Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!

No, I haven't converted to totalitarianism, the Taliban, and/or Tea Party. Rather, while polishing the first long page of short score (or at least, a nominal first draft of it), I found myself erasing some freely added harmony tones, and replacing them with tones from the quasi-Urlinien.
 
Said action immediately reminded me of the ants' lament on the space shuttle (a little more than one minute into this clip):
 

 
The funny part is that when I teach composition, I encourage (nay, bludgeon) my students to create some sort of large-scale plan for the piece, so that they're never stuck wondering what comes next. I always cheerfully emphasize that if, in the act of executing the plan, one discovers more interesting implications within the material at hand, one can always deviate from the script (and then adjust it accordingly). In this case, I did just the opposite. I leave it to others to decide whether this illustrates a propensity for formalism, formality, formicity, etc.