DONE!

I can hardly believe it. The page count for this end-of quarter turned out to be 40[Ligeti] + 22[Stravinksy] + 17[Biblio Essay] + 8 [Shostakovich] + 3 [Book Review] + 2[Biblio Handout] and 0[Shostakovich final]. That puts me at a good 92 pages. Oh my god... Of course not all of it is high quality work (have to add more things and clean up both the Ligeti and Stravinsky, the Shostakovich was bad, and Biblio was not comprehensive at all) but except for the Shostakovich paper (which turned out to be a "well-organized and elegant summary"), I stand by what I wrote.

While I'm working on these papers, and especially when I have them all going at once, giving me the illusion that I'm doing something BIG, I have a sense of excitement. I am, after all, doing analyses and putting forth ideas and explanations nobody has ever done before. That's exciting and even more so when your ideas help you understand the music on a deeper level. There is also a sense of STRESS, of course, but you learn to deal with that.

There is a moment of elation the moment you decide to stop working on a paper. There is always more to say and there are always more errors to correct and sentences to tweak but when the compromise between available time, quality, quantity, and health has been reached, you hopefuly feel good about what you've written. That's the moment I like. I can truly say I'm done.

But there's also a sense of emptiness that comes from the sudden lack of creative flow. In the midst of writing more papers, the moment of elation soon turns to slow acknowledgement of more work and eventual submission to that fate. But now, at the real end, there's a bit of loneliness. I don't want to touch these papers for a while but what do I keep my mind occupied with in the meantime? I mean, I could be writing more papers!

In any case, I am DONE (well done, burnt, even) with this, my first quarter as a graduate student at UCSB. One last errand to run (have to priority overnight my paper to the professor tomorrow) and I will be free to do as I wish. Alas, what I wish (some of it) is not something I can do freely...