One Holiday and Three Applications Down

The turkey, parsnip puree and cranberry mojitos were flowing but it all passed in a joyful blur for me as I arrived bedraggled and zombie-d out, hair a mess, sweater covered in lint, my jeans sagging and my posture slumped. When I got to Connecticut to join in on the holiday festivities (which were marvelous but it took me the entire time to unhunch my shoulders), I had just completed a killer week, ending with the fact that I had essentially completed three applications for grad school! Provided that they weren't lost in the mail (my greatest fear) or that I wrote across the front "BOOGER" in my complete-the-application madness.

But still...

Three down! Only NINE more to go! But the first ones are the hardest ones--now my personal statement is as perfect as it's going to get, and my essays are all sketched out (except for one for Columbia that I can see myself completing badly at the last minute). The writing sample itself, which is 90% of the application's worth (so I hear) will not change another line, word or even comma. If it does, I might just die.

So I sent in the completed MFA and or Fellowship applications to:

UC-San Diego
UC-Irvine
and Stanford--which I looked at one last time AFTER I handed it in and saw a typo on the personal statement. Noooo! Can't change it now. All are due tomorrow so they were done last week. Next round is due December 15th, but I hope to have a few due beyond that out by then.

In the meantime I will be squirreling away in the recesses of my cozy apartment and using the cubes at work to furiously download PDFs on a faster computer than my own (after work hours of course!) and if all goes well, I will submit three applications per week until the week of Christmas. Then I will be done. And on to perfecting my query letter and getting my completed novel out there, starting a new but pretty hard temporary magazine job, and continuing my music writing. Oh, and writing that new book too. *Sigh*

Are you a person who needs to be busy or feels like you are wasting your life? I am. Sometimes it's fun, but on a rainy day like today it's a little exhausting. Perhaps it's that leftover turkey, or perhaps because I had two assignments due over the weekend so have not officially taken a day completely off from work in months, or that I'm working on my next round of applications now, but I am sleepy and wish for my cloud-like bed and a cup of cocoa instead of this lukewarm bitter coffee and piles upon piles of paper.

Sending good vibes out to you on this Monday, hoping to get some back. Boy, do I need it!