Audience and Purpose

I had intended to blog a lot more this summer.  I realized I am faced with multiple considerations when I blog: 1) Who is my audience of my blog and am I writing things of interest to them?  Or am I writing things of interest to anyone?  2) How personal do I want to be on this blog?  How many success and failures do I actually want to share with internet-land?  3) How much time do I want to take to blog?

I know these are all questions I should have answered before I started my blog.  And I did answer them, to some extent.  But as time has went on, some of my answers have changed or it has become difficult to execute.  For example, my audience.  Is it simply for family and friends?  Perhaps, but that is not my sole intention.  But if it is meant for a larger audience, it seems quite presumptuous of me to think I would have anything of value to share with someone who does not know me.  So, I end up riding the fence of the above three questions.

Today, a friend from SoCal wrote me a note, and in response to me telling her that the normal three years of course work at my school were put into two years (just for the DMA choral conducting students), she said, "How lucky you get to be done with coursework in only two years."  It made me pause.  Lucky?  I have thought many things over the past year about the amount of coursework I have, but "lucky" was not one of those words that has popped into my mind.  However, I suppose I can see it from that perspective.  Instead of three years, like the majority of DMA and PhD music students, we must take the same amount of credits in two years.  This creates a very busy and unbalanced two years.  But it gets me to my dissertation a year earlier.  A year closer to finally being able to get a job working in the profession I have wanted to work in since I have been thirteen years old.  So, yes, perhaps there is some positive aspects about having three years of coursework put into two years.

But the real purpose of this blog entry... a little over a week ago, a friend of mine passed away while singing under the direction of his fiancé, also a friend of mine, in Italy.  I have thought a lot of about my friend in the past week.  Two things, really: We were supposed to be better friends.  I thought that once I was done with coursework, I would cultivate my friendship with him.  It seemed natural we would be friends.  Also, he was such a wonderful person- kind and passionate.  My heart is broken for those that love him and for myself- for a friendship I "put off" until a more convenient time.

I still have not fully processed this.