Photographs: March 2009 Archives

I have no idea how to say this, so I will just say it. I did not get into graduate school. Anywhere.

None of the words one might use to describe it - disappointment, dashed hopes, crushed flat on the sidewalk like old ugly gum - seem adequate.

I suppose I had too much riding on it, on a personal level.

I had a lot more riding on it than the first time I applied, when I got into one school that was far away in a city I didn't like, in a program that would have put me into debt for decades, and decided not to go. I had a good job at the time. I wasn't ready to drop everything, to change my standard of living. I just wasn't ready.

This time, I was ready. I am ready. I have been for a while now.

I don't know what to make of this, except - and please just let me say this without telling me how wrong I am to even think such a thing, without piling on the platitudes. I know it's hard to hear someone you like say such a thing, but I need to say it. Because I mean it. Because this is how I feel.

I don't know what to make of this, except that I am maybe not going to be a writer the way I'd always imagined I'd be. The way I always felt, deep down, at the hard substrate layer of myself, in the bedrock, that I was meant to be.

I am too old for this. I am too old for the plucky, give-it-another-shot-someplace-else strategy. And there is something to the idea that if this is the right time, and I am in the right place, and in the right frame of mind, and ready to do the things it will take, that it should have - and would have - worked. I would have gotten in.

Maybe just to the one school that felt right to me. That was what I expected, actually. Just the one school. And it would have been fine - heck, it would have been wonderful. I was prepared to be delighted.

I was not prepared for this, and I didn't know what to do with myself afterwards, except get on my bike. But I couldn't get on my bike, because my back still hurts, and I don't want to do what I usually do, which is to leap back into my normal activities too soon and keep it from getting all the way better.

So I didn't get on my bike. I got on the couch and cried. I called Boywich.

When things are really, really bad, I told him, he is the only one I can bear to talk to. So he's the only one who knows. And it is likely to stay that way for a few days.

Why am I telling the blog? Well, it may be because I don't really know most of the people who read. I don't interact with you. There are exceptions to that: I do feel that I know a couple of you, and that we are friends. Friends in perhaps a different way than the people I see every week. But in a way that has its own specialness.

That's not why I'm telling you, though.

Sometimes when one is writing a blog, one is conscious of writing to the people who may be reading it. But sometimes one is just writing to oneself. This is one of those.

I just need to write it down, I guess. Which may make me still a writer or it may not. I don't know. I've been wishing for a more creative space lately, a space I felt I could paint in. A space surrounded by more creative types than my apartment is. I was thinking of moving closer to the school I thought I'd be going to. Now, obviously, that isn't a reason, and moving is expensive, of course, but I am still a little attracted to the idea.

We shall see.

Note: Headline stolen right off the cover of Astronomy magazine.

We've moved into that sketchy early-spring phase wherein the heat is on when you don't want it on and not on when you do, and so I have been pulling out some of the heavy knits that I normally can't wear in the overheated indoor climate of a NYC winter. (You expats know whereof I speak; steam heat + little control = windows open in winter)

Apparently Kitwich has been waiting to get her paws on them all winter.

Woke up feeling inexplicably decent this morning (I use that term loosely, as always). Could be that I've now had two days of 7 or 8 hours' sleep in a row. Could be that I needed to turn that air purifier off so the room would be quieter and not have a funny smell while I slept.

Could be that my body senses that this interminable winter is nearing its end. Could be that I saw you know who yesterday and that just made me feel better, even though I got nothing tangible in the way of -er- nooky out of it. Some people's presence is just like sunshine, I guess.

I am certain that the bicycle will once more fill a social role and again become a means of transport and not just an object of leisure.

Now they're in the process of undoing all that and, even if the change varies from country to country, I can see that there is a whole new way of political thinking. - Eddy Merckx