And by 'normalcy' I really mean the craziness that was last year, times ten.
My old habits are starting to fall back into place now that I've got classes sorted out and a routine more or less established. I got back from my old roommate Hannah's house around 10:30 tonight (I was there celebrating her birthday with her) and promptly made myself a cup of coffee and gathered up a few music books to head up to the PAC for some late-night practice. It was, predictably, deserted except for Dr. Jovanovic (practicing) and her husband and baby daughter (waiting around for her to finish practicing). I only lasted a couple of hours before deciding to call it a night, but the coffee I drank was enough to keep me still pretty alert, so I'm writing this while waiting for the post-caffeine crash.
It seems like every quarter here presents me with another set of challenges. It's refreshing, in a way--I'm always on my toes and kept humble by the fact that as confident as I am about a piece, I always manage to screw it up in some aspect while playing it in front of other people (friends, professors, etc). But this quarter is a particularly large step forward for me: I'm starting Accompanying class. So far I'm working with three people for sure, possibly a fourth who is still unknown. I'm also tackling the Concerto Competition and playing the first movement of Saint-Saens' Piano Concerto No. 2 in g minor (due next quarter, but I'm getting a start on it now). Add to that a pile of music to sort through and decide what's going to be worked on when over the course of this year (I need two new pieces for this quarter's jury) and remedial work on my scales and arpeggios (miserably failed at last spring's jury) and you have... a crapload of piano to fit into a few hours of practice a day. The only reason I haven't already collapsed from stress is that the sheer amount of work hasn't really sunk in yet. I give it two, three weeks before I start randomly collapsing onto the ground between classes, curling up, and shaking uncontrollably.
And that's just the first quarter of sophomore year.
In addition to the usual piano, music theory and ear training classes, I'm also taking a pretty heavy English 'critical and cultural theory' class. Not a ton of writing due for it, but there's a lot of dense reading that I have to stay caught up on so that I can at least give the impression of alert keeping-up-with-the-discussion-ness in class (despite the fact that we're all way more recalcitrant about discussing things than the prof would prefer). There are actually some interesting things I've read so far, but for the most part I'm just anxious to get back to the writing part of my major.
It also struck me today that majoring in English along with music is actually not entirely comparable to just majoring in music and taking your GUR classes, like most sane people do. That's what I always tell people, because up until now, the course load worked out like that: I take all the required music classes and one or two English classes (which, credit-wise, would otherwise coincide with taking GURs with the music stuff). Again, credit-wise, it's all the same. The laughably light Creative Writing major is only half as many credits as my music major and roughly as many credits (maybe a bit less) as the total GUR count. It's just enough to balance out my quarterly load so that I can mostly concentrate on music but still be a full-time student (13 credits this quarter).
However, this approach ignores the fact that GURs are (as I understand) 1- and 200 level classes (previously taken care of in community college when I earned my AA). Major classes, typically, are 3- and 400 level classes. The intensity of major classes is quite a bit more than lower level classes. I remember basically coasting through community college (this is neither bragging on my part, at least not intentionally, nor an insult of my community college. I really learned a lot there and value my AA education very highly. It's just that, for the most part, it wasn't THAT hard). Were I taking those classes alongside the music ones, I'd probably have about half as much stress as I do now.
But in reality, I'm taking major classes, and this one in particular is not something I can just BS my way through while devoting the better part of my attention to tackling music. I guess all I'm trying to say is that, for the first time, it's really starting to actually feel like a double major.
Fancy that. Now I kind of understand why people are impressed.
Not to make this whole thing a misery sobfest, but as if the new workload and brain-stretching wasn't enough, things aren't looking good for my family back home. My mom has been re-diagnosed with cancer, this time in her bones. She's in a lot of pain due to two tumors in her hip and lower back and on pretty high doses of morphine--which, though it keeps the pain mostly under control, also knocks her out most of the time, makes her dizzy and disoriented, gives her double vision, and essentially makes her hallucinate things that aren't there. She's started a ten-day daily treatment of radiation therapy to shrink the two tumors to get the pain under control, then they're going to do some full body scans to find out the scary truth: how far the cancer has spread to the rest of her body.
Right now it's all up the air, and scary as hell. If it's spread far--and there's no telling at this point--it could be terminal. Terminal. As in, terminally ill, as in, dealing with this for the rest of her life, having it affect everything she does, knowing that her days are numbered.
This is the mom who has been there for our family, despite battling breast cancer six or seven years ago... home schooling us, driving us 45 minutes or more to piano lessons, grocery shopping, library, horseback riding lessons, 4-H, fairs.... taking care of the animals when we were sick or gone or whatever, helping to take care of the property, turning our yard into an orchard (and before that, the untamed wilderness behind the house into a yard and garden), cooking, baking, ceaselessly working through everything to give us the kind of life that a ton of kids aren't lucky enough to have.
When I first heard that she had been re-diagnosed with cancer (just a bit after I'd gotten moved back in at school) I was... well, numb. Scared, but numb. There wasn't a lot of information to work with and I had no idea whether to be hopeful or what. Bone cancer? Well, what does that do? Can you live with it?
Then I talked to my sister last week and she dropped the t-word, and suddenly I'm terrified out of my mind. This is literally one of my biggest fears--things I can't control happening to my family, the ones I hold closest to my heart--and here I am, for all intents and purposes a million miles away. What's going to happen if it IS terminal? I can't just drop out of school. If I miss a quarter I basically have to miss a whole year because everything's sequential. But then, I'm up here for two more years after this one--and how much time does she have?
I always envisioned her being around to see her grandchildren, to bake them cookies and be the amazing grandma that every kid should have. To have her meet and approve of her future son-in-law, to be happy for me and to be there as I go through that huge part of my life. Never mind the fact that my brother just turned ten... will she see him graduate, know what he goes after in life, know what he finds as his passion and decides to pursue?
There are so many what-if's that it just... terrifies me to think there's even a possibility they could be true. I just don't even know how to deal with this.
When she had breast cancer, I was too young to really understand the seriousness of it all. My dad talked to us, at the beginning, how she had it and there wasn't really a reason for it, that the doctors thought they'd caught it early enough that they could get rid of it. I don't think it ever really entered my mind that it could come back or that it could threaten her life.
In the few days since I heard the news from my sister, my mindset has returned a bit more to normal. I'm relaxing a bit more, letting myself smile, letting myself go back to focusing on schoolwork, on me. But the thought is always there in the back of my mind.
I will admit that I almost don't want to know the results of the full-body scans. How can I let myself pursue the things that I want--skill with piano, with writing, getting a boyfriend, building friendships--with the knowledge always hanging over me that she is dying?
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