This Mother's Day is Full of Post

Something I suppose it took me until about 9 months into my Bulgarian adventure to notice about Bulgarian society is that peace and quiet are not especially valued here, at least not in public.

This has been the week that I've dived headfirst into vast tracts of academic writing, and because I seem to have such a hard time working when I stay home, I've been seeking out good spots where I can sit for a few hours, churn out a couple of pages, and relax as much as possible while doing so. The problem in every place I've tried thus far has been that music seems to be a sine qua non of public space here. Coffee shops, restaurants, and the like have all been filled, to varying degrees of volume, with music, chatter, and/or commotion. I suppose there are some of you who can work perfectly well under these kinds of conditions--I remember that I used to work better with music on in the background--but now, I have the hardest time putting words together to form coherent thoughts and sentences together to form cogent arguments when my ear is being bombarded with what-have-you.

And thus has gone the week - a series of never-ending searches for a good space to work, followed, when a remotely satisfactory space has been found, by the exhaustive cudgeling of my brain in sometimes vain attempts to string thoughts together in manners that will somehow advance my thesis.

It's been an interesting experience, delving back into academic writing; it's something I haven't done in quite a while. But--resounding praises to the deity of your choice--I'm making satisfactory progress so far. The goal for this past week was to complete the introduction and Section 1 of this thesis, and come the neighborhood of midnight or 1 AM tonight, these will indeed be finished, albeit much longer than I had envisioned them being. But their unanticipated lengths, in some ways, are a blessing, as I was--and remain--unsure that I have enough material and will be able to say the same things in a sufficient number of different ways expound enough upon the critical subjects to flesh this thing out to the length I had originally envisioned. But I'll let you in on a little secret: I may not be actively striving to write in the concise manner that high school teachers upon college professors have tried to beat into me by virtue of pain and F's.

One scheduling matter that I had hoped to avoid, however, was working on the weekends. The way this process had come together in my mind prior to the actual moment when I sat down and dug in was that I would slowly grind through page after page, Monday through Friday, and so earn weekends that would be gloriously free and unfettered by self-imposed exile in order to get done the tasks that needed doing. Having failed to complete the week's requisite amount of work by Friday evening, however, I've had to work straight through this weekend, which isn't exactly how I had envisioned spending it. To unabashedly mix two wildly disparate pop culture references, I have met Lumbergh, and he is me.

On an unrelated note, wild pianos have appeared at various points in my neighborhood. There's currently an old, beat-up upright, encased in an inexplicable exoskeleton of styrofoam, sitting in the middle of the path in the Doctor's Garden--a four minute walk from my house--which I've taken the liberty of playing a few times as I've walked by. There's also a much nicer one, a quasi-in-tune 6-footer, sitting underground in the Sofia University metro station. This one, more-or-less constantly attended by surprisingly well-trained Sofians, has been a bit harder to gain access to, though I did manage to bang out a rendition of Tiny Dancer on Thursday. These have apparently been placed in preparation for the Subtitled Music Festival, which is taking place this week. Exactly what said Festival will constitute, I couldn't tell you, but I've certainly been reaping the early benefits of its publicity in the form of the little vain thrills that attend the public performance of anything. 

Nearly every time I've passed one of them by, there's been some mix of jazz, classical, and blues issuing therefrom. And as I've started seeing the same people over and over, the greater meaning and lesson to be taken from this episode has begun to dawn on me. It's a very real illustration of the power of music to bring people together in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen. The crowds stopping for minutes--or, in some cases, hours--at a time would have otherwise continued on their way, following the quotidian routines of their life, but for these accessible, public implements of music, and skilled hands to play them, in their midst. But, by virtue of this art and its accessibility, a great many Sofians have already been brought together--and more will surely follow suit--in a manner totally foreign to the norms of everyday life.

Looking to the next week: 

This coming week will be of a character broadly similar to the one of the week past. Two more sections of my thesis await being bullied into existence, after which their oppressor is going to take a long weekend in Vienna to visit fellow Los Angeles Fulbrighter Andrea before she, surely called to be one of the Elect, has the privilege of returning to the City of Angels on June 1st. 

Happy Mother's Day to All, including my own forebear, if she's reading this. I love you! Treat your moms well today. Stay tuned for more on climbing this Final Hill.