Seven Things

Annie tagged me with a wandering blog meme last week. I’m just now getting to it. The rules are simple. I link to Annie and then I reveal seven weird or random things about me. So here you go…

1) The first time my name appeared in print, it was in the Letters section of an ill-fated comic book called The Comet.
2) I’ve never seen Casablanca.
3) I’ve often had the urge to jump on the stage during a live play and start interacting with the scene, just to see what the actors do.
4) I sometimes can taste words.
5) I believe places can be haunted but I don’t believe in sentient ghosts.
6) I’ve won more than one multi-table poker tournament in Vegas but the winnings were small.
7) I’ve eaten javelina.

I’m supposed to tag 7 more people. I’m not going to. I doubt 7 people will even read this post as all my work is being done at Donklephant these days.

Waiting

Last fall, amidst the kind of “well, what now” crisis of self us 33-year olds are good at, I decided to stop being so damn practical about my career as a writer and just embrace my fiction writing whole heartedly. Being of the cohort who gets degrees, I applied for MFA writing programs.

After polishing my best short stories, writing different personal essays for each school, taking the GRE and begging for recommendations from some of the kindest people in the world, I am now waiting. One rejection tumbled in a week ago, needlessly long and polite. I’d be happy with a 3x3 card with a big YES or a big NO. You’d think a writing program would keep to the old axiom that brevity is at the foundation of quality writing. Leave the long-winded, soft letdowns for professionals who don’t spend 95% of their careers opening rejection letters.

Four more schools have not yet responded. One is the Big Daddy school whose acceptance of me would be both profoundly surprising and fabulously validating. The others are more likely shots, drawing to the flush rather than the inside straight. Any school would be nice. No school would be disappointing but writing ain’t medicine, they still let you do it even without a degree.

It’s the waiting that makes it painful. I’m good in a chase, quick, resourceful, tenacious to the point of being infuriating. I’m pretty good with results too, appropriately humble or stoic depending on the outcome. But I suck at waiting. I fidget, I obsess, I drink, I write blog posts that are neither interesting nor brief. I grew a goatee that revealed my scraggly Irish heritage in full, patchy glory. I shaved it. Now I’m considering abusing the concept of sideburns.

Soon I’ll know what the Great University Readers have decided and I can go on, make plans, stop leaping to my feet the moment the mail smacks into the box. I hope for the best, I expect something less. But I just want to know. I hate living in the in betweens when you can neither prepare nor recover.

Me in Six Words

Have you heard about the six word memoir? Kinda cool. Dyre42 reminded me of it. I’ve been meaning to post mine, so, here it is:

Searching is fun. Finding, less so.

Out Here -- A Post About Very Little

I have pulled in my head and stopped listening to the world of blogs. Maybe “pulled in” is the exact wrong phrase. Maybe I should say I’ve stuck my head out from the world of blogs – for when you are not immersed in the daily vitriol and passion and clinging conformity and desperate nonconformity and all the other hardness that is the blogosphere, you start seeing that the rest of the nation, the world, cares oh so little about so much of what boils blood on blogs.

There is a willful ignorance out here, sure, but there is also a comforting acceptance too, a softness to human interactions where personal political opinion is secondary to just about every other qualifier. Out here I am not defined by the force of my opinions so I feel less pressure to be firm. I don’t have to be coherent. I don’t have to be pithy or wise or exuberant. I can wallow in the deep confusion to which us humans are naturally confined.

You see, what’s really going on is that I am in transition – this blog’s sputtering is just a reflection of swirling events out here. Nothing tragic. Nothing even worth mentioning. Just one of those times when life progresses faster than the spirit can change and you’re left scrambling to realign the pieces in a pattern that makes sense.

I’ve got a few pieces stuck back together. Soon, I just know, I’ll be back here with renewed vigor, speechifying away with nary a remembrance of my time out here where political opinion is not the stuff of polite conversation. But I thought I’d write a post about it – just so I can point back and say “see, I CAN exist happily in a world of subdued ideals and formless opinions.” I can – but only when I’m in flux.