More 30 before 30 (academia and love)

Many of my 30 before 30 resolutions (so to speak) do not actually require further explanation. However, some of them are worth briefly expanding upon.

Ok. So...

#3-finish my PhD (hence my dissertation) before I am 30

This seems like quite a lofty goal and also possibly insane, although given how much I love school and research it might be doable. At this point I can not even envision my dissertation defense, probably because I really have no idea what I will be writing 500 or more pages about. Apparently this is not a problem. I will be starting a PhD program, but the first two years of coursework are intended to push students out of their comfort zones and encourage them to explore new interests. This sounds quite exciting and makes me feel less unprepared for the intellectual journey I am about to embark upon. I know the essense of what I want to study, but I can't pinpoint a specific composer, genre, event/movement that I would want to focus on exclusively. Yeah, I may talk a lot about Barbara Strozzi, but I actually know very little about her. I have only touched on the surface of Strozzi scholarship, because while she is not completely obscure, there are only a few Strozzi authorities and very little has been written about her, in English at least. Also, it is quite unfortunate that so little of her music has been recorded. There are actually quite a plethora of Strozzi cd's but most of them recycle the songs from previous recordings meaning a bulk of her repertoire is left untouched. However, this might be because the music is floating around somewhere in a black hole/was not preserved for posterity, rather than a reflection on the quality of some of her music. Anyway...Before I started to ramble endlessly about my love of all things Strozzi, despite my lack of knowlege of all things Strozzi, my point was that I don't have a very focused research topic at this point that I could someday consider myself to be an authority of. Perhaps someday is the key word! Basically what I do know right now is that I want to examine the role of performance in identity formation, specifically as it relates to gender, both from the perspective of a scholar and an avocational performer. I guess this is completely acceptable for this stage in my academic career, I haven't even started working toward my PhD and I am already afraid I will be ABD (all but dissertation) until I am too old and decrepid (or is it decrepit? apparently I am too lazy to look it up) to function.* Come to think of it, 7 years is a fairly long time, and hopefully, a perfectly adequate amount of time to become an expert, or atleast expert-ish on something within the expanding field of musicology.

* I am pretty sure the correct spelling is decrepit, although, at least the way I pronounce the word it sounds more like a final d than a final t...

Wow. Thanks for reading my incomprehensible stream of consciousness minor scale panic attack 2 months before I re-enter the academia universe, and this scary run-on sentence, although I threw in some commas to at least give the illusion of an organized expression of these thoughts. (Even I am reading this thinking, what does this even mean?)

#4 -Fall in love

This one probably is rather foolish to include in my 30 before 30 list...If I truly fall in love it will be completely out of my control, which is what terrifies me beyond belief. I don't do well with letting myself go and relinquishing control to fate. Not that I necessarily believe in Fate as in there is some greater plan for my life, but I do need to release my vice grip on my life and allow myself to live more. I do hope to someday fall head over heals in love because in some respects I do consider myself to be a romantic, but falling implies risk, which implies potential danger. I tend to play on the safe side, which I am gradually realizing could result in my life being boring and full of regrets. I am still a bit paranoid about failure and need to shed some of my layers of self-protection, but this year I finally took a plunge into my future and I didn't belly flop. (Lame metaphor, I know.) I applied to PhD programs straight out of undergrad., dealt with the multiple rejections/blows to my dignity, and after having resigned myself to the inevitable failures that accompany risk, I picked myself back up and brushed myself off, and shortly thereafter I was offered admission to my top choice program. Now I will be starting in just a few months. So, back to love. While it is true that it would be nice to fall in love before I am 30 and only have a few safe child-bearing years left, because I do hope to balance a career and a family, I mostly want to get over my fear of falling and risk. When I have come to terms with the fact that sometimes in life I will fall flat on my face and that it is not the end of the world, I will embrace love and the vulnerability that will inherently accompany the opening of my heart.

This is a really informal post, but it is my blog and I am not in grad. school yet, so I do not have to worry about sentence structure, organization, or making a point succinctly and compellingly. This blog is meant to be where I can bounce my ideas off of people (readers if I have any) or just myself, but it is also meant to be a safe outlet for my half-baked thoughts and emotional rants that may or may not have anything to do with my academic interests...And on that note, I am on vacation in Florida (at the house my parents will be moving to in about a month) and it is time to abandon my laptop and spend some time with my family, the humidity, and possibly some frighteningly large cockroaches and arachnids (ugh)...:)