Plan for 11/25-12/1

I've hit the grad school home stretch at the same time senioritis has hit me like the plague (chicken pox?) I'm trying to combat senioritis by changing my work environment and the structure of my day. So far-- no improvement.

Basically, what I have left to do on my grad schools apps is:

report GRE scores over the phone (do this on Monday)

doctor SOP to fit each school

submit applications

My plan for this week involves:

Monday: finish and submit Cornell application

Tuesday: finish and submit Brown application; finish NYU app EXCEPT SOP, which...

Wednesday: finish SOP and submit NYU application (I have tickets to the Juliette and the Licks show...)

Thursday: finish and submit University of Michigan and University of Arizona applications

Friday: work on University of Washington writing sample

If I don't get everything after the NYU app finished, it's not the end of the world...my last final is Tuesday, 12/11, and I think I'm going to hang around for a week to finish the rest of my applications and clean out my car and do other things I have neglected this term.

In fact, I will be overjoyed if I get the first 3 apps in this week with two vocal concerts in which I have to perform, two concerts to which I have tickets, an essay due next Monday in my creative nonfiction workshop, and a book to read for my history class...not to mention juries coming up.

It was good to go home, but I wasn't too terribly constructive. I did, however, read a lot of Adrienne Rich. I'm officially in love with the poem "Transcendental Etude." If it weren't so long I'd post it here. I'd like to write an entry about it, maybe this week; it meshes with my Gipson intentions perfectly. There's also a quote in an interview I read with her that has opened my mind to further research possibilities:

"I've written a great deal about that whole issue of dead language, the oppressor's language, a language that is no longer useful, and the need to try to find a new language, a common language, if you will. It's the question of associations with words and of the history of words, and how they come down to us and how we go on with them. But I'm beginning to think and talk a lot more again about that which goes along with language and poetry-- which is music, the vibration of a voice. I see that intonation, that vocal quality, as something that is very personal, out of the self, and then combines with the many traditions, the many histories that we've been exposed to, that we come out of." -- Adrienne Rich, from "Adrienne Rich: An Interview with David Montenegro" (1991), p. 258 of Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose

This quote, well, most of what she says in this interview has forged connections between Rich, Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" (which I need to re-read soon!), Anne Karpe's work on the human voice, and Meredith Monk's music.

More on this when I don't have a paper to work on.