comps: i haz wrote them
Thursday 11 March 2010 | I like a cookie
And I managed to use beefcake pictures of Uncle Ezra AND Walt, ha ha, I win!
In the end my “answers” to the three exam questions (which questions of course I parsed and haggled over and negotiated and disagreed with at their very core and defiantly refused to answer in the terms in which they were given and wrote about other stuff entirely) wound up totalling about eight thousand words, and since I was writing steadily for just over eight hours, even my peabrain can determine I wrote a thousand words an hour. Or, let’s be honest, it was more typing than writing. Too bad they don’t pay by the yard. Somehow a large portion of this, thanks to my infallible stream-of-consciousness technique, wound up being about Rilke? I can’t even explain how that happened. I was accosted by Letters to Cézanne, which I think I last read in 1993. In fact I know it was January 1993 because I was on my way back to the Women’s College from DC, and I was sitting at Dulles at like 7 am waiting at the gate for my flight, sitting on my suitcase reading my paperback copy, and then I looked up and saw…that my plane had boarded and flown away without me. Because of Rilke! They don’t make ‘em like that no more, folks.
Toasted. Now brain is toasted. Still have student papers too, but that is my fault. The Brujo, by contrast, energetically hoovers and washes dishes, while I lethargically pick tufts of cat hair up off the carpet and stare dully at the laundry: “I want to get the flock OUTTA here.” Dear Alison had suggested this as a possible venue for the Brujo/Unreliable Spring Break and lo and & behold we are going! for a couple of nights anyway, and then on to a similar (but cheaper) bunch of cabins in Ajo. If I weren’t so toasted I’d be so excited—mostly excited to lie in bed all week with a book and a pen and tea and no thoughts of anything much and hopefully no anxiety nightmares either. Speaking of which.
Last night’s terror was really splendiferous—it turned out the comps were a competitive timed oral examination, like swim-team trials or something, and we were all vying against one another in a group. Our indefatigable program manager Ms. K. had a stopwatch and kept yelling “Thirty seconds! Fifteen seconds!” and we were supposed to do arithmetic with pencils and 3×5 cards, no calculators. And the first question was: “How many hours of classwork have you missed since you began the MFA program?” I was immediately stumped—let’s see, if I’ve missed, let’s say, five classes a semester, and I’ve been here not quite six semesters, and the classes are three hours a week, but does this mean classes I’ve taken or classes I’ve taught—I just couldn’t work it out, with her shouting and my dumb pencil and piece of paper. And everyone else in our cohort was so suave and prepared and diligent, and none of them had missed ANY classes so they didn’t even have any math to DO. And then in the dream I would tempestuously burst into tears and flee the exam, causing Teh Drama, and various well-intentioned people would come after me and cajole me back into the room to try again, and then I would try again, and fail again, and not fail better, and burst into tears again, until by the end everyone was just looking at me with open undisguised dismay and disgust, and worst of all was that in the very back row of the exam room (the room where we do have our defenses late in April) was the department chair of the program which just waitlisted me, and I could tell by the fastidious yet appalled look on his face, his polite but barely concealed horror, that there was now no way I was ever getting into his program. Cue further floods of tears, which just made me more disgusting to everyone, and I stormily fled once more.
Then I woke up. Then I wrote 8,300 more or less completely incoherent words, not including these, which are, like another seven hundred.
Okay that is ENOUGH out of ME. I leave you with the immortal words of Homie.
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