(no subject)

Spent my afternoon and evening curled up on the couch, watching movie after movie. Habit, A Perfect Murder, Chamber of Secrets and all the deleted scenes, and Emma after midnight. Melynda's got her laptop back, and all is well in the world. She came home with lots of birthday loot, and we're both looking forward to next weekend already.

I really don't want to go anywhere today.

time to start

Hold your breath and count to ten
Fall apart then start again
-Placebo

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need
-Rolling Stones

Right. Which is true. Because in the midst of this weekend's beautiful insanity I realized that I absolutely have to go back to school. It has less to do with love than one might think. It was more about the casual moments, talking with these professors that I respect and remembering that little visceral thrill that comes from being in that world. Which means I have to get up and do it, and stop being so afraid that I'm not brilliant and no self respecting grad school would want to have me.

So I'm looking at Slavic Departments all around the country. I'm emailing the people at Columbia right now to see if I can talk to them while I am in New York, and if I work up enough courage this week I'll call Princeton too. Though their website frightens me. I'm emailing my professors and I need to solicit the opinions of grad students I know. I must study myself into a coma for the GREs this summer. I must cajole my professors into letters of recommendation. I must do all these things that make me nervous and require me to be forward and presume that other people want to help me do this.

That's the secret you see. I have lived my entire life presuming that no one gives a damn about me or what I want to do, and as such would have no reason to help me. It is not that I assume anyone is malicious or cold. I just find it hard to see why they would care. Self esteem issues that are slowly being ironed out, I suppose. Hence support has always come as a shock, and adjusting to the knowledge that I have friends and teachers who do care has been a strange strange thing.

I will start working on a thousand word personal statement, in which I will try to refrain from waxing poetic about subways, Czech beer, or my desire to live in New York and be a ninja butler for a beautiful actress. Well, maybe I'll write two essays.