26/04/2023 Wednesday Sixth Hour/Ώρα Έκτη - Everything is great and good :3 I am sitting in Myriade Mont-Royal, sipping my iced moka and savouring the sweet, light, airy mezzo of the woman whose guitar-and-voice covers of João Gilberto songs are playing over the cafe’s sound system. This is one of those moments where I’m just completely overcome with heavenly bliss for no fucking reason. I’m almost done with finals, I have a brand new cat tattoo, and I’m sitting here watching a swaggily-dressed middle aged lady knit what appears to be a sweater at the table across from me.

So what’s been going on with me of late? I’ve been stressing the fuck out about finals, but now that I’m done with my performance exam and my composition portfolio I feel soooo relieved. My performance exam was a real disaster, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Very frustrating - I spent months and months preparing, toiling away at the piano preparing my repertoire, only to walk into the exam hall and completely shit the bed in front of the jury. Oh well. I think I passed, just not with a particularly good mark. As for my composition stuff, following 48 hours of grinding to finish it up, I have successfully turned in a portfolio. Not a good portfolio. But a portfolio.

I’ve actually decided to transfer out of composition. Big decision, and it kind of feels like it’s been a couple of years in the making. I’ve been pretty miserable for the past few years and I’ve slowly been undoing that on a couple of different fronts. First step was transferring to McGill. Then came starting transition. Then came social transition at school. And my misery is significantly diminished as a result of all these actions, but I think getting rid of these more pressing, in-your-face miseries has revealed some that were going on in the background that were being overshadowed by the more obvious ones. Chief among these is my misery with my programme. I have not enjoyed being a composition student. I know that transferring means I might lose my scholarship, but I can’t bear to continue in this programme. Music Theory, on the other hand, is something that I have enjoyed thoroughly all the way through my degree, so I think that will be a good decision for me. I also intend to get into choral conducting, which I’ll post about in greater length some other time.

So now freed from the shackles of the composition career grindset, I am CANCELLING my summer plans to do a summer programme somewhere, and instead I’ve decided I will be getting a job, doing summer classes, and taking this summer to figure myself out a little bit more. I need it. I’ve been on the career grindset in this one direction for so long, I never actually took any time to evaluate if that was something I wanted. I’m young. I have time. I need to make sure I don’t invest years and years into something I end up being miserable with.

So yeah! I’m pretty excited. Going thrifting this afternoon with Madame Zachary Jane Margaret Hasegawina-Powell. I’m gonna buy some new cute dresses for the summer :3

-A