17 was bad, but 27 was far worse.

  I have discovered that I am under a 10 year curse that requires every year that ends with a 7 to be absolutely miserable.  I don't exactly remember what 7 was like but I know that if I reach 38, I will either be invincible or brain-dead. 

17 may have marked the first time I got to spend an entire year in a state of near debilitating depression, but 27 included getting fired, redacted , being rejected by grad schools 6 times (7 if you count the letter I got from Louisiana last week that informed me of "recent changes to my enrollment status" only to be told that I was still rejected), and a few bouts of depression that were about as bad as I can imagine ever surviving.  Luckily, I'm good at multitasking* so I made sure that 3 or 4 of these things would occur at the same time throughout the year.

28 hasn't been much better than a punch in the crotch:  The morning of my birthday found me in the woods, waking up to discover that all our food, beverages, and many other supplies had been stolen.  Later that day, one of the guys in our group almost drove off the mountain and another car was attacked by deer.  A couple days later a highly inebriated bum named Floyd stumbled into our camp at three in the morning demanding beer and pork or he was going to rape and kill us all.  It was probably the second best birthday I have survived yet.

I've known for the last few months that I have failed at all of the most important of my year's goals.  Sure I read 28 books by June and shat from the branches of a few trees, but all the biking, grad school, and leaving Redding business is out for 2011.  So fuck my previous list and fuck all new year's resolutions that coincide with the calendar year.


Andrew's List 28

Read 52 books
Write up book reviews for them all
Quit smoking
Fix both mopeds
Learn Tai Chi
Learn to play 'Happy Birthday' on the banjo
Learn to solve a Rubik's cube
Learn to love Redding/burn Redding to the ground
Apply to Grad School
Get within spitting distance of 200 lbs
Learn to spit farther






*no I am not.

A title? Whatever, nevermind.

According to my nephew's chalkboard and my math, between the three times I've taken the GRE and the 6 schools I applied to I've spent $992 applying to Graduate school. Couple that with the four months I've spent unemployed and this may very well be the single greatest monetary mistake I've made to date. Everything is in the mail or already received so it is all out of my hands.

I discovered a few things about myself in this process, the foremost thing being that I hate my wife's laptop (every time I go to hit backspace I get backslash and I keep moving everything thanks to the touchpad mouse). I learned that I don't get writer's block. I have plenty of things to write about and I am only stymied when I try to write in a manner that is untrue to my voice. I think there were a couple of other things but I forgot them so the other thing I learned is that applying to graduate school is the worst experience ever. It is very slightly similar to any job application but all your dreams about the future are tied up in the process. Very few of the schools do anything to help because they make their websites so poorly organized that it is much easier to make a mistake than apply correctly and they give you three different ways in which you are required to submit your materials. I'm sorry but I haven't yet sired any children so I don't have the blood of my innocent progeny to sign my name with (sure it dangles but that's how I likez my participles).

While I edited and re-read all my writing samples several dozen or thousand times, I have lost all confidence in my submissions. I have to fend off panick attacks twenty to fifty times a day as I rethink every word. I am not allowing myself to read any of the stories I submitted but luckily I have up to five months to wait to hear back about my dreams.

I think I had a point to all this but I guess I just better get back to learning the banjo so my street performance career can take off.

"I AM NOT A NUMBER, I AM A FREE MAN!"

I don’t know what I am doing. I woke up this morning wearing a shirt when I went to sleep naked. Stranger still, it is an old high school football shirt I didn’t even know I still had. Was I dreaming about high school? Did I do anything football related? Did I wander outside? The shirt is not backwards or inside out but the correct application of shirt on body is a one in four chance and I had to have dug into the boxes in the back of my closet for this relic so far that I have no idea what the statistical probability is that I ended up dressed as I am. Sometimes I love the mystery of my nocturnal peregrinations.

Sleepwalking aside, I still don’t know what I’m doing. I write a bit here and there and end up with absurdist bullshit about prank calls and dreams. I’m working on short story samples for my applications to MFA programs in creative writing and this is all I am able to slur out? I want to be a better writer, I want to help other people become better writers too, but you have to be a pretty damn good writer already to get into a program and I don’t think an honest desire for betterment will supersede shitty writing samples.

When I scored in the ninety-seventh percentile for the GRE verbal section I was invincible. Well, 97% invincible. I called everybody to brag about my quantified brain skills and was sure that I had guaranteed my place in graduate school; my score would give me confidence to polish my writing samples and would easily land me an assistantship to boot. And then I received my essay scores. I did not improve at all and my previous score that put me in the sixty-seventh percentile would have to stand as my best effort.

Who has two thumbs and appears to be a bit of an idiot savant in that he knows tedious words to a fairly impressive extent but can’t seem to string together enough words to form a cogent pair of essays? This guy.

And so I doubt and delay, never quite finishing a story, opening three documents at once about obsessive counting, a petty creator of imagined universes, and a smoky conversation about pain. That is, when I am actually working. Most mornings I distract myself with the internet while I wake up, checking email, discovering the best sales on items I can’t purchase, watching videos of people hurting themselves. I then make myself some coffee or tea or whatever caffeinated beverage catches my fancy and sit in my backyard reading.

Today I read a whole book from start to finish. This is ridiculous excess. I glut myself every morning on caffeine, nicotine, and literature. As the chemicals seep in and the literature draws me out I am thankful that nobody sees me laugh maniacally (the GRE word for this is cachinnate) and dry sob from sentence to sentence till I can’t stand it anymore and have to go inside to write. By then my hands are too cold to type correctly so I check my email again.

I don’t know what I am doing. I write to exorcise the constant internal narration, writing because I want to (need to?), hoping that someday somebody will read and say “I’m glad he wrote that.” I feel like a polished writing sample is just my current excuse because I need some sort of goal when what I really need is a reason for why I’m writing.

I don’t know what I am doing but I seem to be doing something, and just like my nocturnal adventures in fashion, I hope it means something interesting and mysterious and is not simply the restless wanderings of an overactive subconscious.