8:59 p.m. x 2010-11-18

currently listening to: "princeton review" by team sleep

AHH I HAVE COMPLETELY APPLIED TO THE FIRST SCHOOL. the first of eight. i have a whiteboard in my office where i list things i must do. usually stories to complete or tasks (like taking the GREs and contacting professors). right now it has my eight schools and their page requirements for the portfolio and the due dates. two schools need twenty pages (the first and the last) and one inexplicably identified TWENTY-FIVE. two ask for thirty precisely and two others between thirty and forty. one (the one everyone knows) allows up to eighty. one is due the first of december (that is all done), two are due the fifteenth, two the first week of january on different days, and the other three the fifteenth of january, making it possible for me to submit in nice shifts. next task is priming the other addition to my portfolio (novella excerpt, i am thinking, or this story that just was PUBLISHED AHHH I'M STILL SO HAPPY ABOUT THAT!).

all things cleared up about the sunday dinner; sara and i are going to go find our own scotch somewhere i won't feel so horrid. the girl and her in-laws don't know yet, though, because i didn't know if sara had told them we weren't going before i saw them last night (they come in all the time) and they seemed to be ignoring me. i thought they knew but i guess they were being aloof!

meanwhile i have been deliriously queasy and disinclined to enjoy anything/am constantly hungry and i wonder if that isn't just tremendously somatic. of i don't know what. discontent. i'm disinclined to think it's stress only because i'd like to believe i can handle perfectly well what's going on at work and at home which is all now very, very little. but also my discontent is a nonissue because it is so confined to something so totally ridiculous. when my other friends complain about their parents others and myself all groan but it IS very difficult the absence of polite conceit and how conversations are always cut up sharply and unprimed with assertions and insistences and if that is ALL the conversation you have that is disheartening. my mom is losing it over the state of my room because there is stuff on the floor (as in things are stored at floor-level; there is a small pile of clothes but that is not the whole issue). some of it is from my office where there was a bag of papers from school and she would mention it every day as if i didn't notice this whale-sized paper bag tipping to one side in my very small office. she finally freaked out and cried and i put it in my room and now there is only me and the desk and the desk's contents in here (and a stool i use as a caddy where the rotary phone lives) plus a large pad of watercolor paper that obscure object of desire gave me at graduation. its presence is making her crazy. we really deal with space differently. i've long been okay with tight squeezes and exercising ingenuity by creating ways to organize all my things in my small room. my relationship to things is also totally different. for maybe two or three years i had not even an unhealthy relationship to material goods but a more frivolous one than i wanted. so i got over that. i spend all the money i spend on books and dvds and groceries and virtually nothing else. i rarely buy clothes. i do have a lot of books and movies but i also never get rid of any. i don't think of them as expendable and i use them all the time. i don't collect anything. i'm very active with my goods. so i don't store them often - i keep them on hand, and there isn't much space conducive to on-handed-ness. that which i do store in my closet, hilariously, my mom is always asking me to go through and get rid of.

i just want to sit here and write and go to work and rest when i come home so i can get up and write again. i know i will have time to clean that is not when i'm working six days out of the week.

if anybody should ask i'm going to a seminar
pieces of the moon
JOBJOBJOB
interviewinterviewinterview
sensitive heart, you're doomed from the start
(& etc)