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.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but aarrhhhhhgggggg!!!!!!!

As a peace-loving, mellow sort of person, I’m rarely truly angry.  Annoyed, grumpy, indifferent, yes, but angry, not likely.  But today I’m furious.

ETS.  The Educational Testing Service.  If it were a person, we might come to blows.  Impenetrable webs of bureaucracy, bitchy customer service reps, misleading websites, and money-grubbing monopolies would be a source of annoyance any day, but when they come between me and grad school, I’m neither patiently forgiving nor temperate in my anger.  It was like this: in late October I sent out the additional score reports for my general and subject tests.  I hadn’t received the subject test scores yet, but I figured that my order would be filled when those scores became available.  Why would I make such an unreasonable assumption?  Well, only because a statement on the instruction page of the online score-ordering website said:

“score reports for a future scheduled test date will be mailed when scores for that test date are available”

Now, it’s possible that my grasp of the English language is slipping, but to me this statement suggested that it was indeed the established practice to send pre-ordered scores once said scores were processed and became available.  However, the customer service rep informed me (snottily and with unnecessary attitude) that it “clearly states” on the website that only available scores may be ordered.  I could hear her derisive sneer as she shot down my belief that pre-ordering scores was an acceptable practice.  She refused to listen to my concern that the order acknowledgement I had received by email had listed my erroneously-ordered subject test score reports along side my properly-ordered general test score reports.  I felt like screaming or crying or cussing her out, but  because I’m a well-mannered Minnesota girl and because she had made me feel thoroughly stupid and incompetent, I thanked her, hoped she had a good day, and hung up.

The real kicker is that I then proceeded to give twenty-three more of my hard-earned dollars to this pernicious company, in order to rectify my mistake caused by their misleading website.  If any other company operated in such a way I would take my business elsewhere, but I can’t exactly do that now, can I?  Luckily this mistake only affected one of my eight schools–it could have been disastrous.  I can’t do anything about it…but I want to.  Oh, I want to.

Caring and letting go

If I didn’t care so much about grad school, it would be easier to fall asleep at night.  I would probably pay more attention to my classes and almost definitely spend more than 30 seconds doing my hair.  I would probably also clench my teeth less and have fewer headaches.

However, I very much do care about grad school.  Along with my family and friends (loved ones will always be a priority) it’s about the only thing I care about right now.  I’m pretty sure my monomania makes me socially unattractive, but Anne puts up with me and no one else is subjected to me for long enough that it becomes a problem.

I think the problem is that I don’t usually let myself care this much about something so uncertain.  The “don’t get your hopes up and you’ll never be let down” theory has always made sense to me.  It just feels terribly dangerous to want something that I have to rely on someone else to give me; I can re-write my personal statement until my brain oozes out my eyes, but the result is still entirely out of my hands.  The applications are going out this week–I can’t hang on to them any longer–so I need to figure out how to just let go because whatever is going to happen will happen.

But letting go, like falling asleep, is easier said than done.

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!

Possession

I was having a horrible Tuesday night.  I know how to save myself in situations like that–distraction, occupation, company–but I’d let it go too far and found myself sitting on the edge of my bed in tears trying to think of something to do and feeling that everything was too much effort.  I didn’t want to read Remains of the Day, I didn’t want to watch TV, I didn’t want to go for a walk, I didn’t want to do art, and I certainly didn’t want to study.  Eventually, I forced myself to grab a new book, unopened, recently purchased for two dollars at a half-price books warehouse sale.

I happened, thank goodness, to reach for A.S. Byatt’s Possession.  I bought the book without knowing a thing about it besides the mention on the back cover that the main character was a scholar of English literature.  After the first paragraph, with its rich description of a dusty antique book, I wasn’t crying anymore.  By the second page I remembered, through Roland Mitchell’s obvious passion, the way I feel about literature and how excited I am to move forward with my education.  Byatt writes, “The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence” (6).  That’s what I want to do–what I’m going to do–and there’s nothing in my way besides the paralysis of frustration.  Because I’m not in any English classes right now, I need occasional reminders of the way studying literature makes me feel, and the appeal of scholarship in general.  Possession gives a far-from-rosy picture of the practicalities of an academic life, to be sure; Roland is more-or-less unemployed and financially dependent on his secretary girlfriend.  However, the only thing that seems certain in Roland’s life (thus far) is his fascination with the work he does.  It’s worth living on the edge of poverty, working for an unencouraging taskmaster, and staying with a woman he may not still love to be a member of the academic community.

I need to remember that it’s worth it.  It’s worth the stress and the labor and the occasional tears.  It’s worth opening myself to rejection and reaching high.  Opening Possession on Tuesday night reminded me of what I want and what it’s worth, and that makes everything else easier.  It reminded my of my “own huge ignorance” and the life I hope will make it slightly less-huge (10).  It made me actually want to work on my personal statement, and that, my friends, is quite an accomplishment.

The Newest BoME

Applying to graduate school is the most current Bane of My Existence.  Like most BoMEs, it entails late nights awake and fretting, early weekend mornings on the computer, anxious conversations, lists, scribblings, spreadsheets, heart palpitations, and (hopefully) metaphorical gray hairs.  Over the past two greasy, pajama-clad mornings, I’ve come up with a list of 8 potentials: UW Madison, Uof Michigan-Ann Arbor, Brown U, Yale U, Northwestern, Michigan State U, U of Illinois, and Ohio State U.  8 schools, all of which require personal statements of varying length and content, writing samples of various lengths, ridiculous amounts of supplementary materials, and modest-to-exorbitant application fees.  I have regular nightmares that all 8 will respond to my applications with skinny envelopes containing variations on “no thank you” (except for last night, when I dreamed a completely non-grad-school related dream about kissing the rather elderly Sir Paul McCartney).

There’s probably a terrible heap of character to be built through this experience.  Lessons on perseverance, organization, hard work, and perhaps graceful acceptance of failure may be provided, free of charge.  Hopefully the overwhelming sense of overwhelmption* that I’m currently experiencing will hold off some of the less-worthy competition.  As for me, I don’t have a choice–this is the thing, the only thing, I want to do with my life.  So no pressure, right?

*Hey, if Shakespeare got to make up words and be called a genius…