...hello ...again

It's hard to come back after being gone for so long. I don't really know how to start. What do you say to someone you've abandoned for two months and now want to get back together with? I did quite a bit of abandoning this semester, in the heat of the busyness. I abandoned the blogspot. I abandoned tae kwon do. I abandoned friends. In fact, the older I get, the more people and activities I abandon along the way, just because I can't do everything and keep up with everyone.

That sounds pessimistic, but really I was doing an amazing amount of stuff in the interrim. I suddenly buckled down and got more serious about music than ever. In short, I did a whole lot of practicing, recording, performing, traveling, and auditioning, driven by a record amount of consistent motivation and inspiration. Now that my senior recital is over, things are significantly calmer. I mean, I still am doing a concert with Kanye West on Monday, playing in Catherine Stark's recital, accompanying Anne for the entire Tzigane violin concerto (all on harp), playing Salome as a duet with Colleen, and learning the entire Bernstein Chichester Psalms for orch rep. I'm not sure why that necessarily feels calmer, but I guess it says something about how the rest of my semester has been.

In a matter of weeks, classes will be over and I will graduate from college. I'm starting to think about what moving out of this apartment and saying goodbye to everybody is going to entail. I've already been thinking about the future. My family is moving back to Illinois. This time they'll be living up north, in St. Charles. I'm going to live with them for the summer, help them move in, and decorate my new bedroom (finally I get to paint my walls!). After a good, long, break then I'm going to move to France. Yes, seriously, I'm going to be living in Paris, attending a conservatory where I'll be studying harp with Isabelle Perrin. I have all these plans for not only improving as a harpist, but learning French, learning how to better communicate in general, finally having some time to pursue my own education in history and reading and writing, practicing photography around Paris, and otherwise escaping the American school system.

However, it's not all about the future, because I've learned and changed so much this semester. I'm a completely different person, with a completely different outlook, than I was when I first started writing this blog over winter break. I guess that's actually part of the reason why I didn't write so much. Because I was trying out new ways of thinking about things, I needed to let things simmer in my mind without being forced to take on a form as concrete as a sentence or a paragraph. One of my goals for this summer is to learn how to communicate some of these things I've been thinking about. I need to capture them before their vividness fades.

Today, after waking up for an AHS chapter meeting, I cleaned my room, balanced my checkbook, tallied up everybody's grocery receipts, took care of all the forms for commencement, and then got completely engrossed in a huge project entirely unrelated to school which involved sorting through a lot of pictures. Speaking of things that aren't school-related, I've also recently been reading this great book called "A Short History of the World" by J. M. Roberts. It's an excellent overview of world history, done with intelligence and sensitivity. I'm going to do it right this time: beginning to end, filling in all the gaps in my knowledge. I'm supplementing by printing out maps of the areas that I'm reading about and looking up unfamiliar terms on wikipedia. Yeah, the jazz history paper will get done, but it'll have to be another cram job, just like the previous two, because it's not something I care enough about to want to spend more time on than I have to.

To conclude my day of freedom, I now go to bed at 3am, happily thwarting the necessity of going to bed at a reasonable time.