Gut Sickness

There is a feeling I get when I feel particularly ashamed of being human. A great example of this is something I glimpsed on the Reuters website.

2nd most popular article: Iran required to give up most of it's enriched uranium
1st most popular article: Donald Trumps's daughter, Ivanka, tweets new pregnancy.

UGH! Doesn't that make you sick? In what crazy world is Ivanka's pregnancy more important than Iran releasing it's enriched uranium? This one. My stomach gets upset and my face contorts to disgust.

After seeing that on the computer screen I had to physically remove myself from the room. I walked to the kitchen to get some water. In the living room some show was on about wedding dresses. Even now my stomach feels queasy. Ugh.

I will have to come back to this.

Back.

The wedding dress show is a reality show about people who buy wedding dresses. Problem customers, easy sales, and lots of money and a warehouse full of super expensive white fabric body coverings. But when I hear them talk up the wedding day as the single most important day of a woman's life (thought: of course they would talk up that day, they sell wedding dresses). Then the women parade around in front of their friends and family and try on various wedding gowns, gasp at the $10,000 price tag (or triple this in some cases) and pay it anyway saying, "Well I only get married once, might as well make it count."

Now before you think to yourself, "well actually lady, you will probably get married twice as the divorce rate is going up," I have to tell you that the divorce rate is going down, and has been going downward since the 60's. The current rate of divorce is about 41%, which I admit is rather high. But it has been decreasing. It's a oft-perpetuated lie that says otherwise. But accurate figures are seen when surveyed by legitimate institutions like the Fertility and Family Statistics branch of the Census Bureau and the Pew research center. Now, back to what I was saying.

These women buying these dresses for the price of a car that they will wear for a day...

I got nothing.

My brain simply does not compute. It does not make sense to me and I can't even wrap my mind around the idea of another person making that kind of decision: "It's the cost of new Honda Civic and I'll wear it once... but it is the most important day of my life, might as well make it count. I'll take it!"

You want to know the best part? Sometimes this expensive dress BANKRUPTS the women. Yeah. I know right? Imagine that post coital honeymoon conversation: "Wow. That was great -- by the way we are now fourteen thousand dollars in debt." BAZINGA!

I think the part that gets me is the frivolous spending of dump-trucks full of money on A dress and A celebration for A day. I see all of this, this industry, this institution and I think to myself... what a messed up place we live in. I understand far more than I am able to express, so I see these people and listen to the things they say and understand what kind of person they are, what they think about, how they think, what it must be like to live with them and so on.

Sometimes all I see when I look at this show is bipedal mammals acquiring white fabric at great cost to themselves and wear it one day in front of other bipedal mammals wearing expensive fabric so everyone can stand around and wear expensive fabric. It not unlike chimpanzees putting a leaf on their head starting a trend that others follow and they start revolving teir lives around acquiring said leaf, or something approximate. The sad thing is that the chimps know it is a game and drop it eventually.

Another day another update

It's been a really long time and a lot has happened.

After I busted my butt to write all those essays, and not to mention working when not applying to all of those grad schools, I just wanted to vegg out and decided to relax for a change.

Oh, it was so nice to not have responsibilities for a change. All I had to do was go to work. That left a lot of other time to do some mindless activities. So for the first time in three months I turned on the XBOX and played Forza Motorsport 3 and raced around in it. I must have done that for hours. While I'm racing in video game land my mind can wander and often does.

I feel like a huge weight just fell off my shoulders and I want to enjoy my carefree moment (however brief, because I know when the schools start responding to my requests I will be going back to school for a couple years and be very busy again, if I get accepted. So this may be the last good goof-off time I have for awhile.)

It was much needed after applying to grad school. I played other games, read some books and I even participated in some heavy-nerd activities!

One of my room mates has a girl friend, just recently she moved in with us (quartering the rent, wahoo!) and asked if I wanted to join them in a vampire/werewolf role playing table top game called the world of darkness. My initial reaction was negative, but deep below the surface of my psyche, my inner nerd stirred. I said maybe and slept on it. The next day a premise was posited to me from nowhere, insisting that because I had no obligations I could join them in the game, and if it wasn't fun it could be just the once. So I joined the game as a cage fighting, dumb tough guy that would, some how, transform into a werewolf at some time. We were playing humans first, and role playing the transformation for dramatic effect. (side note, vampires don't do anything for me; Werewolves on the other hand interest me quite a bit. I like the monster lurking beneath the surface idea, and prefer ferocious beast-type monsters to uppity, aristocratic, humanoids with pointy teeth and pale skin. However Bram Stoker's Dracula is a favorite story of mine, and the only book to scare me)

Anyway the role playing table top game was a lot of fun, but it reminded me of all the years I spent playing Dungeons and Dragons and others with my friends growing up. It made me very nostalgic because it was a favored weekend activity, and on several occasions it prevented my other friends from partaking in illegal activities like drug dealing. Role Playing Games satisfy some deep level of the psyche, something that can override desires to make money illegally, or go to parties or get drunk or a bunch of other things. Anyway, after the world of darkness game I started talking about Rifts, a futuristic role playing games with magic, robots, supernatural and stuff. They seemed interested so on a whim I offered to lead a game of Rifts for all of them to play in. They happily agreed and we played it the other night. It went pretty well, but it was all new to them so I had to lead them by the hand, so to speak and let them get a feel for the game mechanics. So now that that has been done, session # 2 will be a lot better, and after that it will be character driven.

Wow, what a nerdy outburst. I have to watch what my inner nerd says sometimes, he will talk forever, just to talk--which reminds me:

I saw some episodes of a show called Big Bang Theory about a bunch of nerd geniuses and a hot blond girl. I think it makes the obvious mistake with the stereotype about geniuses being unable to function socially, or with basic things like tying shoes and the like. I know plenty of brilliant people, some of them geniuses, and they are not socially awkward, quite the contrary, they are often speaking at huge public forums or writing formal papers. I realize that some people are awkward socially, and when they see girls and stuff, but the writers seem to go out of their way to make simple things complicated simply by inflating the language to chemistry or physics jargon. Sometimes it's cute, and sometimes it's annoying. Mainly because I understand and follow what they are saying in their complicated science talk.

That reminds me, I been watching a lot of the show Bones, and there are times when Bones will say something really complicated and Boothe doesn't understand what she says and says something like, "She, must have known him?" And Bones says, "Yeah, I just said that." I was watching it with some of my roommates friends, and it occurred to me that they are with Boothe and his inability to follow the science talk, and they have to wait for Boothe to 'translate' the science talk so they can understand it. I'm not trying to say I'm smart to brag or something, just observing that the two world perspectives we must have are vastly different.

Rambling now, time to go.

Mozart and Snoop Dogg

I was riding in the car with two other people and listening to Howard Stern on Sirius/XM radio. I have been listening to Howard for seven years now, so I understand whats going on, but others in the car weren't that familiar with him and they suggested listening to music on one of the many music channels.

So we listened to The Pulse, a top 40 pop/rock music station. And they were doing a countdown of, what else, the top forty songs of 2010. We got there at the tenth most popular song. They all sound alike to me so I can't tell you what song it was, but this guy was singing and he had a warbling/underwater sound quality to his voice. I wondered what it was like to be in the room when that decision was made. Did they listen to his rice paper thin voice and think to themselves that something was missing? And then think that making him sound like he was singing underwater was the solution? Maybe that is the reason its number ten? (As a matter of interest song number one sounded like he was singing above water.)

I'm not a fan of pop music. I'm a metal head myself, but I listen to classical and a lot of others. See, the thing with me and music is that if I think it is difficult, technical or skillfully done I tend to like it, and if I feel like it doesn't require much skill, ability or technique than I am disinclined to like it. Rap for example, often times I feel like it doesn't require much skill, or isn't equivalent to say an opera singer or a violinist. The sounds in rap songs are usually computer generated and spaced and timed and layered in such a way that sounds like it was constructed by a person at a computer. In my mind it can not compare to the likes of a Yo Yo Ma playing the cello with his hands, which is what I'd rather watch and listen to.

At a concert all the sound is coming from his cello, if he makes any mistake we will hear it, and when we don't we can appreciate just how sharp his brain is, how much practice he had to reach this level. At a rap concert the computer will not make a mistake leaving my interest to fall on the rapper alone, and I'm usually disappointed in them because they don't sing well, and the rap, or poetry in some cases, isn't so hot either. Maybe I'm totally ignorant of rap and can't appreciate it, but I want you to think of Mozart and ask yourself the question, will anyone know Snoop Dogg 219 years from now?

I think I'll end there because my eyelids are getting heavy.

grad apps

I did not expect the application process to take this long/ I been at it for three weeks or so now.

I have applied to 10 programs with two more to go. I have to say it is getting hard to be excited about their program. Each school peppers their application with questions about why I am interested in them. At first giving thoughtful answers was easy and took little time but as I progressed through them it got much harder. Suffice it to say I am burned out.

But I knew I would get this way

:-O

Cause I know me, see? So long ago I wrote templates with blanks in them for all my essays and responses. I wrote thoughtful responses to their questions and essay prompts a month go so I wouldn't have to do it now when I'm burned out. Smart on my part. But I can still make mistakes so I fill in the blanks and then wait a day to read it to make sure its seamless and answers the prompt and stuff.

The thing is they all want different things. Except UC schools. They have the same prompts, questions and stuff. I recycled my UC Irvine essay for UC Riverside and switched the names. But I graduated from that school so I had to make it more personal, you know? I probably know the professor who will read my writing sample very well, so I had to.

But I think it was U of Michigan that wanted 2000 word personal statement and u of Florida wanted 500. So I had to write a new one, largely borrowed from the middle of the larger one, but whatever. When I get burned out like this I got to relax, get away from it and recheck everything when I am fresh before I submit it.

Oh, another thing: I didn't know it would cost so much money to apply. Each school charges a fee of about 70 bucks. Venderbilt was free, U of Florida was 30 bucks, UC Riverside was 80 (bastards). I am applying to 12 of them.

KA-CHING.

It cleaned me out. But on top of the application fees you have to send your GRE scores to some of them (not all) at 25 bucks a pop, and your official transcripts have to go to each one, and some want two, and some split their departments, one for writing and one for graduate admissions and they both want two transcripts. At around ten bucks a pop those transcripts add up too, especially when one *&%$&%#^#$^% school wants four of them, two for each department. (UC Irvine said something nice here, they said, "Just send one transcript and if we need an additional copy we will make one. Brilliant! Why can't these other schools discover a copy machine?) Plus packaging, envelopes, paper, pens staples, and mailing. It adds up very quickly. I am keeping track right now, and when I am all done I will post it so you can see the breakdown. GRE scores, transcripts and fees--that's a racket.

Just think last year the U of Michigan in ann arbor made a ton of money from application fees. Even though i dislike it, let's do some math. If around 1,200 people apply to the U of M and each fee is 70 bucks that is around 84,000 dollars-from writers no less. (Bunch of wealthy people, writers.) The company that does GRE testing (I do not like them) ETS charges around 25 bucks to send your scores to colleges (((IMPORTANT: Unless you send the scores the same time as when you take the test, I didn't have the addresses of all the colleges when I took the test.))) so 25 bucks a pop times 1200 people required to send them in is about 30,000 dollars. And that is just one university. Feels like a racket to me. It's like a necessary evil that is unnecessary.

SO if you plan to apply to graduate school here are some tips for you:

1) Start early. Some of them start accepting applications in September of April, others December.
2) Go to each university website and read what they require, they have their prompts available sometimes, and list when they can start accepting applications.
3) Save up about a grand to apply for ten universities (through a wide net to increase your chances of being accepted because they only accept people ONCE a year, and some schools alternate which year they accept majors, ie fiction applicants accepted odd years, poetry applicants accepted even years, so if you miss that then you got to wait two years.
4) Do writing related stuff before you apply, they ask a lot of questions about it and I had very little to add to that because I was only published the one time I tried. Leaving all those questions blank made me feel really bad.

I guess that's all for now, time for bed.

MFA Update

Personal statement has been worked and reworked and in two days and four drafts later it is something I am quite proud of. Of course it wouldn't have been possible without my best friend Mike.

My prose was like a tattered sword; yeah it could kill you but it would take a few swings before it broke the skin. Thanks to Mike that sword would get sharpened to a razors edge so that one clean cut will cleave a man in two. So to speak. The point is the P.S. is sharp now.

Personal Statement: Mission Accomplished
Statement of Purpose: Round One! Fight!!

It doesn't make sense to me, it is so vague:

In an essay, please describe your natural ability and motivation for graduate study in writing, including your preparation for writing, your academic plans or research interests and experience with writing, and your future career goals. Please be specific about why our MFA program would be a good intellectual fit for you.

I will be doing this tomorrow and applying in the evening. If all goes according to plan.

You got it, Teddy!

For the first time I am sitting in my room at my new desk looking out the window and watching the snow fall. I am out of coffee, milk and food. I am hungry. The snow right outside the window blows to the right, further out it blows to the left. My car looks like a frosted miniwheat.

From 10am to midnight yesterday I wrote my personal statement for grad school. And now that I read it over I can see that it is crap--amateur prose that sounds like I am trying to impress someone. Maybe that is what it is supposed to sound like? Maybe the selection committee knows what they are looking for. Either way another round of revision is necessary. And then I move from the personal statement to the statement of purpose. Which is kinda the same thing but with a focus on academics. I don't know what that means. I can't spend too much time on this because I have to modify it to fit each of my choices when I apply, and I haven't applied anywhere yet. As soon as I get this stupid essay done I can start applying. And then I will be free of huge responsibilities for a few months.

In my mind I thought of myself as a strong applicant, but as I write down what I have done I see that I am not, that the University of Michigan will be receiving 800 other personal statements and choosing like 10 people. Maybe my writing samples will wow them. Confidence is not high and I'm hungry. But Teddy Roosevelt said, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

That MFA feeling

[noon and twenty] I am preparing to apply to graduate school for creative writing within the month. I have a lot to say about this because it is surprisingly complicated and I still have a lot to do.

Firstly, I want to apply to eight to ten schools to have a lot of options. I looked at a lot of schools and comprised a list of schools that I would like to attend based on how well they fund incoming students, like me, how well their faculty writes, the future success of graduates and places that would be a nice fit for me, places that would push me as a writer, places where I would create the best stuff and get the most out of my Master of Fine Arts degree.

This list ended up being 24 schools long.

So I went back through the list and selected schools that I absolutely had to apply to, based on my own personal excitement about the program. This yielded a list of 18.

Than I asked my roommate Justin about his thoughts about narrowing the list down. He asked if I considered what it would be like to live in these places for a couple years. I hadn't. So I made a new list of graduate schools that were located in places I would actually like to live in. Justin pointed out that there are places and colleges on my list that have considerably colder, and harsher winters. Winters that made you wish you had a ton-ton to cut open and crawl inside of (they smell worse on the inside I hear). There were also places that had summers and springs that felt like the inside of a sauna for months at a time. I removed the universities of Minnesota, Alabama, and etc., from the list.

This new list was 15 schools long. Still too many. Especially since each school has a non-refundable fee of about 60 buckeroos. I then went to each program's creative writing MFA web page and researched what was required, not only for admission to the school, but what was required of me while I was there. There were a couple schools who required a lot of material from me (three short stories, a critical English essay, statement of purpose, statement of intent, personal statement, resume, etc) on top of all that their website was difficult to navigate and unclear. So, as awesome as Purdue might have been, they are too needy for me. So I removed them from the list. There was another one that was more literature based than I want to be so I got rid of that one.

It's hard work, all this research. Once I have this done however, I will start writing the things I need to apply. Personal statements and the like.

After that I fill out their online application forms and send them all my stuff, test scores, writing sample... oh the writing sample. Let me talk about that.

Some of the schools want multiple stories totaling no less than 40 pages. I had planed to send my one super-razor-sharp-polished nonfiction piece that could pass for fiction, but it is only 25 pages or so. This means I had to find another work I had written, something that isn't quite as polished, and polish that up right now. I hope a school doesn't require 3 or more short stories totaling more than 60 pages, or I am screwed and wont be applying to that school. So far, only a few have asked for two stories.

The due date for everything ranges from December 15th to January 15th. each school is different. So I want to apply to the schools with the earlier due date first.

Anyway, I had to write this down. Sometimes it streamlines my thoughts and helps me see what I still have to do.

If this doesn't make sense to you, that is alright because this was for me, and I know what I mean. ;-)

More posts to come in the near future.

Oh, the MFA feeling: Sore lower back, tired eyes from scanning pages of text about how awesome a school thinks it is, a slight headache, a little hunger, the smell of hot coffee nearby (mug number 2) and the odor of someone who forgot to shower last night after work (me).

[1:45 pm] I removed John Hopkins university from the list (now 12 schools long). The school offers a Master of Arts, not a Master of Fine arts degree. The difference is the MFA is more dedicated, requiring additional time and effort. The MA is quicker, and the university says you can apply anytime, take a class at a time, night and weekends in Washington DC, or Baltimore. I don't want quicker, I want longer, more dedicated and more difficult. This is my future life here, I want to learn as much as I can rather than get a master's degree so I can check off of some bucket list.

[2:00pm] I was ready to write off the University of Florida at Gainesville because they seemed so uppity. They talked about what is required, how most prospective students don't get in and how awesome they are. Obviously written by some english/computer science/engineer type person. Not that there is anything wrong with those kinds of people. It is just that their writing lacks the kind of flow that I would appreciate in a prospective school. Than I read the Department of Creative writing's MFA page. What a breath of fresh air that was. They get it, and renewed my interest in their program.

[2:30pm] The word "slate" is appearing a lot in the writing program's websites. In the form, "...writers have an active slate of readings and activities to do..." What's with that? Is 'slate' that cool of a word? One college website even used the British informal usage meaning 'to criticize.' really? Is there some meeting where all the ideas are shared for what to put up on the website? And one guy, maybe an intern, says, "what about using the word 'slate?' It means the same as plan, schedule, book or organize and also has some peripheral meanings having to do with color, geology, and history--as many writers first wrote with slate." And they must have responded, "Brilliant!" And promptly taken the idea as their own condemning that intern to coffee barista status indefinitely. Oh the humanity!