Thanks World, you rock!

It’s hard to find a word for how I’m feeling these days.  If I were religious, I would say blessed.  I could say lucky, but that doesn’t convey an adequate amount of gratitude.  Whatever the word, the fact is that life is very good to me and I feel obliged to try to deserve my good fortune.  Of the eight graduate schools I applied to, three accepted me.  Of those three, one offered a generous funding package.  That one was my first-choice school all along; funny how things work out.

When something has consumed your life the way applying to grad school has consumed mine over the past half-year, it is extraordinary and strange to find your worries and obsessions suddenly resolved all at once, in the course of  a few words on official letterhead, a few emails, and a few phone calls.  It is strange to go from not knowing where you will be in six months to knowing (as much as any of us can know the future) where you will be in six years.  Strange and wonderful.

And so, even though I have ten thousand things to do every day and a mountain of stressful situations to surmount before graduation in May, I am singing-out-loud-smiling-for-no-reason happy.  And since I know it all could have turned out otherwise, I am grateful.  I suppose I could say that I am blessed by luck.

New beginnings and such

Almost all of my dreams in the past two weeks have been about babies.  Either I’m in charge of a baby, I have a baby of my own, or I’m pregnant.  According to the dream dictionary, babies may signify new beginnings.  The fact that I’m usually terrified, nervous, or overwhelmed by the (expected) babies could thus, I suppose, symbolize anxiety about new beginnings–which would certainly be appropriate.  Or, it could reflect the fact that if I had/were having a baby I would be terrified, nervous, and overwhelmed.  I don’t go for all this dream interpretation hooey anyway.

I do go for literary interpretation, however, which is what I’ve been trying to tell these folks in a non-hokey, memorable 500 words or fewer.  For those schools that allow me more space, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on what I want to say and how I want to say it, but I’ll be a blue nosed gopher (as my mother says) if I can figure out how to get my point across in 500 words.  When frustration sets in, I start to wish I could tell them how I really feel.  It would go something like:

“Dear admissions committee,   Please let me come to your school.  I want to do this so bad; more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything before in my life ever.  If not given the chance to pursue my PhD in literature, I’m pretty sure my mind will shrivel up and die of disappointment and will rattle around in my head like dried beans while I putter around at a boring job, possibly as the checkout girl at a grocery store or in clothing retail.  I have the serious intellectual passion, determination, and focus to accomplish my goals, but there’s no actual way I can prove that to you so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, although why should you when I’m sure everybody else is saying the exact same thing.  Please please please please please please please?    Love, KMN       P.S. That thing about the checkout girl/clothing retail was hyperbole…just so you know, I would keep trying to get into grad school in the face of failure because I’m so PASSIONATE and DETERMINED!

Beginning of the end (of the beginning…)

Today is the beginning of the end of my undergraduate career.  I know I’ve changed a lot in the three years between now and the last time I was a senior, back at Woodbury High School.  Perhaps I’ve learned things, become a more capable student, made new friends, figured out how to live on my own, etc. but the biggest difference is that I used to feel like a child and now I think I’m starting to feel like an adult.  I’m excited about the future, even though I don’t know what it will be like–that’s the exciting part, right?  I make plans and I set goals but ultimately I don’t have a popsicle’s  chance in hell of predicting what is going to happen.  It could be terrifying–the insecurity and instability and such–but there’s as much chance of good things happening as bad.  In fact, in my experience so far the good has always outweighed the bad, and while of course that could change, I have no reason to assume the worst.

I love new beginnings; they always fill me brim-full of hope.

Indelible Ink

Yesterday I ran several blocks through torrential downpours to arrive soaked at St. Sabrina’s just in time for my tattoo appointment.  While the tool was buzzing in the artist’s hand I ought to have been thinking about the reason I was getting this work done–the meaning it had developed for me over the two years I had been planning it.  Instead, of course, my thoughts were more along the lines of, “Ow ow ow ow, holy bujezus, that’s got to be touching bone, ow ow ow damn ow!”  However, had I been in a properly reflective mood, I would have been thinking along these lines:

Acorns, like human beings, are little bundles of potential energy.  They are these tiny, beautiful capsules that contain the raw materials for enormous, strong, ancient oak trees that mark the face of the earth for centuries.  If there’s one thing I truly do believe about individual human beings, it is their unalienable potential for change.  Until you are dead, you have the power to change yourself, your situation, and your environment.  It’s not foolproof and it’s rarely easy, but each passing second an individual has the power to make decisions that will change the direction of her life.  The reason that it’s important to me to get a reminder of this potential indelibly marked on my body is that I think the longer you live, the easier it is to lose faith in your own potential.  With age come memories of the past–a past in which perhaps you didn’t use your power to change to its utmost advantage.  I am determined to remember, when it comes to it, that looking backwards is useless but that my power over the future is as strong as it was at any point in my youth.  Even if I’m 92 and the bulk of my life is behind me and my options are limited, I will still have the potential to change myself.

So that’s something I want to remember forever, which, conveniently enough, is how long tattoos are said to last.

Boundary Waters

Heading back up to the Boundary Waters with my dad, Kathleeny, and her dad has a nostalgic sense of deja vous about it.  Our last trip, just before freshman year of college, was the paradoxical combination of a jolt of pure energy and a blanket of perfect peace.  My nerves were taut and humming with worry and excitement about the changes coming up in my life, but all that nervous energy was sucking dry my deeper reserves of strength.  Those few days of water and sky and pine needles–when worry was clouds building in the distance and perfection was stretching on a rock next to my daddy watching the sky for shooting stars–loosened the bowstring of my emotions and left me with the sense that things would be ok.  Well, not so much that things related to the upcoming transition to college would be ok–that, after all, would have made north woods a false prophet and cheapened the feeling of tranquility into a shabby lie.  It was the feeling that things would be ok–that all of my worries might come to pass and still, the world and my life would endure.  Ultimately, the world is so much bigger than our biggest, most life-altering moments that to lose yourself in it is to lose the pressing urgency of your fears.  I came home from that trip at peace with whatever happened, with reservoirs of vitality deep enough to see me through its happening.

Of course, hell happened.  The worst year of my life.  There’s nothing that can mitigate the awfulness of that experience, the unhappiness I brought on my family, or the way I shut down and let it happen.  However, it did prove to me the truth in two old sayings: “adversity builds character” and “this, too, shall pass”.  I did what I had to do to survive that year, and I made it.  I didn’t collapse at the finish line gasping “never again” with my last breath, either.  I came back, I improved, and I made it to the point at which I can’t wait to get back to my independent life in Morris.

I’m a senior now, and I need that peace and deep inner energy to plan another set of life changes for the years ahead.  I need to remember that the world is bigger than my struggles.  I need to remember how far I’ve come since last time.  I need to remember that when I’m crying over my life’s imperfections, the loons are still laughing on their silver moonpaths in the quiet of our north woods.

Note to self: it’s all gonna turn out fine

Sitting in front of a snapping fire under stars and trees and gentle wind, I thought how far my life has taken me in the past three years.  It was a perfect day: hiking, swimming, reading, laughing, breakfasting, lunching, and dinnering, in short camping.  Of my three companions, with whom I felt completely at ease, none had been my friend for more than two years.  If only my homesick freshman self, having trouble dealing with change and separation from all those people who had become indispensable parts of her daily life, could see that in time (such a short time!) life finds a new rhythm and real happiness is possible with new people, as well as with the old.  I think it’s fear of the unknown future that makes us experience life’s current imperfections so intensely.  If we could only say with certainty, “I may be alone right now, but I know that in a given amount of time I will be surrounded by true friends,” then we could perhaps be much more contented with our present situation.  Pain with an expiration date–that we can handle.  But knowing you will hurt indefinitely (perhaps only until tomorrow, perhaps forever) is what makes many of life’s trials a real bummer to deal with.  Obviously there’s no way to see into the future, or to send your past self snapshots of happy days to come.  But the more times I think, “hey, I had nothing to fret about,” the more evidence I’ll have that somewhere in the future, I’m out there thinking the same thing about my present self.