Uh...heard any good jokes lately?

Okay, I’m not going to try to explain all the ins and outs of the past, um, however many months it’s been since I’ve last updated this thing regularly. I know part of the reason was that this blog kind of went above and beyond its original purpose and snagged me a sweetheart and ever since then I had an actual live audience toward whom I could direct my ramblings. And frankly, Blogger doesn’t put out when it counts.

So, where to begin.

I decided to quit grad school. A hard decision, but after a while it became less and less difficult to walk away. I feel defeated in a way, but also liberated. There’s so much undesireable bullshit ahead that dodging it makes me feel giddy, like I’m playing hooky.

Now what. I’m still in a decompression mode, trying to purge some of the worst things of academia from my system. Like letting it sink in that I’ll never have to explain the circle of fifths to a roomful of twenty-year-old biology majors ever again. Like recognizing that I can, in fact, write for an audience larger than six people. Like believing that I can, y’know, earn something more useful toward paying rent than a hearty pat on the back and a calligraphied sheepskin for the work I do.

But now I’m unemployed. Kinda.

Technically, I’m still a student until February 2007, an alarmingly long wait when you consider I could be done with all my requirements for the master’s degree by the end of this summer if I choose to write my few remaining papers efficiently. (That’s a big ‘if’. It’s going to take a lot of effort to make me care enough to get started on this comic opera paper. I’m tempted to change the topic from Kurt Weill to This is Spinal Tap. Maybe I can do a semiotic reading of chord changes in “Big Bottom” and spin a web of bullshit around Aristotelian theories of comedy.) My application to transfer from the PhD to the MA program is currently being processed by the McGill Office of Unnecessary Forms and Senseless Regulations, which I believe is also located in the Department of Devious Fees. I’m treating the mandatory registration fees in September as a graduation tax. It’s going to take a lot of abuse of the music department photocopier to make up for what I’m paying for the privilege of not taking classes. But I digress.

So the good news is that I can still use the “but I’m a student” defense to justify my existence, especially since my Yankee ass is supposed to get deported when I graduate. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out what in the hell to do with my life. That’s all.

The problem is figuring out where to begin. I guess I’ve already done some work in simply eliminating another career choice—I guess I can add ‘musicologist’ to the list that already includes ‘jockey,’ ‘dog-trainer’ and ‘mortician’—that’s a pretty small consolation. Now I’m reading career-changing, self-help books with titles like “‘So What Are You Going to Do with That?’: A Guide to Career-Changing for MAs and PhDs” and “What Color is Your Parachute” and “Why do you need a job, anyway?”. Actually, I made that last one up. But maybe it’s my calling to write just such a slacker bible.

I’m trying to keep an open mind with everything and not to drift into cynicism when thinking about drawing a flower to represent my life interests, but it’s hard. I’ve had unpleasant experiences with jobs in the past, and it’s tough to imagine doing work that keeps me awake all day and does not involve spreadsheets for more than five hours a day. The problem I also have is that I’m just overwhelmed with the thought of starting from nothing and looking for a career. Whenever I start to read about all the steps that I’ll need to do, I panic after about half an hour and come up with even more creative ways to procrastinate than I ever had time to imagine as a grad student. This one time I even resurrected my blog, for heaven’s sake.

So anyway, considering that it's now two o'clock in the afternoon and that I'm still in the same undressed and unshowered state that I was when I woke up (a mere three hours ago), I think I'm going to leave it here for now and resume these thoughts again some other time. Hopefully it will be less than a year and a half before the next post.