Sometimes, I am a very stupid girl.
No. I am.
I’m assuming you’re arguing, because if you’re sitting there, all smug and ‘Yes, Weetabix, we’ve been waiting for you to notice, since you’re all ‘ooooh, I am an artiste! Read my journal about the boobies!’ and by the way, what the hell is with your parenthetical abuse? It’s a little annoying.’
Yeah, well, bite me.
Anyway, my stupid clueless casaba of a head must be filled with potpourri, I think. The kind that smells like peach (which, by the way, is how they cheer up the second layer of hell’ with that noxious peach scented potpourri, except that they call it ‘Pot Porry’ because, you know, it’s hell (yes, I’m putting things in parens just to piss you off, you fuckers)) and also, when it gets warm, vaguely like cat urine.
So the crappening with my quest for my graduate degree.
To sum up, for those who are late to join the party (except for Fifi who is bravely making her way through the archives and leaving me little messages in a bottle from the ancient empty comments): Three years ago, I applied to four schools, including one I used to attend (Let’s call that School A), and was rejected by all four. I decided to try again, increasing the number of schools. Many more rejections, including School A, but I did get accepted to one in California, which I decided not to attend, as it is in California and the majority of the people I love are not in California. So I reformulated a plan to take a writing class at School A, so that they would get to know me and, naturally, fall in love with me and want me for their very own. And then, after I had already submitted my third application to School A, new information came to light in which I learned that School A’s Master of Arts degree would not be enough to get a teaching job in a college and I would need to get an MFA, which is not available at School A. So I also applied to two MFA programs (Schools B and C), which happened to be also low residency, thereby giving me the MFA I needed while allowing me to live in my home and perchance even be a contributing member to society instead of the vilest of bottom dwellers, a loan-surfing graduate student.
By the way, that’s not my opinion, but rather the opinion of the people in charge of our government. Because otherwise why else would they be cutting grants and slashing federal aid? Because we’re just draft-dodging hippies who don’t vote, that’s why.
(I do vote, by the way. But can’t argue with the draft dodging, because I have a uterus.)
So then, there were various issues with my application to School A that I sort of viewed with bemusement and also kept pursuing, because it was the principle of the thing, damn it. Sure, I had decided not to go there, but man, there was no reason that this should be so hard. Like Cheap Trick, I wanted them to want me. No reason. In my head, I was doing it for English students everywhere, and I would stand on a balcony and raise my hands to them in supplication and they would sing my name in unison and then Madonna would play me in the screen adaptation. In a latex body suit. Shut up.
And then I got the School A shit canned letter. Fucking third time in a row. Despite having my O.Henry Award winning professor write me a recommendation and on the fucking School A acceptance committee, I was axed yet again. We artistes obviously are a self-destructive lot.
And because I can’t leave well enough alone, because I have to take a seeping wound and poke at it a little, just to feel the ache and burn, because of that, that right there, I did something stupid.
After class last night, I asked my professor if he ever did actually see my application at the review committee or if they had just never even allowed it to be considered.
And that’s when the proverbial shit hit the fan. He was shocked. He was dismayed. He was utterly flabbergasted. He caught himself just short of badmouthing his fellow reviewers. He had greenlighted my application and had to leave the meeting before they got to discuss individual candidates, so he had assumed that I had been accepted, especially since I graduated cum laude with an honors distinction in my major, had a perfect post-graduate GPA and a very good manuscript, and since he wrote one of my letters.
The few lingering students after class were likewise stunned. One said that my stories were better than PhD stories (I’m assuming that means the stories from the PhD students, not stories about people with PhDs, of which I have written exactly zero) and the girl whose story will be in Glimmer Train assured me that I do not suck and she couldn’t believe I would ever have a problem once, let alone three times. One guy volunteered another’s oral gratification prowess in order to get me into the program. My professor was utterly beside himself and promised to look into it. I urged him not to, because I had decided in December to not go to that school anyway, except that I didn’t say that. I said that I didn’t want to make waves, and I had been accepted elsewhere (at School B’s MFA program… still waiting to hear back from School C) and I wasn’t looking to appeal their decision or anything, I was just curious whose dog I murdered or whose boyfriend I slept with after prom because something, SOMETHING had to have gone down and got me blackballed. Something. Right?
So that was last night at 8:30 pm. About fourteen hours later, I received an email from my professor.
I’ve been accepted to the MA program.
He mentioned a ‘clerical glitch’. Um, sure. It wasn’t a clerical glitch three times in a row. Something went down this morning, some heads were busted, or are about to be busted, or something. I think my sweet, incredibly talented professor kicked some ass. I don’t know. I do know this: I have one very useless head. Because now, I’m in. I’m so totally in. In fact, if I decided, that no, maybe I don’t want to be in, now I’m the jackass. It’s not Dr. Frank anymore. It’s me.
Fuck.
For sale: one cranium. Hardly used.
Although one interesting development in this whole ordeal, after I opened the email from my professor and was just flooded with emotions (because really? I totally want to attend this program, even though there’s a million (ok, five or six) reasons why I shouldn’t) my first thought was NOT ‘I need some chocolate’ but rather ‘Oooh, Le Creuset is on sale!’
So I bought a pan. Ok, two. But I got the sauce pan as a gift with the purchase of the first (and then $25 offtoo! Yay!)
Now, truthfully, I’ve been coveting Le Creuset ever since I filled the spot in my heart that yearned for a red Kitchen Aid. Every time we watched cooking shows, the Le Creuset sat there, like Gatsby’s green light, making perfect brown bits for deglazing, making satisfying clunks as the cover was replaced. But the real lesson here is that as I move up Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, my emotional eating response has mutated to emotional shopping, but with an eating twist.
You have to admit’ that’s fascinating psychology.
Yeah, I’m a psyche dork. I’m the girl who was transfixed by a PBS documentary on the Bubonic plague and the identification of the mutation of a certain gene that allowed people to survive infection and which has later gone on to increase immunity to AIDS. In fact, I was shouting back to the television set yelling out the chromosome number and the amino chains like an armchair (chaise) geneticist, then going off on a rant about Downs Syndrome and women with three X’s and men with two x’s and a y, all the while Esteban wished that he could just sit there and be jetlagged in silence.
Before you get too impressed, realize that tonight I’ll be parked in front of my Tivo, watching America’s Next Top Model. I’m totally a Brandy haytah. Bitch poured beer in mah weave.
Also, when I picked up Esteban from the airport, we went out for Portobello mushroom fajitas (ok, that’s what I had, he had some noodle thing) and at said restaurant, the dessert sign had a misspelling.
Chocolate Suduction Cake $3.99
I stared at it the entire meal. Suduction. I mean, in whose brain did that look right? Suduction. Did you stick a fork into the cake and a frothy glurt of bubbles stream forth? It sounded like a medical procedure.
I told Esteban about it because I kept looking back at it, to see if it was still spelled so stupidly. Certainly I couldn’t have seen correctly the first time. Certainly the E just looked like a U. But no. There was no mistaking. It was Suduction at its sudsiest.
When Esteban went to the bar to pay for lunch, the hostess walked by and asked how everything was. To be fair, I wouldn’t have said anything if she had asked how my meal was, but since she asked how ‘everything’ was, I felt the dessert sign was fair game.
‘Good. But just so you know, there’s a misspelling on your dessert sign.’
‘There is?’ She stood in front of it and read everything. ‘Where?’
I forget sometimes that such verbal toxicity doesn’t jump up and slap everyone in the face, just a certain tainted segment of the population who are smugly holding their hardcover copy of ‘Eat Shoots and Leaves’ like a crucifix.
‘SUDuction.’
‘How should it be?’ She puzzled.
‘It’s like seduce.’
‘Oh, so with an I then?’
At that point, it was just uncomfortable, so I walked away and left her to her own devices (or devises). I am clearly not strong enough to change the world on my own. So much for thinking globally and acting locally. Next time I’ll start small. Their and they’re. You’re and your. Its and It’s. Its a good thing.
(Ouch.)
