Extracurricular Activities
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That’s when I decided to give up music school. I had been feeling the pressure to sell out already. But there were two different kinds of selling out. Selling out while remaining a musician meant doing whatever makes money that can also be called “music”, as opposed to the ideal path of creating great music and selling that. The second way of selling out meant giving up on my musical career entirely. I was more interested in the second way.
The first way would have involved sticking to the starving artist career path after giving up the hope of becoming a “great musician.” That was unnacceptable. Those two things were supposed to go together. This wasn’t going to be a pivot. It was going to be a transformation. I felt myself catching fire. I was going to be completely new again.
I was going to make EVERYTHING NEW AGAIN!
I took a tiny piece of a prednisone tablet as I sat down with the university curriculum guide. (They come in 10mg tabs but I needed to break them into quarters as I tapered off in order to minimize the withdrawal symptoms and the chance of triggering another flare.)
My first idea was to major in Political Economy. That was because I was getting interested in politics and economics and both words were in the name of the department. But as I thought about it more, it didn’t really solve my problem.
With a degree in Political Economy, I would be eligible, I believed, for some kind of nebulous corporate job, hopefully one with some influence, but without a lot of freedom for my other pursuits. The only way to get there was to go the other extreme of selling out, like becoming a politician or a CEO; becoming one of the evil capitalists myself. Those guys seemed to have time for all sorts of extracurricular activities.
But I wasn’t there yet. What I really wanted was a skill I could sell for money while keeping a big chunk of my time free for activism. And I thought that if I willing to live like a starving artist then I could also have free money to go with my free time.
You aren’t really free until you have both.
