August is coming to a close this week and I’m feeling very behind. I’ve been too busy with end-of-summer things, which were all good for the social health but have made me nonetheless feel unproductive with my writing/portfolio/applications.
That isn’t to say, however, that I haven’t had a good time. I got to visit my family, celebrate my birthday, and take a small vacation to Charleston – all things intended to relax, but maybe just made me a little more stressed than I needed to be. Too much in one month, perhaps.
I haven’t written any new poems this month – or at least not any that have made it to completion. I’ve dabbed here or there at my applications, but am yet to get serious-serious about them. Mostly, I’ve been freaking myself out and reading waaay too much on the Internet about the programs I’m interested in, who goes there/who went there, and how to put together the perfect application, etc. Oh, and I submitted some poems to two magazines back in July – I heard a rejection from one last week (or assumed rejection that is, I never got a formal one. I just saw that they published without me!) and the other one has been M.I.A. and even though I’ve written a query as to the journal’s status, I haven’t heard anything. I’m not so certain as to simultaneously submit yet, because it is a journal of some reputation, but I am generally peaved at the unprofessionalism of the matter and probably won’t consider sending my work there again.
Oh, and I picked up another freelance project for the newspaper. It’s small – in theory at least – but it requires enough research to put together the few blurbs that I can and did spend a whole evening on it on the first try. I hope this isn’t the case in the future and that I can keep my freelance evenings down to 2 nights per week instead of 3 or more. I’d hate to quit the gigs just for the sake of completing my applications – plus, the money is good enough to keep my head above water at bill time at the end of the month.
And to top things off, I’m about to enter the busiest season of the year at the day job. I worked a little overtime last week, but that was mostly just so I could take Friday off to go to the beach, but in the following weeks I will probably be spending a lot more time at work until we push out the holiday catalogues. I’ve been told that things will die down around Thanksgiving, so I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
So, I plan to have a very uneventful Labor Day weekend – with the exception of a quick visit with my parents on Sunday evening at a nearby campground – and spend most of it studying for the GRE (only a little over a week away!) and working on applications. I feel a little guilty for this because even though I’ve had a busy August, most of it has been spent out of town and there are still several friends here who I’d like to hang out with more. Maybe weekday evenings will work better, but I’m still too exhausted to dedicate myself to anything this week. And after the GRE, I hope to sit down every weekend for several hours and knock out these applications one by one, so that I can have all materials to give to recommendation people before Thanksgiving, and mail the rest to the schools by Christmas. Ambitious, yes, but it’s my only saving grace.
Oh yeah, and I’m now officially 25 so I must be going crazy.
