I will not ACTUALLY submit this to a grad school...

(Unless one of you thinks it's a good idea, too...)

I'm working on grad school applications, and this one says to "outline in general terms your reasons, goals, and other considerations relevant to undertaking graduate studies." I think this would do it...

A graduate education would further my knowledge of the English language, enabling me to waste more of the precious fleeting years of my life discovering that which has already been found, pleasing people who, in ten years, will likely neither remember nor care about me, echoing empty phrases and terms, learning to speak in a language of convenience. Graduate school could serve as the mortar for the cinder-block wall I am building to cement myself into my comfort zone, another layer of knowledge slapped, viscous and oozing, into the crevices of my mind, left to slowly ossify, optimally arresting all inconvenient wandering forever. A graduate education would let me stave off the inevitability of real life as well as serving as a pretend solution to the vacancy I fear.

The universe is a howling wilderness of despair. Carlyle says so. And all of us upper-middle-class yuppies have got to find some sort of cocoon to help us pretend that it isn’t. Some prefer a white picket fence and a hideous beast of a mortgage—I choose grad school. There’s this gap, see, this chasm that no one remembers to tell children about as they’re growing up and obsessed with high school and moving on to college. And it’s not until sometime—oh, maybe the summer of sophomore year—that the truth kicks in and our minds begin to spin the silk that is meant to serve as the parachute against the bitter winds of that cold, cruel May day when we throw our caps in the air and, with them, every link to the carefree, dependent past. I’m well aware that grad school will just give me two more years of that artificial scholastic co-dependency, but every little bit counts, right? And from there, it’s only another forty years or so til Social Security kicks in…sooner if I move to Sweden.

Say, does your graduate school have a program in Swedish studies?

Of course, I know this doesn’t apply to pre-med kids. But that is because they are all zombies.

peter-versus-mr.-darling

I took the GRE today. I did okay on it.
When I say "okay" I mean I got way higher than I anticipated on the math and not quite as high as I wanted on the verbal.
Because it's a computer-based test the results were available as soon as I finished so I called home while I was waiting for mayhem to find the bizarrely located test center to pick me up and we (my mother and I) fell to talking about my summer's plans, and it hit me in a solid and peculiar way:
"summer plans"
will not have much meaning in my life for much longer. We even talked about my getting a job and an apartment and things. And as abstract concepts those things do not bother me at all even remotely.
But applied to me, on the phone with my mom, they are foreign and frightening and I do not feel like childhood should be over yet. And it is.

Soon my life will not be defined by my double major, or my number of Facebook friends, or the grades I get. Grades. Tiny convenient measures of worth: how many times have I looked at you and felt so good about Me?

I am not sure how my life will be defined.
I know how it should be defined
and even how I want it to be defined.

So really? I will graduate college in seven months. I will either go home for the summer or work and rack up cash and find an apartment and a roommate and get a driver's license and maybe a haircut or something
and my life will go on
because I am alive
and that is what happens to people: they live.

I just have to get used to that living looking very different from what I've been accustomed.
I am
a little
afraid.
That I can't do it without someone else there picking up the pieces of my mistakes.
That the lives of the people I love will also go on but
without me in them
without theirs in mine
and I am a selfish beastie. I want to keep them all. I can't.

(this is only part of it. since I know there are wonderful truer-than-true answers for all of these. but...I needed to write them out at least a little anyway.)

A First

Candidly:
When I imagine you reading this, I squirm
Discomfited, like a Frog
Self-pinned for dissection. Because you knowing how I feel
Feels that way: fate Worse than Death.
But I am no true Introvert, and reticent as I am
or Wish to be, my fingers curl
of their Own Volition around the pen
and I write. Even as the words form
my mind registers a Protest, lyrical Roadblock,
cautioning against the following:
Sap, Cliches, and Flowery Language. So I do my best
To avoid the offenses. Not such an effort: I do not think
I could be Those with you, despite
whimsic and ironical Effort, or Anonymity of Subject.
But, since I cannot say even these things to you
When we are sitting, silent, at a red light:
You always smell like Clean Laundry
And you know when to take me Seriously
far more often than I give you credit for.
You keep a low enough Profile to be overlooked,
and for some reason I did not intimidate you.
And even though
We've hardly gotten started, I suppose
I wanted to say thank you.
Because if it has been obscured by Cynicism (third Wheel
Which makes our Tricycle go) I think you're pretty amazing.
And for those Insignificants of yours, the ones you sneaked in and forgot
(which is like you, very) a long Time ago,
I noticed
Even though I tried hard not to.


Like a diamond in the sky how I wonder

Summer Child Care

When I think about my future,
I can only hope
That it does not involve this summer's pastime:
Cleaning up a five year-old
Who succumbed to diarrhea,
(Sans toilet)
And immediately
Blamed the devil.

Hello, July.