Oh hey, it's Thursday again

I gotta tell you guys, turns out Thursday was not a good choice for me. If the universe wants to just cancel Thursdays for the rest of the semester, that would be totally fine with me. In fact, cancel Wednesdays while you're at it, they're no fun either (though for difficulty reasons, rather than length reasons).

You guys mentioned your "# year" plan? I'm lucky if I have a "Next week" plan with all the busy-ness in my life right now!

A lot has happened since I last talked to you guys. As Katie told you earlier this week, I have finally moved into my apartment, and I absolutely love it so far. It's far enough away that I feel like I really am LEAVING school when I go home for the night, but not so far that I can't walk it easily (if I plan right). It is right next to everything (including some dangerous places like Chipotle, Old Navy, and most importantly Barnes & Noble!) but I'm on the back of the complex so it's very quiet, even in the middle of the day. And, it has lots of closet space which is just awesome! :-)

The other part of this change is the classes. Luckily, I passed out of all but one of those exams I was studying for (WOO!) so I'm not in any remedial coursework - the theory is without 4 other tests to study for I'll be able to study for, take and pass the one I failed, especially since I only failed by a few points. All excited about school, I decided to sign up for 5 classes, 2 Library and 3 Musicology. Many musicologists thought it would be too much, but going on the advice of some other dual majors ("Library courses are really easy! Take it and get it out of the way!") I did it anyway. Needless to say, I dropped the extra library course by the end of the first week.

My remaining classes are a mixture of ridiculously easy and ridiculously hard. The big one, for me, is M-551: Intro to Historical Musicology. We're required to write a paper a week, on a topic that requires original/primary source research. This would be okay if I had a background in the topic, but he assigned us "American Sheet Music from 1830 to 1880." Guys. I know jack-s**t about that era in American music. I mean, I know that's the point, but I don't even know where to start each week, in coming up with a topic. It was that class that made me decide I couldn't handle 5. I need all the extra time I can get to research these stupid papers!

[I feel like, since I'm doing a lot of complaining about M-551, I should say something nice about it. In fact, it is very interesting to do this research once I've decided on a topic, because I get to learn about handling positively ancient music, in one of those fancy manuscript library places (there's one on campus!) kind of like in A Discovery of Witches. I've wanted to do that for forever, so now I have an excuse and that's cool. Also, he wasn't too mean in our first presentations yesterday - critical, yes, but not ever in a "You're an idiot!" way like some teachers might have.]

Everything else has been pretty easy so far - Z-401 is "Computer-based Information Tools," a necessary evil for my library degree. Seriously, our lecture today was on Search Engines. SEARCH ENGINES! Then there's M-539: Music Bibliography, and I'm not sure what it's about yet, since we had a sub last week, but we talked about library catalogs, how to use them, and a little about the cataloging back-end, which is a particular interest of mine. And lastly, M-603: Methods of Musical Scholarship. It's a variable topic course, and I lucked out because this semester they're doing Film Musicology! My kind of stuff! Anyway, that one involves lots of reading so far, but I can already tell it won't be nearly as difficult as M-551, and it will be infinitely more fun because I actually CARE about the subject matter! YAY!

And that's about it. Apologies if I miss lots this fall. I will try to take time on the weekends to write up and schedule posts, but there's no guarantees - weekends are my best times for research, and until I have a paper for the next week, I feel guilty if I'm not working on that...