(Bloomington, December 2003)

After my failed hearing, I stopped one member of the piano faculty in the hall and asked what had happened, why I’d failed.  He told me that they, the faculty, felt like they knew me well enough by now that they thought I needed to learn the consequences of “getting in my own way.”  I turned around, locked myself in my apartment, and suffered what, in looking back, could only be described as a nervous breakdown, huddled there amongst the torn-down posters I’d so presumptuously printed and hung before my hearing.  They were worthless now.

I moped there for a week before reemerging for a new hearing, which I passed.  I played my recital unadvertised for just a couple people, and in the recording you can hear the struggle, the resentment dripping in every note of my tense Bach c minor Partita, wracked with mistakes, or my wild, angry “Waldstein” Sonata, played so fast you can almost hear how badly I wanted to get it over with, how desperately I wanted to get out of IU.  

——-

(Bloomington, June 2005)

… it seemed as if I’d never left, and all my memories trapped there were suddenly released like a blood blister.  But I kept my cool, driving from street to street in what felt like a recurring dream.  In every sense, I’d been here before.  I knew what would happen next.  If I got out of my car at such-and-such spot I would smell such-and-such smell, or if I walked into such-and-such building I’d see such-and-such person. 

I passed by the sports bar where I’d worked for just one night, spilling and shattering a tray of cocktails on a group of sorority sisters, unclogging an overflowing toilet at dawn, and then heading straight to music theory class.  I quit that afternoon.  

And then there was the Student Union building where, every day for two years, I stole my lunch, an act committed at first out of necessity, but then refined and maintained out of compulsion.  Once I knew I could, there was no reason to stop.

Speaking of which, there’s the Music Library, filled with the copy machines I used to manipulate into spitting out free copies, an offense that landed me defiantly before the Indiana University Student Ethics Judicial Board where, exhausted from a colonoscopy that morning and a John Adams premiere the night before, I testified to having no moral qualms with exploiting a manufacturer’s mechanical glitch in order to do my homework for free, and argued that IU’s policy of forcing students to pay for their photocopies was exploitive in and of itself.  Unimpressed, not only did the Board make me pay, they required I write an apology letter for my “attitude.”