries-to-make-it-in-the-Big-Schnapple. Please. But nonetheless I must personally come to terms with this momentous change, and therefore have accorded myself exactly one blog entry to wax nostalgic about the Bleep U. Era, to ponder the immutable rhythms of time, to contemplate notions of place and self... and all the rest of that crap.

To be honest, the implications of this move have not quite set in yet. I don't feel as emotionally sucker-punched as anticipated. Maybe I did most of the letting go when I was actually there, clearing out my locker and my teaching office, boxing up/ selling off/ throwing out my meager personal possessions, saying goodbye to various people piecemeal over the course of spring and summer. Or maybe-- more plausibly-- I'm in the denial stage, fully expecting to hop on a flight in a few days, ride the airport shuttle through vast stretches of cornfield, wheel my suitcase a few blocks back to my apartment in good old Snackwell Parish (incestuous stronghold of Bleep U. schmoozic students for generations), attend various stilted start-of-semester meetings, scowl at the influx of bright-eyed optimistic new blood, duck into Schitty Bakery for coffee / croissant and inevitable run-ins with everyone I know, cross the street to seek (in vain) a practice room in the teeming windowless circular building, flee to my closet-sized teaching studio in the highest room of the tallest tower and say hello to whoever else might be lurking up there, dig out my score of the Schlach two-and-three-part inventions and begin to work through them on the startlingly reverberant upright piano, let the unassailable logic of counterpoint wash over me, will myself into a place of calm acceptance at the prospect of yet another year here, start to brainstorm escape routes. OH WAIT.

It will sting like a motherfucking stinging nettle eventually, I know. My identity is rather deeply intertwined with this institution, probably more so than most other students who pass through. Prior to my seven-year student "tenure"-- and seven years in itself is a LONG time, enough time for Harry Potter's entire hero narrative to unfold, enough time for, like, twenty-nine generations of iThings to hit the market-- I spent two summers at Bleep U.'s pre-college piano intensive, a program that lured me in as a garden variety angsty maladjusted teen and spat me out the musical zealot we now know and love/ tolerate.

Things did not get off to a promising start, though. This is the story of my maiden voyage: fifteen-year-old me had boarded a connecting flight from the West Coast, through Chicago, and to Dingyanapolis, where I would take a shared cab for the hour-long ride to campus and check in at the dorms. Fifteen-year-old me had also purchased and consumed some "authentic" deep-dish Chicago pizza at the O'Hare airport. The suspect nature of this food and my natural predisposition to motion sickness culminated in a vomiting incident on the side of the highway in KKK-infested Schmindiana Nowheresville, an incident that sadly did not clear a wide berth for the outfit I was wearing. My mom had repeatedly told me to pack a change of clothes in my carry-on. Had I listened to her? OF COURSE NOT. She was my mom. So as penance for my adolescent hubris, I made a grand splash at Orientation that afternoon as the kid who had puked on herself.

The weeks that followed were a vast improvement over that first day; in fact, they may still hold the title of Best Time of My Life. The stars aligned in such a way that all at once I found my intellectual/ spiritual vocation and felt, for the first time, a complete sense of acceptance among my peers. The notebooks that I kept during this time attest to both facets of Awesome. In the front sections are meticulous records of lessons, masterclasses, and seminars, scribbled down in loopy cursive as I tried to absorb every morsel dispensed by teachers and invited speakers. Sonata form. Principles of postural alignment. Plagal cadences versus authentic cadences versus the ever-titillating Phrygian half-cadence. The psychology of performance anxiety. The Chopin etudes in (subjective) order of difficulty. Definitions of dodecaphony, aleatory, minimalism. And, delightfully, I still have notes from a guest masterclass by Teacher, as in he who became my beloved and influential professor for three years in grad school. Usually we don't have tangible relics of these first impressions; we have to rack our brains for vestiges of these individuals before they assumed important roles in our lives, and our recollections are by nature distorted through the lens of more recent interactions. But here, HERE was an unbiased account of what my future professor had to say about the C-sharp minor prelude and fugue (Book 1), the B Minor Rhapsody, and the A-flat minor Impromptu on a June afternoon in 2002. The ideas and vocabulary are unmistakeably his: the resoundingly true artistic convictions, the wry asides, the tinge of despair at our culture's descent into crassness. Oh Teacher, look at us now...

And then there were the BACK sections of my academy notebooks, which documented the social element of camp. Okay, so maybe I wasn't hanging on every word of every lecture all the time, because how then would I have had time to conduct so many illicit written dialogues with my peers? There are pages upon pages of gossip and doodles, caricatures of the faculty and their chain-smoking ways, discussions of who was ridiculously good at piano and would get into Toolyard and who liked who and who had sneaked out of the dorms to go skinny-dipping in the fountain, conjectures about which of the counselors were screwing and in what practice rooms and on what grand pianos and with what sound effects. (Years later, when a number of us became counselors ourselves and were sadly not carrying out such activities, I hoped that the students were at least concocting rumors at our expense). The in-jokes abounded, summer love blushed, and we all cried and were devastated when we had to leave and return to our non-utopian high school existences.

I was so taken with the place, apparently, that I came back, and came back again, and stayed, and then did another degree, and then oh what the hell tacked on another year, became part of the furniture, and it got to the point where Professor Schmartledge would see me in the hallway and query, in his briny Australian accent, "Shouldn't you be about DONE by now, Alaner?"

So, school was school. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Actually it never quite achieved the dizzying joie-de-vivre of summer camp, and it never plummeted to the depths of, say, seventh grade. But certainly there were peaks and valleys, and bat caves and vortices, and numerous other topographical features that typically characterize late adolescence / early adulthood / a burgeoning life in music. I was pretty insufferably gung-ho at the outset. Lessons with faculty with long impressive biographies! Let me show off how much I know to them! Music Theory is totally cool, guys! And choir? I LOVE choir! And boyfriends! I need lots of boyfriends to validate my existence and to function as receptacles for all of my intense feeling-y feelings! Also, alcohhhhhollllll! WEEEEED!!! And then, thunk. A lot of reality checks. The discovery that music performance entailed not just enthusiasm and talent but also crazy-intense, self-flagellating, oft-solitary dedication, and even after you busted your ass you were promised nothing in terms of recognition or material gains. The accompanying discovery that your relationships with your principal teachers were kind of like your romantic relationships-- i.e. all-consuming, usually not quite the right fit, plagued with communication problems, and headed for disaster. The realization that self-acceptance was a long and difficult road, one not always compatible with a career path of artistic martyrdom, and that the university system didn't really care about either your personal journey or your professional prospects as long as you chug-chug-chugged along the conveyor belt of Degrees R Us and paid all your bursar bills on time.

Anyway, let's summarize by the numbers.

Teachers:  I had three-and-a-half over the years (the "half" is for a sabbatical replacement). The first professed a distaste for most piano literature pre-1830 and an abiding love for Bill O'Reilly-- we had a messy breakup, to say the least. The next one cracked the whip and cracked it good, but eventually he deemed me too fragile and loopily intellectual to become one of the sleek competition thoroughbreds that he was in the business of grooming. So he sent me to Teacher the humanist, and there I happily stayed. (Teacher! It was you all along).

Living situations: I spent two years in the dorms and divided the remaining years among three different apartments. I always had roommates, some of whom remain dear friends and others of whom I probably don't need to run into ever again because we were about THIS close to killing each other. Good times were had in every place of residence, but for me most of the memories come from Snackwell Parish, that dumpy shoebox apartment complex where everybody lived at some point. (And I do mean everybody-- in its original incarnation, Snackwell housed some very prominent music faculty. Slowly it sank into decrepitude and became the official living quarters of broke-ass students).  Though I didn't officially move there until the grad school epoch, I was an honorary Snackwellian from the earliest days. There was always a party going on. It could be a legendary one in which the cops showed up and all the underagers cowered in somebody's bedroom with the lights out, afraid to draw breath-- or there was that one where a full-on fight broke out over someone's girlfriend and suddenly the whole living room crowd was engaged in a massive tug-of-war to restrain the warring factions. And then sometimes the parties were totally lame and I'd look around and realize that I knew everyone in the room and everything about them and I'd rather just go home and search for clips of Beethoven string quartets on YouTube and call my mom. But more memorable than the epic pan-musician gatherings were the spontaneous small groups or one-on-one interactions that Snackwell seemed to foster. It was here, in identically shaped but diversely furnished apartments, over tea or coffee or questionable mixed drinks, that many of my acquaintance-ships made the quantum leap to friendships. We played board games, we watched movies, we tried to cook stuff with varying degrees of success (an ice cream cake doused in flaming rum was the clear winner). One time we created an arsenal of water balloons and drove around campus ambushing sorority girls. It was a small college town: we were bored, we felt trapped, we were stressed and confused about our life paths, we didn't have a huge array of cultural events and hot bars to divert our attentions. So we manufactured our own ridiculousness, and in in the process built our support systems.

Identity crises: I had about five billion of these. On a daily basis, my thought process would run something to the effect of: Is Alana a) concert pianist material, b) an academic square peg trying to fit into a piano-shaped hole (ummm, that's what she said?), c) a writery creative type, or d) deluded, none of the above, the world's best dilettante? Ohhhhh, the navel-gazing. Part of it was me, and part of it had to do with the environment. Something in the atmosphere of the Bleep U. schmoozic school made me, and others, especially prone to insecurity. My theory: when you take a glut of talented individuals and plop them down in a remote location where the only real cultural life stems from the university, most of that ability just sits and stagnates, everyone whittling away at his or her craft with correspondingly little opportunity to actually put it into practice. And eventually everyone gets so exhausted from running on the hamster-wheel of degree requirements that networking outside the school system becomes an afterthought. Not to mention that inside the school system your primary department may be a wee bit dysfunctional... as in too busy squabbling over administrative responsibilities to communicate effectively with students, let alone assist them in career development. This is one reason why I stayed in school there for so long. I became increasingly inert. The more years I'd been there, the harder it was to conceive of possibilities on the fabled outside, and I had just enough funding as a graduate student to squeak by, so why not stick around a little longer, forestall the inevitable difficult decision-making? Thus the degrees piled up and I became, as a friend recently put it, a "lifer."

But I was lucky enough to become the favorite stepchild of several other departments over the years (choir, theory, schmoozicology). This did little to lessen my confusion about OMG what to do in life?! until one day in the second year of my Master's, the most intimidating and high-powered member of the schmoozicology faculty (Schmarvard Guy) sat me down in his office. He had been my professor for a semester and a half, and I was sure that I was in trouble with him somehow and that this would be a fearful day of reckoning. But to my intense surprise, he bluntly opined that I would be wasting my best abilities by languishing in the purgatory of performance grad school, and that I would make a better addition to the scholarly community and would probably be happier there. I rebuffed him and got all defensive. WHAT? Wasn't a life in academia the most purgatorial experience of them all? Yes, other teachers and mentors had suggested similar paths for me, but never so forcefully or tactlessly. And yet Schmarvard Guy was ALWAYS right about EVERYTHING-- I had noticed this in class; he had a formidably clear-headed view of the universe-- and it was only a matter of time before I conceded that his assessment of my character was spot-on. So in the end I took his advice and applied to PhD programs (a fun [not!] process detailed in my very first blog post). Here, finally, was my long-sought-after escape, my ticket out of this one-horse town, my chance to try out a field in which eccentricity and far-flung interests were maybe assets and not detriments.

And that is exactly why I'm in the Big City right now, typing away at 5 AM as a scary unprecedented storm system approaches. What better time to reminisce and process the last major chunk of my life than right now, when forces of nature have placed the entire East Coast under house arrest? I'm sipping a Dark 'n Stormy cocktail, listening to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," and forcing all of my thoughts out into the ether before we lose power.

Natural disasters aside, I am so deliriously happy with the way things have worked out. Little signs keep cropping up that say, "Good call-- you're supposed to be here." Signs like my hilarious, proactive, and direct new teachers who I can already tell are going to give me the support and direction that I often missed back at Bleep U. Or my excellent apartment / roommate situation complete with an upright piano and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Or the presence of many other young up-and-coming musicians in my building and neighborhood-- it's an upgraded, more-fabulous extension of Snackwell where we can pretend to be grownups but retain some irresponsible behaviors.

Yes, I'll miss school. Yes, these were character-forming, crucial, young-adult years full of growth and first experiences. But towards the end, I felt like I'd wrung out the last few drops of what I could possibly gain from the environment. Most of my friends had left already. I was a known quantity in the school hierarchy, no longer upwardly mobile. I was getting jaded, on automatic a lot of the time, not quite my best self. I needed to go somewhere new and start from scratch, become a saucer-eyed, awestruck addition to the seething throng of humanity. Now I'm here and it's ON. Provided we don't all get washed away.

As noted earlier, my first moments at Bleep U. were defined by projectile vomit. My last night there, nearly a decade later, unfurled a little more elegantly. After a deeply stressful week that involved getting into a screaming match with my raging asshole of a subletter (see Paragraph 1) and moving all of my worldly belongings (Paragraph 3), I ended up at the only martini bar in town with a truly swell arrangement of people-- the last iteration of a quirky friend group that I always seemed to have. We ordered some classic cocktails. We shot the breeze per usual. I yammered on about my insane excitement for this next, radically different phase of life. And then the wonderful live musician at the bar consented to do a cover of my favorite favorite FAVORITE song, a woebegone Fink Ployd ballad. We sang along, boozy, croony, swoony-- I knew every word, of course, and it's one of those songs that adapts its meaning to whatever bittersweet life situation you find yourself in at the time. Every weird tight sensation in your chest, every half-regret and secret confession, everything you can't quite articulate finds expression in the simple strummed chords and sad suggestive lyrics. You remember exactly why pop music was invented and you fall off your elitist invulnerable pedestal, responding viscerally to the Common Man's language of melancholia. You use the song to feel everything that you need to feel, to say your proper, emotionally fraught farewell for which you can't quite find the words. You almost lose it a little bit right there, in front of everyone, but then you slap on a smile, buck up, and remember to keep your eyes on the road ahead. And then poof, the next day you're gone.