Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,
for I’ve been absent. I know. But really, what’s been going on in la vida mia is not a glut of emailification. Instead, it’s been some seriously hot nose-on-grindstone action for me: at work and moreover, preparing for MFA program application. Every second I’m not at work, I’m working on my writing samples or my statement of purpose or figuring out how many transcripts each of these schools wants or sending bags of fancy coffee to the nice, nice folks writing recommendations for me or studying ALGEBRA for the GRE. Actually, I didn’t study that much Algebra, since what I’m lookin’ to return to school for is writing, not the quadratic equation. So I studied just enough to giggle at my complete ineptitude.

So the deadline looms now, for school #1, a place I’d really like to go. Oh, how it looms. My writing prof from last spring looked over the only writing sample I haven’t finished—I won’t bore you with details, but it’s an essay. Anyway, she returned it to me today with the advice “to put it away for a few days,” before tearing into it once again, to which I felt like screaming, “But there’s no tiiiiime!” Except I couldn’t, really. Because she’d written this in a note, which she’d stuck in her mailbox along with my critique. I think she planned it that way on purpose. But she’s right. I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with the essay’s narrator for a couple weeks now, and I can’t even tell who’s seeing what, anymore. To coin a really bad turn of phrase. But I’m allowed to do that here. Ha and HAW.

And so, yeah, that’s the real reason for this rambling, Mr. Henshaw. I just had to write something else tonight, something I could write while not really thinking, without proofreading even once, with Wolf Parade at full blast through headphones: the surest route to deafness. I really should make the most of this night of Not Really Working: Watch this Harry Potter movie my coworker lent me three months ago. Eat a few gummy pounds of red licorice, enough the glue my jaws together, and my digestive tract, too. Turn the heat up to a money-bleeding extreme and take a shower with the bathroom door open, rock and roll blaring. Shave my legs. Sigh.

Anyhoo, thought I’d pop in and see how you’re doing, Mr. H. Drop me an email, why don’t ya?