Holy Schmitt, Batman!: essays, internships, and auditions (Suzanne)

Apparently, there is a Facebook group titled ‘What the Foucault’. As a student of legal theory, this greatly amuses me. It amuses me enough that I forget that I am supposed to be reading Foucault for my essay due on Friday, and not reading really bad Foucault-jokes on Facebook walls. I have decided that from now on, I am going to say ‘what the Foucault?’ and ‘holy Schmitt!’, instead of the version with the four-letter equivalents.

I really hate essays. Of course, every student hates essays, but I particularly hate essays and would much rather have exams. I like exams. They’re short, painless, you can wing them without doing any extra work if you’ve kept up during the semester, and unlike 100% essays, a 100% exam gives you an incentive to actually pay attention in class and engage with all the material, not just the small section that happens to be relevant to your essays.

Which is why I always wonder why I chose to do music and law here instead of physics at ANU, where I wouldn’t have had to do any essays at all. ANU gave me lots of scholarship money, too, and Melbourne didn’t. Sometimes my life choices really escape me.

I do love research, though. I really like trawling through libraries looking for books, and reading random articles, and searching the footnotes to find other random articles, and amassing a big database of notes and quotes on a given topic, neatly arranged to support a coherent argument. I like coming up with the skeleton argument, and distilling it to a nice snappy thesis statement that fits on a bumper sticker.

I just hate the writing process. I really hate having to come up with sentences to express my arguments. I really hate agonising over whether to use the phrase ‘legal person’ or ‘legal subject’ in a given sentence, and trying to think about the implications that each choice would convey to my reader, when I know myself exactly what I want to say. Once I’ve gone through the thinking process and arrived at my conclusions on a topic, the joys of that topic are gone for me – the process of telling people how I did it just feels like a rehash of a thought that by this point has quite overstayed its welcome.

Also, I’m reading over my past essays to remind myself not to panic and that these things do eventually get finished, and I came to the depressing conclusion that my 19th Century Music and Society essay is worse than my first-year Baroque and Classical Music essay. Which means that I won’t be getting an H1 on that essay, which means that I probably won’t get an H1 in the subject, and I will probably have to take Impressionism to Postmodernism next semester if I want to specialise in musicology next year since the prerequisite for musicology is apparently an H1 in a second-year music history subject.

I have decided that if I can’t meet the prerequisite for musicology this semester, I’ll just specialise in something else because I really do not want to overload again next semester.

In other news, I’m gonna be working at the Victorian Law Reform Commission over the summer (as in, the southern hemisphere summer around Christmas, not my home summer around July), as part of the Victoria Law Foundation’s internship program. Hopefully I’ll also be in one of the Australian Youth Orchestra’s programs, assuming I pass the audition and the dates don’t clash with my internship. What I really want to do is the Tasmanian Symphony’s fellowship program, because you actually get to play in the TSO for a week, and they give you a lot of coaching for professional auditions. But I don’t really think I’m at the point where I’ll survive in a professional orchestra at the moment, so whatever goes, really.

The excerpts for the audition came out on Monday – surprise, surprise, the clarinet excerpts are from Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 1, which I played in last year for orchestra. All the excerpts are pretty difficult (and also pretty standard fare for high-level orchestra auditions — Scheherazade, Beethoven’s 8th, and The Miraculous Mandarin are all asked for at Melbourne Symphony auditions), so straight after clarinet exams this year I’m gonna have to start work on them.

And now I have come to realise that despite the fact that I have an essay worth 100% of my Legal Theory grade and a take-home exam for Obligations due on Friday (handed in my final music history assignment already), an orchestra concert on Monday for which I still don’t know my part, a Music Techniques assignment due Thursday, and all my exams in the first three days of the exam period, I have done nothing productive today. Except go to orchestra rehearsal, because that was compulsory. But it was only an hour long rehearsal, so that means I’ve wasted 23/24 of the hours of today.

I should do something about that.

Or I could go eat dinner.

Mmm, dinner.

EDIT: Oh my Gadamer, I’ve finished my draft for Legal Theory and come to the realisation that I’ve never ever written an essay so Schmitt. There will be some serious redrafting work necessary.

EDIT 2: I amend my statement, I hate research essays. Currently loving how quickly I can knock out a reflective essay for Obligations. If only Legal Theory would be so compliant.

EDIT 3: I got my 19th Century essay back today. Looks like I won’t be needing to overload next semester. Wonderful – a normal timetable! Now if only I could do the same for Legal Theory.