CodeBlue

Because then I can just move on. Hope is a wonderful thing, sometimes. But these days, hope is like a dog tugging at the leash or stone in my shoe and I want to be rid of it. Unfortunately, I cannot be rid of it until the not-knowing has been replaced by knowing. I'm finishing up my UG degree as a non-trad student. I live in university owned housing. Come graduation in May, I need to be out. I put away what I had made of my life to return to school after I got laid off: I don't have anywhere to "go back to" because the place I left wasn't "home" to begin with. I have to make a life for myself. That means either grad school or trying to find work in an economy and job market that doesn't take humanities majors all that seriously. The whole thing has taken on the appearance--at least to me--of a rather sick game with the future hanging in the balance. I'll grant that this is just one narrative, but half-knowing is uniquely paralyzing experience. Exactly. Those things really are a stumbling block. I can only half-heartedly look for work, only half-heartedly pour my guts into my honors thesis. Hope still hovers, flickers...and I just want it to either catch fire or go out.

I called Yale to look into my GSAS app. status. The rather exasperated--and I can't blame her--woman on the phone told me to log into my application and check. Unfortunately, the only thing my application says is that it was "successfully submitted" (in other words, my payment went through). Blue limbo. I'm still waiting on Harvard's envelope, as it seems they've sent out whatever acceptances they had and won't respond to phone or email inquiries. Brown and Columbia have both told me that a decision is forthcoming...yet their acceptances all seem to have gone out. Only Princeton and Cornell have pulled the trigger. At this point, I feel a strange sort of disconnected frustration. Beneath that, there's a deep-seated feeling of humiliation coupled with an incredible anxiety over what to do next. There's a real "otherness" I feel when I see the acceptance threads. I no longer read them. TMI, perhaps, but I'm not really here and I don't have anything invested in a persona on this board. Just a speaker in bad poem.

Emailed three programs today. This process is boring me to the point of madness and if I'm going to be rejected, then I'd prefer to get it over and done with. Heard back from two that have already sent out acceptances: the wording of the replies fell along the lines of "your application is under review and a decision is forthcoming in late February or early March"and, in the case of Brown, "Your application is complete and a decision will be forthcoming." I'm going to dispense with a close reading of these.

Emailed Columbia GSAS admissions this morning asking about my application status, indicating the program I applied to. Received this: "Dear (CodeBlue), Your application is still under review. We expect that the faculty committee on admissions will return Ph.D. decisions sometime near the end of February or March. You will be notified via email when a decision has been reached." The French Foreign Legion will have to wait a bit.

Rejected by Vanderbilt, thank GOD. Applied because it was free and I lived in Nashville for a few years: they don't offer anything I'm interested in. I was afraid I'd actually get in. Would've been a nice safety, but safety is wildly overrated. We'll see if anyone says yes. If not, c'est la vie, eh? My condolences to those who had hoped to study there and was rejected.

Hell, yes. Pure terror. It's not so much a fear of "what am I going to do," but rather, a nagging fear of the shame that might accompany being rejected by the programs I'm applying to. Part of applying to any school-whether one wants to admit it or not-is asking oneself the question: am I good enough to get in? Perhaps that seems silly, but it is very much a lingering question for me. Socratic method helps: "Am I still intelligent and hard-working if I do not get into graduate program x, y, and z?" Fatalism is somewhat comforting. The die is cast. Only Fortune knows. None of those approaches really drive out any of that fear, at least for me. In a few months I'll know. And, regardless of whether or not I am chosen, by July--just 7 months from now--my life will be nothing like it is right now: from the chair I sit in to the bed I try to sleep in every night to my idea of what the future could look like. It's never what we know that is really terrifying. It's what we don't know...and the worst part of not knowing? It's that we don't know what we don't know.

Applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell. Currently carrying 3.89 in my major (Eng. lit) at Columbia. 96%ile on GRE verbal, 74%ile on GRE Lit. in English Subj. Fingers crossed. Maybe I'll get in. Maybe I won't. At this point numbness is beginning to replace exhaustion.