Holiday Recap and the New Term

Well, now that I'm back at a new semester I figured I might as well get this thing going again! Last term ended in a flurry of chaos and stress, but alas its done and gone and my grades from last term show me that the hard work was worth the effort. The break was EXACTLY what I needed. A week traveling through Northern Ireland and Scotland fed my soul a good bit, but also made me long to be back in the states. Thus convincing me to extend my trip home and add a week in New York to my voyage. Which was $$ well spent. I love New York, and this last trip has put it in the running for my new home when I return to the US. The week in southern California was exactly what the doctor ordered - besides that fact that the reason I was there in the first place was to see my doctor. Warm sun, clear skys, beaches, good coffee, great food, great family and friends made it the best week I've had in a long time!! I have to give thanks to my dad and Laura for putting together such a great weekend, and to everyone else that was a part of that amazing week!

Upon returning to Ireland I felt obligated to partake in ungodly and chaotic sleeping hours for the next three days. I discovered that even four bottles of wine can't make one go to bed at a reasonable hour, but can still wake you up with a blinding headache as soon as the sun peers over the back fence. I actually should give that day more credit, for without the pain from what felt like a brain stung by 100 honey bees, I would have slept all day instead of lying awake wishing I were dead which in turn allowed me to sleep that night. So, perhaps wine has a secondary - and somewhat delayed - function in curing jetlag from the other side of the planet.

Since being back I've been playing a fair bit of bouzouki with my fiddle-touting friends Jessie and Kay. They've been kind enough to let me bash away and explore chords and wrong notes while they work on their already amazing fiddling. Just in the maybe five times we've played tunes I feel I've learned a great deal. Hopefully it'll be enough, as I was asked to play in one of the performance ensembles with the MA Trad Performance kids here. They are all great, so I feel honored that they'd ask me to join them. If I get departmental permission to do this, I see myself learning a lot this term while hopefully not annoying those who already know what they're doing.

The spring term is going to be very busy, yet fun and exciting. Our workload is reduced, but we have our thesis to mainly focus on plus a good deal of international conferences and research proposals with ethnomusicologists at the University of Cork. We're attending (perhaps presenting at) the International Conference of Traditional Music in Dublin at the end of the month, then there is also an intensive 10-day seminal/conference ethnochoreology conference in Norway at the end of April. There is also a recording engineers conference/trade show in London in May, and another ethnomusicology conference in the Czech Republic later in the summer. My classes should be informative and quite interesting. One is solely based on theoretical issues in the field, while the other is a survey on music from around the world. As of now we'll be looking at music from Egypt, Morocco, West Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Hungary, and others.

It'll be a very busy 8 months, but it'll be rewarding just the same. My main concern is not losing my mind and myself in all the chaos. I've come to realize that not playing music regularly makes me a very edgy and irritable person. You'd think regular exercise would help such a thing, but as of now its just making me hungry and sore. Not exactly great additions to someone already pent up with musical frustration. So, though I vowed to not any new years resolutions, I've made one anyway. Well, sort of. I've decided to not let my academic work completely rule my life, as it'll do me no good if I just want to kill anyone around me who happens to say anything remotely dumb. Music is why I'm here, so music is going to get out of the trunk and hop into the passenger seat for the next 8 months, at which time it'll probably take the driver seat again.