The Die, it is Cast...

It is finished. Done. Finito. Graduate applications for Fall '10 are assembled, paid for, and officially dispatched. Proust to that!

Schools I've applied to this year are, in no particular order, UT Austin, UNC Wilmington, UC Boulder, FSU, NYU, and UI Urbana-Champaign. Don't ask me why I chose these particular programs. Probably some combination of arbitrariness, unoriginality, and my general over-estimation of myself. Grad school is where would-be writers go to wile away the difficult years in which they are unlikely to be published. Kind of like why old people go to Florida, or why kids fresh out of college go to Europe; symptoms of a passivity that's thinly veiled. They allow us to feel like we are doing something, when all we're really doing is waiting.

This is not the first time I have applied to graduate school. After I graduated college I took a year off and went (guess where) before sending out my first round of apps in the Fall. I applied to UT Austin, UNCW, Brooklyn College, and Brown University, and got rejected by all four. I remember feeling pretty down about that. It was probably the realest taste of failure I'd had in a long, long time. That was before I got started submitting work though. Now it's not so much the taste that bothers me, but the ache my jaw gets from constantly chewing it.

Unilateral rejection last year has left me with few expectations this time around. I tried mixing it up a bit by choosing some schools that weren't ripped from a top ten list somewhere, but as you can see, I'm still aiming pretty high. Hopefully I will get in, but there is at least a fair chance that I won't. I feel like at this point I can say honestly though that that won't bother me. It has been humbling, this path I'm on, but I am truly glad that I did not go straight from college to grad school. I'm glad that in the span of a year I 've done everything from bartending to substitute teaching to selling cable door to door. Don't get me wrong, I can't say that I've found anything romantic about these enterprises, but they have succeeded in teaching me at least one important truth: that there are many ways to get where you are going, and when you love what you're doing and believe in yourself, one is as good as any other.