whoa
Has it really been this long? Geez. Do people even remember me?
When I last posted a blog entry, I had just finished college. My grandmother willed herself to live long enough to see my live-streamed graduation, and I started grad school outside of Boston rooming with my best friend from college, an organist looking to get a church gig in a big city who tethered himself to wherever I ended up going.
Grad school was way more intense than I expected. It requires an enormous amount of self-motivation compared to undergraduate work, especially in the humanities. On top of that, the pandemic meant a full 2/3 of it was online—which, in music composition, was a lot of writing music and not too many performances of it. Plus, doctoral programs cut back on admissions or paused them entirely.
2020 is also when I fell in love with the woman who is now my wife, and I have many wonderful memories of our first days together at the end of an otherwise miserable and deeply scary year. Our relationship was long-distance as she was still in grad school in Boston while I moved to Buffalo to begin a PhD. Those two years were my first spent living alone, which in a lot of ways I really liked. I'd always liked the snow (growing up in North Carolina meant we only got a full, fun, sleddable amount of it once every few years), so I've come to really like western New York in a lot of ways, from city life to the suburbs, and even to small towns.
So now I'm in the final year of the PhD, where the piece of music I wrote for my dissertation has been performed, and now all that's left is to defend it. I've been teaching a lot, including a class on the Beatles in the 1960s.
See you in a few more years, I guess? Or maybe I'll stick around. All my Lego is still back in North Carolina and I've only taken a few small trinkets with me on my various moves over the years. Two of our three cats would be absolute menaces with the stuff.
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