So, this week finds me knee deep in esoteric readings about embodied experience, race, gender, Nietzsche and his influence, history of Psychological systems, pre-Socratics, etc.  I feel like I’m keeping up with the bulk of readings and references bandied about in my classes at NYU but am actually really feeling the fact that I’ve not read Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault.  Damn.  Now that I’m actually in a graduate program I’m stuck trying to figure out why the hell it’s relevant.  Don’t get me wrong - world class professors and access to the entirety of NYU’s Graduate School or Arts and Sciences is wonderful.  It’s just dawning on me now that the onus of responsibility for doing anything worthwhile with this embarrassment of riches now rests squarely on my thin shoulders.  I feel like I’m running from this responsibility back to the arms of music, practicing clarinet etudes when I should be reading “The Will To Power”.  The good news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  The bad news is that I’ve just bought a bass clarinet.  What’ll I do with all of this?  
I’m beginning to find myself drawn more to neuroscience and cognitive psychology than I am to music and it’s relationship to trance as I first was.  Perhaps because I haven’t myself identified with any particular spiritual path for some time, nor have I had a good cathartic artistic experience in a while.  First world problems.  Still, it seems to be inhibiting my interest in studying music and it’s lived experience.  Instead I just want to play and write melodies again.  I want to step away from the esoterically considering things and have a purely (Nietzschian) Dionysian experience/worldview and make and consume music in a pre-conceptual or non-conceptual  sense - if that sort of thing is even possible.  To get away from reference and concept/object relationship to that “given-ness” before conceptualization.  Ugh.  Talk with me in a few weeks.  Hopefully I’ll have sussed this out or at least gotten a direction.