You gave me hyacinths first a year ago. They called me the hyacinth girl.

currently listening to: "night man" by chemical toilet

all my time as a child i spent on the swingset giggling at scenarios i made up in my head. i never made a real friend until high school and until then girls would only lean over to me and whisper, "i'm a fairy and a princess in an alternate universe and these are the scars i got swordfighting" or "my parents want to murder me and put pieces of me in the houses they sell as realtors." or they would stalk me. this made me not terribly keen to develop relationships and i had always read but i did not like it too much because i didn't like young adult books about wanting boyfriends or having zany adventures that were full of words i all ready knew. i got genuinely into reading when i discovered dennis cooper and the marquis de sade and kathy acker and for a long time only read books about psychosis, murder, incest, prostitution, trauma and the like. mostly psych textbooks and other such nonfiction resources and true crime books on jeffrey dahmer and ted bundy. amidst these i had bought katherine dunn's geek love - my very first novel that was mine and mine alone purchased with my own money - and the everyman library selection of poems by sylvia plath. geek love i bought, i remember, blindly, out of nowhere, urged on by fate, with my still-best-friend manda from a b dalton. the plath book was recommended to me at a waldenbooks by a bookseller who knew i'd enjoyed girl, interrupted. geek love and plath piqued my interest in craft and the means by which a story is conveyed. i wrote my first long piece of fiction a year or so on. it was all in statement sentences because i was a little shell-shocked. all my friends were crazy and unhappy and i was, too, and i was trying to reconcile my feelings and the things i was learning and the best way to do it was to build some objectivity and make it fictional, controllable, so that i could empathize without being overwhelmed. that is why i started writing and why i write, why i have to and want to and how i know it works. i did not do much with this until i went to community college. i know in high school i was reading nietzsche and freud and aliya was reading dostoevsky and so tweak picked it up and so did i. clare loved ginsberg. i was not the very literary one. i spent the beginning of college with a really decrepit copy of the brothers karamazov glued to me. i had - oh yes - fallen madly for burroughs and nabokov right before that. because of the themes. but it was in college that books became friends. and i had real friends by then, a solid stable of close friends that i am still close with and love. then psychology deadened and turned into statistics and science and i was repulsed and jilted and had no idea what to do more than i let on to anyone. i took a semester off from psych at the gentle urgings of my then-advisor once i was at lycoming. i took intro to creative writing and intro to film studies. i got an A in the former and a B in the latter. i learned HOW to form the mass of content i want to deal with. for the first time in my life i got positive attention for my academic endeavors, was awarded coveted responsibilities, worked myself to the marrow and felt it pay off. i took lit classes and felt - more often than not, but still not all the time - that i was getting something out of it that was not merely hat-tipping to people who had tread ground that didn't need retreading. i had a professor who put me off faulkner for a time (criminal) and a professor who made me not want to miss a discussion about frankenstein (holy shit!). this warmed me to school. before that i had spent all my time trying to avoid sitting in class listening to people who hate their jobs try to avoid alluding to that hatred. now that i have the skills to be the kind of writer i want to be, some objectives which require a little aid and a love of collaborative artmaking as a result of intense, tight-knit undergraduate workshops, i would like to attend a graduate program in writing. i want to have the experience of working on a piece of fiction with a group of others in a similar boat as i get impressive mileage out of solitary instances and what i have learned from my every little hurdle i still benefit from, so this chance strikes me as quite valuable. yes.

there is also the matter of relocation, which plays a role. all right. i'm done. that should really be my statement of purpose. addendum: i have never been diagnosed or treated for anything, i do not have a record, there are those in existence who can attest to my academic ability, i am pretty great to have in a group, i am routinely entertaining and enthusiastic and hardworking, i criticize tactfully but ruthlessly, i love a variety of forms of writing. please let me into your program. i will rock it. you will at least get a kick out of my laugh i am famous for it.

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)