So fo' realz, our family is tired of being sick. I spent a good bit of my day Friday trying to clean Kent up after repeated throwing up (including at a playdate at the local museum, twice at home, then three times in the car throughout the day), taking him to an unimpressive substitute pediatrician because ours was out of the office, not figuring out what was wrong, then watching him mostly get better anyway. She had narrowed it down to a sinus infection (with too much snot in his tummy making him throw up) or a stomach virus... so we were just kind of guessing at treatment.

On Saturday, though, we were all feeling good, so we had a lovely lunch and Wii session at Matt and Steph's. We played Mario Kart, and it was also Jack's and my first time playing Guitar Hero, which I rocked. Such fun. We came home, and by Saturday evening, Kent had thrown up again, Jack was sick, and I was on my way. Last night was decidedly un-fun for the parental units here; every time I woke up last night from snot issues, Jack seemed to be in the bathroom for some reason or another, and Kent woke up a couple of times, so I spent a lot of time getting him back to sleep when really I just wanted to crawl back under the covers. Today was my day to get hit hard, while Jack is on the road to recovery, mostly. But seriously, the strep a few weeks ago stunk, so I thought we had earned a pass or something not to be sick for a while.

I decided to take a shower after we put Kent to bed tonight, and that has helped me feel like a non-gross person, even though my overabundance of snot continues to work its way through my system. I would like to be better, please. Okay, thanks.

Other news from this past week mostly centers around Tuesday. The Inauguration: awesome. I cried a little as we heard Wolf Blitzer interrupt the musicians at noon ET to let us know that Obama was now the president, even though he hadn't yet taken the oath. I tried to explain to Kent how cool the whole thing was. He was pointing at the screen and saying "Baba" (his version of "Obama").

Kent and I met Jack for lunch that day, then went to campus so that I could officially resign from the university. It was entirely too easy to get the form from the graduate school, then take it to the registrar and the bursar's office for signatures and be done with it. After the woman at the bursar's office said, "Okay, you're officially resigned," and I walked out of the building, I teared up. It was too quick, and I felt like someone from the university should have wanted to talk to me about my decision or wish me well or something. Nobody did. I turned in a letter of resignation to the grad school office when I got my form, but nobody read it. Such is life at a giant university, I guess, but I felt like there should have been more of a fuss made out of this major decision. They probably have students resign all the time, but to me, it was a big deal. Kent and I had to take a walk down to Highland Coffees so I could drown my sorrows with a mocha latte, and I have to say, it wasn't as satisfying as I'd hoped it would be. I guess no cup of coffee could bolster me enough after such a crazy day.

So with all of that suddenly behind me, I brought Kent home and we got ready for our party. It was a great success, with a few little boys playing in various rooms of the house, friends from school/church/my mommy group getting to know each other, and yummy food (even though I forgot to make the stuffed mushrooms I had planned and to put out the bag of red, white, and blue Terra chips I had bought). Mary and Gaines (Kent's sometime babysitters) brought a king cake, and then Gaines got the baby, which was kind of funny since the person who finds the baby in his/her slice of cake is supposed to provide the cake for the next year's get-together. We also watched McCain's concession speech and Obama's victory speech from election night, which I can't bring myself to delete from our DVR, and then we watched the recorded Inauguration festivities from that morning so that everyone who hadn't a chance to watch/listen to the speech could do so. Several of my friends later remarked that it was nice to be with people who wanted to celebrate the Inauguration, since much of Louisiana is a sea of bitter red voters.

One note from Tuesday: did anyone else notice that as the Obamas were escorting the Bushes onto the helicopter, President Bush saluted President Obama for like half a second? I have no idea whether this is traditional or whether he was just feeling moved in the moment, but I still appreciated it. I always want to believe that he's a real person, and that salute confirmed it.

It's now bedtime for the sickos in Baton Rouge. Here's hoping tomorrow has less snot and no throwing up.

Labels: being political, dissertation land, under the weather

• posted by erica 1/25/2009 09:51:00 PM
•  2 comments

It's over. I'm walking away from my dissertation. I'll never get a doctorate in music theory.

I feel free. Free to have the life I want, instead of feeling trapped in something I was never going to finish. Free to explore all the things I haven't had time to explore. Free from the guilt of not working when I knew I should, and most of all, free from the feeling that I wasn't good enough to get a PhD, because I honestly felt that way all the time.

I never actually believed I could finish a dissertation, not even when I was first starting in the doctoral program. I could imagine what graduation would be like, or teaching, but I didn't ever find a successful dissertation defense to be a plausible outcome. Everyone who goes through this process talks about how difficult it is and how they wonder if they'll ever finish, but this was a different feeling. I didn't realize the difference for a long time, so I just lumped myself in with the rest of the downtrodden doctoral students who eventually finish their degrees and then wonder what they had been so concerned about. I know that when most of you would ask me when I was going to finish my dissertation, I tended to answer, "Probably about a year," whether it was two weeks ago or two years ago. I always felt like it was just a year or so away, but then as I'd get deeper into it, I would realize (over and over) how much more time I still had left. There were always more threads, more reading, more music to consider, and I knew I'd never be able to devote the time to seeking out all of the answers I needed to search for. There was never a definite end in sight. And I didn't feel joy from it anymore, at all.

I'm grateful for the learning that took place, both about music and about myself, and I don't regret starting this degree program for an instant. I don't believe in living that way. Self-awareness often comes at a great price, but I'd never reverse the course of things if it meant that I wouldn't know about myself what I know now. Failed relationships, if we're open to what they have to teach us, can make us stronger and more able to love deeply in the future. An unkind word tossed out to someone we care about, if we explore our motivation for saying it, can lead to deeper communication and a better relationship. And the road not taken, no matter how alluring it may seem in retrospect, probably wasn't the right path at the time, which is why we didn't take it. It certainly would not have brought us to our present. I love my present, and I wouldn't change a thing.

(For the record, I do still have a masters degree, and if I someday decided I wanted to teach again, there are options, like the classes I've taught in the past that I really did love teaching.)

So what now?

Now, I stop feeling guilty about not working on my dissertation. Now, I seek out ways to change the world. Now, I indulge in things like Facebook (which I had avoided joining because I knew that if I joined it, I'd just feel guilty about spending more time not working). I'll spend more mental energy on my family instead of on something that was taking me away from my family. I'll read for pleasure again. This is the first time in my entire life that I'm not thinking about the next step of my academic career. Do you know how freeing that is? Well, most of you probably do, and maybe you didn't give it much thought when you were finishing. But for someone who was feeling as stuck as I was, being able to look beyond academia is just lovely.

Our church service this morning could not have been more perfect. Heartened by the upcoming inauguration, our very liberal pastor spoke eloquently about opening our eyes and hearts to hear God's call to us in an optimistic, but still broken, world. I'm thoroughly excited about service opportunities now that I have the time to devote to them, so everything she said and the hymns she had chosen spoke to me in a really clear way this morning.

Then I talked to my advisor after church, a conversation that went better than I ever could have imagined. He was understanding, saddened by losing me as a student but also very supportive. One of his comments was representative of his entire response, and also my whole thought process about this thing. He said, "The world doesn't need another music theory professor nearly as much as it needs more happy people." I started crying right there on the spot, because it was the most generous and true thing he could have said to me in that moment. I told him that of all the people I've talked to or whose writing I've read who have mentioned their graduate advisors, he's absolutely at the top of the list. I'm glad that I'll still see him at church, because I would hate to lose him in my life.

This week, our country begins to create a new version of itself, and so do I. I think our Inauguration Party is also turning into a New Phase of Life Party. Spreading the news to friends in town will be much more fun if I'm serving them O-shaped hors d'oeuvres and putting blue O-shaped ice in their drinks, as we fantasize about our country's future and about changing the world together.

Labels: being political, dissertation land, Freude

• posted by erica 1/18/2009 09:33:00 PM
•  6 comments

and sometimes you get a detailed answer in a new post.

My father-in-law's question: "I'm not asking about your diss, but what do you think about composers that continue composing after loosing ability to hear? I am amazed that amazing music can come from deaf composers."

Interesting question... did you know that Fauré was one of those composers with hearing loss, or were you mostly thinking of Beethoven? In any case, a good composer who's trained from a young age in eartraining, instrumentation, composition, etc., hears most things in his head before or as he's writing them down without having to hear them performed. Some composers did/do compose at a piano, but I think that's more for manipulative purposes or for wanting to experience the art he is creating in the moment, than it is for necessity. So Beethoven didn't experience a performance of his Ninth Symphony as a listener the way the audience did, but that doesn't mean that he didn't know exactly what it sounded like from start to finish.

I've often wondered how I as a musician would react to a hearing loss, whether gradual or sudden, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't react well. Beethoven knew his hearing was going, and as a result, he became even more ornery and difficult to deal with than he had been. He contemplated suicide, but then he decided to turn his pain into a motivation to compose even greater music (this decision is detailed in the beautiful Heiligenstadt Testament, a famous letter that Beethoven wrote to his brothers). Fauré's hearing problem was of a different nature, in that he began to hear sounds in a very distorted way, so rather than not being able to hear at all, it was actually painful for him to listen to music that used to sound beautiful to him. I've read some of his journals from later in his life when he describes his frustration and pain at this condition, and it's heartbreaking.

What a joy music is. I'm not sure how anyone comes to terms with the loss of music, but I would speculate that anyone who has been able to hear and then can't is probably capable, to some extent, of hearing music in his head. Small comfort.

Labels: dissertation land, Freude, music

• posted by erica 11/21/2008 11:08:00 PM
•  0 comments

This week, I've entered new territory in my dissertation work. I'm using the word "chapter" for the first time. Granted, in the Word doc in which it appears, "Chapter 1" is in parentheses right now, because my prose is just so very rough and I'm reticent to let "Chapter" sit alone without the crutches of those parentheses around it. It's like when Kent was first learning to sit up, and he'd fall over as soon as I took my hands away. I only have one really good sentence that I don't want to change, and all the rest of it needs some scholarly love. But my work with Fauré's First Violin Sonata is sort of coming together into something that sort of resembles a pseudo-chapter. Once I've turned my analysis of this work into a chapter, the work I do on my other pieces will be much easier by comparison, because I'm laying out the structure of my analytical prose in this work. Writing music analysis in a way that's both coherent and interesting is no small feat. So this chapter is like a prototype, which means that I'm feeling a simultaneous sense of exhilaration and intense pressure.

Just wanted to share that, for all of you who are curious about how my diss work is going but who don't want to ask because I've told you not to. Thanks for not asking, by the way. It means a lot to me.

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 11/20/2008 05:02:00 PM
•  1 comments

I love my advisor. Really. He's supportive, enthusiastic, kind, has kids, and is an eminently helpful resource. While reading the sections in Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day on advisors, I counted my lucky stars many times as he surpassed the list of things a good advisor does. I don't mind that his office is cluttered beyond belief, because I sometimes live that way too. I appreciate how busy he is, with student appointments (he has three doctoral students in the writing phase), faculty committees, and, oh yeah, teaching. But dude. He has a planner, and he usually writes stuff in it, but not always... so he often emails me at the last minute to reschedule our meetings or postpone them, because he's suddenly realized he has a schedule conflict.

This morning, Kent was up at 5 a.m. Yikes, right? After I dropped him off at school, I got home around 9:30 and went back to sleep, and I slept until noon. I couldn't believe it when I woke up and looked at the clock. I felt groggy, but I knew I needed to get up for my 12:30 meeting, so I got ready quickly, drove out to campus, parked myself in the coffeehouse, and sat down to check my email for the first time all morning. Somehow, I knew I'd find this email from him before I even read it... I just had that feeling. He had scheduled appointments with undergrads during our meeting time.

To be fair, he emailed me a few hours ago, and I usually do check a bunch of times a day, so he knows I'll generally get his correspondence quickly. But we meet at the SAME time every week (he's very hands-on), and he keeps forgetting what time. This happened to me with my thesis meetings a few years ago, too, and it took him about half the semester to remember the time of our regularly-occurring appointments. Now, he has a planner, and I watch him write things in it. I know he uses it. He says he just wrote in the wrong times for his undergrad appointments, so he hadn't realized the conflict until this morning.

He's not a terrible person, and I also want to cut him some slack, because I know what it's like to be so busy that appointment times get away from you. This was my life as an undergrad, when I was double-majoring and double-minoring, working as an RA, and serving as an officer in several organizations. I deliberately cut back when I came to grad school, though, realizing how easy it would be to wade back into that lifestyle and not realize it until I had gotten swept away. When I got a teaching job a couple of years ago, I learned very quickly that I needed a planner to keep things straight, and I've been surprisingly (to myself) dogmatic about using it. I just wish he could figure out how to do the same thing.

There are bigger problems to worry about. I just needed to get that out. Now I'm good.

Labels: dissertation land, school

• posted by erica 10/23/2008 01:59:00 PM
•  1 comments

(click to enlarge)
from PhD Comics


I dunno, it sounds pretty clever (and frighteningly accurate) to me...

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 10/22/2008 03:10:00 PM
•  0 comments

Kent started hugging us for the first time today, which is just indescribable joy for a mom (and a dad, I hear). He got such a kick out of wrapping his little arms around our necks and squeezing. He just kept giggling and saying/signing "more" and wanting to do it again. I feel quite lucky at the moment.

Another reminder of how blessed I am was that I FINALLY, after almost 3 weeks (?), got to catch up with my mom on the phone today. That was way too long to go without contact, and there wasn't really a reason other than the fact that we're both so swamped. I kept thinking about the Gilmore Girls episode when Rory and Lorelai are playing phone tag for days, both needing to talk to the other about major things going on, and they each end up crying in the arms of another friend because they miss each other so much. I wasn't crying yet, but I was feeling very separated from her life, wanting to know how her new teaching job was going and also just wanting to hear her voice. We never get past that connection to our moms, do we? I hope not.

I think I'll be more excited than usual tomorrow, when Kent wakes up at 6 or 6:30, because a new day of hugging will commence. Some Wednesdays, it's really hard to send him off to school, when I just want to keep him all to myself instead. I do need some time to finish some of the weird diss things I've been writing this week that are rolling around on the page, unable to be tacked down. Being in my own head space for this much time during the past week has been heavenly, because Progress is happening, but it's also like Tim Gunn's analogy to the fashion designers about the monkey house at the zoo. You first go into the monkey house, and you think, "Wow, it really STINKS in here," but after a while, you start to notice the smell less, until eventually it just smells normal to you. Of course, someone from the outside would still come in and say, "Wow, it really STINKS in here," and you'd be like, "Hmm, I hadn't noticed." This is what it's like to be creative in isolation, then share with the outside world. No monkey poop, no monkey poop... maybe that will be my new mantra.

I started off talking about delicious little boy hugs, and I ended up at monkey poop? See? This is what can happen in a dissertation. Let that be a lesson to you all.

Labels: dissertation land, family, Kent, what to watch

• posted by erica 10/14/2008 10:13:00 PM
•  0 comments

I'm in the dissertation groove. Here's what got me going and what's currently keeping me going: Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, and in particular her suggestion of writing in order to think. I don't know why someone who loves to write as much as I do didn't think of this before, but I always felt like I had to have something to say before I wrote it down. Not so, apparently; ideas just start pouring out of me when I'm typing away and forcing myself to keep going, and it's as easy as anything to then highlight things in red, cut and paste into a document of actual formal prose, etc. I've made concrete plans to work every day, which is a new thing for me, and it's worked beautifully so far. I haven't been this motivated since I started my dissertation. Or possibly ever. I've cranked out so many good ideas, set really ambitious goals with my advisor that I think I'll actually stay on top of, and have felt so good about the work I've gotten done Every Single Day (!) that I can see the end of this process for the first time ever. Every graduate student should read this book. Thanks again, Don.

I'm currently enjoying some Dagoba Roseberry chocolate, organic dark chocolate with rosehips and raspberry infused into it. Dagoba has the best flavor combos, and the last three squares of this bar have made a lovely afternoon treat during my writing and analysis today.

In one of my freewriting sessions this week (a Bolker idea), I wrote smilingly about how I was actually going to be Dr. Erica Angert, and then I wrote "Ph Freaking D!"

And she's off!

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 10/12/2008 05:09:00 PM
•  3 comments

So it's no secret that my dissertation is creeeeeeeeping along. I can blame this only partly on the undeniably loud ticking of my biological clock that beckoned me into parenthood. The rest, I blame on my own inertia, which has always been something of a problem for me. Lack of motivation. ADD. Desire to check email and blogs, watch TV, and knit when I have free moments, instead of burying my nose in a music score. Writing and defending a dissertation is not an easy undertaking, and so far, I don't think I've really risen to it.

I had a moment of crisis on Friday night that called a lot of things into question. I've been thinking for a while now, especially as I look at the work that my uncle Jeff is doing in Africa with Global Hope Network, "What in the world am I doing to make the world better?" I come up with "not a lot" every time I ask myself that question. Yes, I'm raising a child (and hopefully more someday), and I'm going into teaching, but I seriously doubt that even a great music theory instructor can do that much to improve global hunger and poverty, or cure disease, or bring a sense of hope where there is little. There are several women at my church, some with kids and some without, whose husbands make enough money that they don't have to have jobs, and instead they devote a large portion of their time to volunteer work. They're kind of this little community of action heroes, meeting for lunch and helping with each other's projects and figuring out how to carve out meaningful existences outside the traditional stay-at-home mom role or the full-time working woman role. They inspire me.

Academic pursuits are great fun. But I'm quite frightened of what will happen if I can't finish my degree or don't pass my defense, so I think that those fears, coupled with this "I want to do more" thing, made me think that perhaps I should just throw in the towel now and get on with changing my life.

Of course, I gave it a little while, knowing that some sense of reason might hit me, and it did. Not that I'm not still wondering what more I can do, or how better I can raise my kid to understand how to change the world, but I'm finishing what I started. What I'll do with degree in hand is another question, though.

And thus begins my renewed period of activity on my dissertation. Please, don't ask me anymore to join Facebook or take on other random things. I need to buckle down and get this thing done. Pardon me if blogging takes a back seat to that for a little while, but I'll do what I can to come back here as often as it feels right. My free time just isn't going to be spent in quite the same way that it has been for the past year or so. And that's a Really Good Thing for me, for my sense of motivation, and for our family, so that we can get past graduate school and get on with figuring out the meaningful existence thing.

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 9/21/2008 03:08:00 PM
•  3 comments

Well, more precisely, I need pencils that still have erasers left. Such is the recurring problem of a music analyst who finds herself sketching musical ideas and then erasing them furiously. Maybe I should invest in some of those pencils with fancy erasers that wind out, or the ones that come with replaceable erasers. Of course, that would make me like Jack, with his silly school-supply fetish.

Seriously, though, I feel the whole back-to-school thing very acutely this year, and I'm not even going "back" to school. My university is still happy to take my tuition money for my 3 dissertation hours, but the diss is a constant thing in my life now, not delineated by semester breaks. The diss doesn't take summers off, and thankfully, neither did my advisor, even though I wasn't technically registered. I'm itchy for fall, though. Something about knowing that football season approacheth makes me very eager to wear jeans and sweaters and study outside on a blanket and buy a new backpack, even though I use a tote bag now. I think I'm nostalgic for the student I used to be. I remember what it feels like to stroll through campus on a sunny autumn day, unencumbered by strollers and toddlers that are Far Too Noisy to take into the library, and find a nice piece of earth to plop down on for an hour or two of quality reading and analysis time. Having him in school two days a week will allow me to do this, sort of, though when I try to recapture that past student-hood and stroll nonchalantly, I never quite feel the part. I feel like I have a huge blinking sign over me that says, "I'm not really a student — I'm a MOM!" 19-year-olds in their lazily slung-on workout clothes and flip flops will eye me with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion.

I'm also nostalgic for cooler weather and can't wait to get outside with Kent now that he's walking and is noticing more about his surroundings. And pointing. We'll have nature walks and collect things to adorn our dining room table. Just not when it's still 85 or 90 degrees with 127% humidity. I wish fall didn't take so freaking long to get here in Louisiana. Around October, it'll be pleasant enough to be outside, and then it'll be downright lovely in November, when we'll probably have our windows open most of the time and the air inside our house will be fresh and tasty. Fall air is tasty.

What month is it now? Still August? Yeesh.

Labels: dissertation land, Louisiana, SAHM

• posted by erica 8/20/2008 10:33:00 AM
•  2 comments

So I gave my paper at the colloquium yesterday. It went well, I think. I'm getting my Presentation Voice more solidified each time I do one of these things, helping me feel much more comfortable and competent. All of the questions/comments I got were very supportive (this is a small group of scholars who know each other well), and I came away with a few new ideas about listening perspectives and how I might explain some of the funnier parts of the piece I've been analyzing. I got to visit with a few friends I haven't seen in a while, including the friend who got me the teaching gig the year before Kent was born, who just took a job in KY last year. It was a nice day, and there was one paper about Elliott Carter, given by a couple of other grad students, that I found kind of impressive. They used graphs, but not in an offensive way (as some theorists do, when they get too far removed from the music in favor of making exciting pictures and tables). It was like music theory day camp. And my godsend, Mary, had a great time with Kent while I was enjoying everyone else's papers and presenting mine. Kent slept in the car on the way there and on the way home, and Mary and I chatted about subjects from knitting to careers to churchy stuff to academia; her husband is chair of the history department here, so she knows academic types very well and kept commenting on the differences she was observing between historians and music theorists, especially their wardrobes.

Jack and I celebrated my triumphant presentation by going to Jason's Deli for dinner (I know, not India's!). Kent enjoyed some hummus, cantaloupe, and tiny bits of their awesome whole grain flatbread crackers, and he threw everything else we tried to give him onto the floor. Pretty standard. He had a fun time looking around at the other babies and little kids, since this restaurant is Family Central most of the time. They have such a healthful and diverse kids' menu that it's the perfect place to bring tiny persons. Imagine my shock when I looked behind us to see one little girl bringing in a Happy Meal. Chicken nuggets, french fries, and a soda, when she could have been eating mac and cheese, deli sandwiches, a kid-sized salad, pb&j, or any of the other great things on the menu there. Oh, well. Maybe she's in that picky stage and all she'll eat is Happy Meals. It just seemed so very wrong, especially given Jason's Deli's near-militant attitude toward trans fats. I expected guys in hazmat suits to tear out of the back room and quarantine her Happy Meal, like the renegade sock in Monsters, Inc. Chuckle.

Anyway, it feels good to have that done. Now I've given not one but TWO conference papers, doubling my output — score!

Labels: dissertation land, eating out

• posted by erica 5/21/2008 11:26:00 AM
•  1 comments

My advisor has approved my dissertation prospectus, so I'm now ready to distribute it to my committee for their revisions. I seriously thought this day would never come. He and I have been trading drafts of this thing all semester. In order to fix my last-minute ugly things that I had completed somewhat hastily at first, I spent a lot of quality time with Finale and Photoshop this week; Finale is the notation software I use, and Photoshop is the means by which I make my musical examples look exactly how I want them to look, since Finale can't do everything it should be able to do to make music pretty on the page. Photoshop and I are very close now.

I have no idea what to expect from my committee. They could sign off on it right away, or they could give me a ton of revisions. Bring it.

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 5/08/2008 02:23:00 PM
•  5 comments