halfway to go

I've become completely nocturnal while applying to graduate schools. Not the "night owl" sort of nocturnal where you go to bed at one to three in the morning, but really nocturnal: I go to bed at six to nine or even ten in the morning and wake up at four in the afternoon. I really don't like living like this at all. It just so happens, though, that when-everyone-else-is-sleeping is the best time for me to work. As a result, I've been seeing a lot of sunsets and sunrises.



I go to bed every morning when it looks like this:



Everything is white and there are footprints in the snow.



Tonight I finished the first five of my applications and feel thoroughly depressed about the whole endeavor. I'd been working for months at a slower pace, concentrating on things that didn't matter very much like the GRE tests because I thought that I was bound to end up with subnormal scores, and then started spending whole days working for eight to twelve hours without breaks getting my writing sample and statement of purpose ready. The statement was composed about two days before I submitted the first application and it is atrocious. I am sick about it because of all the time, energy and money I put into the rest of the application, and I feel as though I've shot myself in the foot with the statement. I actually tailored the statement to fit four schools in the last twenty-four hours and THAT was possibly worse. I found at least one major error in wording and one typo that was submitted to my first school.



I found myself sitting at my computer at my computer this morning at 8:30 wondering why the hell I was applying to some of these schools because, for the life of me, I couldn't find anything to write for my "fit" paragraphs. I wrote something for all four, obviously, but it was terrible. My head hurts just thinking about having to do the rest of them.



The remaining are all due on January first or later. I want to have them all done up before Christmas so that I don't have to think about this anymore.



One thing I have been enjoying is my Lindt chocolate advent calender. They're not the cheap ones you get next to magazines at the grocery store: everything is individually wrapped/packaged and there are many different chocolates.

Everyone is arriving home at the beginning of next week for Christmas festivities. I can't wait until this whole applications process is over. I've probably put up my best effort in a unideal world. Perhaps it will be an act of kindness when all the schools reject me because I'm beginning to think that actually being accepted would be the scariest thing-- being expected to constantly produce the kind of vague academic justifications of my research that I've been trying to make up lately almost seems like more punishment at this point. I started reading "Doctor Zhivago" two nights ago, stopped thinking about the study of English, mostly, and began to feel very much happier about life.

Off to make my Christmas wish list.