I absolutely hate it when people show up unannounced and uninvited. I always say I hate miniature golf and karaoke, but my intense dislike for those things pales in comparison to my real true hate for the times when people just pop on by. My father has a habit of doing this although I've tried to make it very clear that he is wasting his time coming all the way to town without calling first. The last couple of times this happened I wasn't home. Prior to these instances I made a facebook posting announcing to everyone that most people at the door are Jehovah Witnesses or people trying to sell me stuff. So, I'm never going to answer the door unless I am expecting someone. So don't even try!!
Also, I happen to not like wearing pants around the house when it's fairly warm outside. Why? Because I don't have to!
Anyway, today I have a lot of homework to do and a lot of writing to do. I mostly have a lot of homework to do because I've been doing so much writing. Who wants to scrape rocks and measure fault lines on maps when you have a million stories brewing in your head -- all screaming to be let out?
And I do mean SCREAMING. Last week I had so many ideas hitting me at once that I started to feel sick. I had to lie down and put a blanket over my head, and force the thoughts to stop. Writing stories requires a sort of singular focus that is difficult for me. My brain multitasks and I flip from word document to word document, alternating between stories, and sometimes it becomes too much. Once in a great while I'll have a singular focus and I can write an entire story from beginning to end so easily. Then all I have to do is type it up and since I type 100 wpm it doesn't take long.
Anyway, someone is coming over who I can't get rid of. Plus, my father emailed me asking if I would be around because he wanted to participate in this charity sale I was running and to pick up an Ann Arbor District library book he gave me months ago. I told him, probably won't be around 'cause someone else is already coming over, the charity sale ended on Friday, and I returned that book months ago. My suspicion is that he will still show up with some other excuse. He likes to show up and look around, investigating for local gangsters, or searching for signs of my poverty, or whatever will help him confirm that I live some dangerous life in some dangerous part of the city -- oh the horror, the horror!
He seemed excited the day he showed up at my work and learned that I didn't work on the first floor. It was as if working at the top of a building indicated some sort of prestige, which in reality it definitely does not. But my father is still stuck in stereotypes. He believes people need agents to send out short stories to college lit magazines. He also believes that colleges don't ask for your high school transcripts once you're a transfer student. Both ideas are completely false. Maybe they were true 20 years ago, or maybe they were never true. Either way, I've learned to do my research and not trust the opinions of others.
Anyway, all these intrusions are affecting my ability to produce what I want to produce today. What I need to produce. The clock is ticking. I have to come up with answers to essays for my U of M application and those are proving to be the hardest to write. They make me so nervous.
I realized why U of M is my top pick of a school. First of all, I've excluded any school outside of Michigan in my undergrad search simply because of cost. Eastern Michigan is cheaper, and it has some good professors, and I've had good teachers and professors come from EMU. BUT I know that wherever I go I'll find good and bad professors. I also know that if I go to U of M there are more scholarships available for writing and lit majors. But my primary reason for wanting to go to U of M is the student body. I knew a girl who went to U of M for creative writing and she was quite smart, an avid reader, and an all around great person. I feel that what has been most challenging at JCC is that I'm often in courses with peers whose abilities are so far below mine that the courses have to be tailored for them. This inhibits my learning and it makes my A's seem pretty meaningless. Even when I was taking Writing Experience II there were a couple students who should have been repeating remedial courses.
I figure that U of M is my best shot at having classrooms with the highest number of intelligent students. Students who are smarter than me. Students who read more than me. Students who are much better writers than me. Then it wouldn't even matter if my professor sucked because I'd be able to learn by working alongside intelligent peers.
So you see U of M, it's not your athletic teams I like, nor your impressive list of faculty members, nor the beautiful buildings in the downtown setting so close to so many delicious restaurants serving eastern cuisine. It's not the appeal of dancing at the Necto, nor drinking Brasseire Blonde at Arbor Brewery. It's your students. It's your cream of the crop. It's the people you attract from all over Michigan and all over the world. I want to work with them. I want to discuss Borges with them. I want to make charts illustrating the effects of globalization in the steel industry with a U of M junior -- even if that student is nine years younger than me. I want my creative writing peer reviews to come from U of M students, even when their review is rushed by their urgency to go to a football game or a kegger. I will be 29 when I enroll in Four Year. What I can offer as a 29 year old who has spent years on the same boring job, and who has already vowed to never be hung over again, is that I will never rush my way through an assignment because of social obligations. In fact, my social life has dwindled by the simple fact that many of my friends have married off, some have had children, and most of us work steady nine to five jobs and we have learned the value of sleep. I no longer go to bed at four in the morning, wake up at noon, and answer the door for friends while being dressed only in a sheet. All I want, in exchange for my boring maturity, is to work alongside people who are smart. What better place to find them en mass than U of M?
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