I have my Yahoo home page set to show me my Libra horoscope, more for kicks and giggles than anything else. It's generally some sort of generic platitude, or random advice about my love life (because I totally have one). Today's was randomly relevent:
Quit the hand-wringing and stress. You can handle any outcome -- just move forward.
During the past few weeks, life has gotten to be pretty overwhelming for me. My classes, while they are mostly enjoyable, require a tremendous amount of work. The hardest one for me is a class on music after 1945. As it turns out, I know much less about music after 1945 than I thought I did, and (it seems to me) I know far less than everyone else who's taking the class. I'm not used to being that person who's lagging behind in a class. It unsettles me a little.
My job is taking up a lot of time. I still enjoy it. The students I'm working with are all really nice, and I've found it to be really interesting to attend a bunch of classes in subjects I'm generally unfamiliar with, without having to do the homework. But sometimes it gets crazy, especially with the logistics of picking up the computers from Disability Services and carting them all over campus.
But what really got me bogged down was the fact that I started feeling sick over the weekend. I was able to circumvent actual sickness by taking a few doses of Airborne over the course of the weekend, but fighting off sickness, even with immune support, is tiring. So I didn't get as much accomplished as I wanted, and went into the beginning of this week still tired, and not well prepared.
As I was going through the beginning of the week, I found that, while I still wasn't quite sick, I was just feeling ... odd. I never wanted to eat anything even when I was hungry, I found myself feeling alternately chilled and overheated depending on whether I was outside or inside. I didn't know what was going on with me, so I went to the health center, where I was told that I'm healthy enough, but I'm just under a lot of stress. Still, they thought it was a good idea to do some blood work just in case. Got the results from that today. I'm perfectly normal.
I may or may not have mentioned the ironic fact that the Disability Services office is located on the top floor of an old building with narrow hallways and an extremely slow elevator. That irony was compounded this week when the elevator stopped working. It's technically working again now, but whenever it opens up on a floor, it tends to stay open until it's called to another floor, and every once in a while, it only opens a few inches when you get to the floor you need, and you have to pull it open the rest of the way. If I didn't have a roller bag with computers in tow, I'd just take the stairs.
So with all of this craziness, of course the thing that goes by the wayside is my composition. This has happened to me before, and it's always frustrating, because it's the reason I'm here, and I can't find time to do it. This, along with everything else has gotten me starting to feel inadequate, like I did all this work to get to grad school, and now that I'm here, I'm not good enough.
But that's ridiculous, and I know it. If I wasn't good enough to be here, I wouldn't have gotten in.
This evening, after spending much of the week rushing to catch up with everything I've been falling behind on, I finally put in a good two hour block of composition time, and I got a lot accomplished. I felt, for the first time in a while, completely absorbed in creating music. I missed that, and it's such a blessing to have it back. I'm feeling in good health, and I've got a weekend in front of me in which I'll be able to get my hands dirty in some composing.
There's no need to worry.
