Some More Summer

I'm sitting here at my kitchen table!  Isn't it amazing.  Having counters, tables, outsides and a new security.  I love home.

All I can think about is in about a week, when it will get hectic and wonderful.  Club Drage 2008 begins in T-minus 8 days!  I can't wait for just eating eggs, writing on the white board, playing the piano, and sitting at the table together.  I also can't wait to retreat to my room when things get too crazy.  Not that I am predicting a time, but I just want something to happen so I can quietly perform the simple action of just going into my room and BOOM being alone.  I half expect a tiny chorus of angels quietly humming Mozart's Requiem in the corner of Hoops's bookshelf while I celebrate staticky solitude.  

The white board will be a signature of our household--despite it being present in households and dorm halls worldwide.  Every morn, I shall scrawl--with the glorious ease of dry erase markers (don't you just love them)--the word of the day, today's weather, and something creative, like a quote or something.  We're also going to try to memorize a Bible verse as a house every week, so that will be up there for viewers as well.  So exciting.

I am making it a point to write a lot this summer.  Even with this potential...probable...change in major, I can't give up my writing.  All I'm thinking about lately is singing--rather, all I'm thinking about focusing on lately is singing--and then last night I watched "Becoming Jane" and fell in love with the image of writing once again.  The good thing about falling in love with this image is that there is actually substance underneath it that I can fall into, plush, luscious...pluscious....substance.  These flawed--or desirable--notions of pure, passionate love that Jane Austen has recently impregnated me with can be abated by the fact that it's gotten my pen moving again, in a creative fashion, something more than just journaling.  It feels wonderful.

Keep me accountable for my goals this summer, dudes:

-exercise daily or at least every other day

-read---an amazing amount

-write (both fiction and song)

-learn a piano masterpiece

-learn a voice "masterpiece"

-Project Vocab--sticky notes 

-eat healthily

-Season and Trilogy Summer! (Lost, Grey's, Office, Matrix, Indie, Anna, Jones, Star Wars, Godfather, Arrested Development, 30 Days)

-watch the rain on the porch with a silky cup of coffee 

-celebrate beauty, life, earth.

Looking up,

Kaitlin

The Wheel Continues

So here I sit, Memorial Union, encapsulating my title as Student with full vigor and gusto as I blog on my Macbook drinking Starbucks.  Even though it's finals week and I should be re-writing my 10 page paper, I feel the need to reflect on my semester in blog form.

The semester's been full of "issues."  Discovering God for real, re-attaching to my Catholic heritage, getting through a break up, finding a job, making plans for the summer, making an amazing friend Breezy, and struggling toward my real vocation.

The most monumental thing for me has been--and is continuing to be--deciding whether or not to major in music.  Even just typing about it now I tear up--something undefinable about how all my emotions are so tangled up in this one thing, this universal message, this movement of the larynx and vocal folds that enables my one true love: singing--that just makes me cry.  All this semester it's been a battle--The Practicalities Of Life vs. The Passions Of The Heart.  

It wasn't even like I "found" this overbearing love for music inside of me.  It's like...the beginning of this semester, it just casually was there in front of my face, an obvious thing that seemed was always present in my vision.  I mean, it wasn't even a surprise to me that it was there or recognizable all of a sudden--there was no sudden.  More of a milk in the fridge type presence.  Delicious milk of Soul Seekers.

What was the surprise for me was realizing that I could just do music.  As dangerous as it sounds to me, as nervous as it makes me---or should make me...really, all I feel when I think about doing music is the overwhelming urge to cry with relief, the relief that I will be doing something I for sure love that isn't a mediocre replacement that I have to work to love.  

I have set aside the summer to decide.

All I want is peace: peace with being Catholic, peace with Keith, peace with my job, and most of all, peace with my highest inner desires for ever-present music.  Peace with my own will.  

The Wheel

So I guess I haven't decided.

And so it turns.

Alone in 227.

As of late, it seems that everything is working out for me.

Conclusions I have come to: 

I am under this morbid curtain that by dropping my music major, I will no longer have "the in" at the School of Music.  But I have failed to realize that I will still be taking music courses.  I will still go to the FAB a few times a week.  I will still sing in McKee on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  And maybe more.  I will still get to take great courses like Music History--emphasizing the good of my world in every aspect!  Writing, history, hilarity.

I will NOT be on the outskirts.  At least not for where I am now.  Fist pump!

Also, by doing a J degree (as my stepdad so fondly calls it), I will be more apt to helping out society and communities around me than with music.  

I was so worried this week about not being able to do Summer Choir because of a possible job conflict.  I mean, who would hire me: "I can work for three hours between this time and this time..."  Followed by a plethora of scowls, I'm sure. 

 

So I asked my boss at Tiger Calling Club if I could (for the 2-5 shift AAAALmost oh-so-perfect) if I could work through my 15 minute break and leave early so I could get to Summer Choir on time.  And he responded with a casual, "Yes."

Sooooo relieved!

God has totally provided!  

Another--Chris Nelson from the Omaha World Herald gave me the opportunity to do some out-of-state stories this summer!  Wunderbar.

Life is on the better side of okay when I focus on schoolwork and God.  I'm still in a lull but getting closer to finishing/starting my paper and closer to the summer is slowly bringing me out of it.  Thank God for that.

Catholic, 

Kaitlin

Upcoming Academia:

Informal Proposal due Wednesday, April 9 (which I turned in yesterday)

Voice songs memorized by Monday, April 14

Martin Luther "On Christian Liberty" read by Monday, April 14

Nutrition Test on Monday, April 14

"Short" Essay kind of due by Friday, April 18

Carmina rehearsal Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, April 22, 23, 24

Carmina Burana on Friday, April 25

1st Draft of Final Paper due Friday, April 25

last day to turn in "Short" Essay on Wednesday, April 30.  

Sheeeeeesh.

My final paper is due a week after that, then finals, and then on May 16, I'll be moving into the Drage's!  Wow.  End of my first year in college.  Hello, surrealism.  

In other news, summer choir is going to be fanTAStic.  I'm predicting.  Last summer there were 16 people.  SIXTEEN.  How terrifying yet invigorating.  We are doing music from a Renaissance composer, which is perfect because of how much I've been loving the Renaissance lately.

Also--I got an email from Dr. Crabb: "I'm expecting you at the awards ceremony on April 22."  Wahhhh!  Does this mean what I think it means?  Me, a simple freshman?

Calling tigers,

Kaitlin

PS. I've also began thinking about switching to convergence journalism due to all the advice I'm gaining from talking to journalists at my job.  Funny.