One foot out the door

I am enitrely preoccupied today. Each time I speak to my mom or my best friend out in Portland, the plans to move get more and more concrete and leave me unable to think about anything else. And not only am I thinking about the details of the actual move, I am thinking about huge abstract things like My Future. A few times a year I find myself researching graduate programs in writing and then I consequently find myself getting excited and picturing myself nestled away in a writing workshop under the tutelage of my mentor, Jeffrey Eugenides (at Princeton) or Amy Hempel (at Sarah Lawrence) or Michael Byers (sigh) (at University of Michigan). Naturally, all of my would-be mentors happen to teach at ridiculously fantastic schools. Schools that would require one to have gobs of talent/money/drive. Schools that require three letters of recommendation. See, there are shortcomings both big and small when it comes to the idea of applying to these places.

Not to mention that I haven't written anything (except for silly pages in my journal and silly entries here) in over a year. It's delusions of grandeur, I'm afraid, thinking that I could even contend with other applicants. But I don't know... I took a couple of writing courses in my undergraduate career, and plenty of people who took themselves very seriously as writers weren't nearly as good as they thought they were. What I wouldn't give for an ounce of their unfounded confidence to replace my self-doubt. Why can't I just be one of the blissfully unaware ignoramuses? Ignorami?

At least it gives me something to do at work while I piss away these last days. I counted earlier - 23 days left. That is hardly any at all. And while thinking of how much I will need to do once I announce that my last day will, in fact, be August 8th is slightly overwhelming... this moment of finally feeling excited about where I'm going is really nice. And maybe the move to Portland will be big enough to shake me out of my terror and really go for this completely unrealistic dream of getting an MFA in writing. Maybe.

Or maybe I should stop wasting time on these daydreams when I know that they will never happen and focus on finding a job in Portland so that I can survive. I have enough money saved up to last for a couple of months out there, but if that money runs out I will be back where I started. And that needs to not happen.

I'm reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris right now. It's about a workplace. In it, there is a brief mention of a character who would get to work early, photocopy every page of a novel, and then sit at his desk and read through 300 pages in a day of what looked like legitimate work documents. That is so brilliant! That would be a much more productive use of my time than what I'm doing today, that's for sure.