Six more weeks.

In typical procrastination fashion, I am posting when I should be doing something else. In this case, writing a take-home essay I've had about 2 weeks to complete.

I am still waiting on five more schools to get back to me, so at the advice of my thesis advisor, I sent the directors of the writing programs emails asking for updates on my applications. They were very short, polite emails, stating that although I got a good offer somewhere else, I want to hear from them before I accept/decline. Hopefully I'll get responses within the next week or two; if not, I still plan on making my final decision by April 8 (a week before the April 15 deadline).

I've been talking to my top school choice, and I am very excited about the opportunities presented to me. I've already been briefed on my choices for my assistantship, and everyone I have talked to has been really friendly. :)

I still have a lot of work that I need to do for (undergraduate) school, and there are two big submissions due at the end of this week that I haven't really started on. Coupling that with job fairs and award interviews and getting headshots taken and all of this... I'm getting rather stressed out. There is so much to do, and I just don't have enough time for it all. :/ Hopefully my headshots turn out nice (I have a lot of faith in my super awesome photographer, Toivo) and my interview goes well and I finish everything I want to do this week.

I've paid for almost everything for graduation (just waiting to get my honors medallion, which I won't get until the end of next month), and I'm excited because my parents are both chipping in to get me a class ring. :) My mom and her fiancee were also nice enough to get me an awesome outfit for my graduation. I have two ceremonies on two separate days, but I'm wearing the same outfit to both of them. I like it that much. (And it was crazy expensive, even on sale.)

Battling seniouritus is such a pain; but I am still trying to get everything done and keep my grades up high. I know all of my acceptances are conditional, and I don't want them revoked because I got lazy in the last six weeks. So far so good, though. :]

Spring Break

So my last undergraduate spring break was not nearly as awesome or productive as I would have liked. I wanted to get at least 6 more pages of my thesis done (to total 10) and I got like 2 pages done. Sorta. And by that, I mean I've been working on it mostly just all day today. I am rather pleased at how it is turning out. it has taken forever but I think I'm finally getting back into the hang of drawing on a regular basis. the only issue is that coloring things in, too, it making the process a million times longer. :/ When I think I've got a good scene to show what I'm doing, I'll be sure to post it here so you all can sneak peek. :)

Ama and I have been keeping dream journals as a part of an extra-credit assignment for a class we are both a part of. The results, on my part, have been... interesting, to say the least. At worst, the dreams are just strange. At best, they're awesome story ideas. I woke up one particular morning and I thought--finally. This is it. This is what I'm waiting for. I've been struggling with how to balance a character-driven story in a science fictional plot... and my subconscious gave it to me in the form of a post-apocalyptic dream. :) I look forward to pursuing it more once I graduate and have more free time.

Speaking of writing more, I didn't really get to work on any of my upcoming submissions, and I was once again rejected by the undergraduate literary magazine run by my university. Ugh. And I still haven't gotten any new acceptances, in terms of MFA programs. I decided not to go to Denver this year, and got the good news that I can defer my enrollment to next year. (Yay!) And as for more good news, I was just notified that I will get to present two works (one being literary criticism on Shakespeare, the other being magical realism flash fiction) for an Undergraduate Symposium held this Friday by my chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. :) I wish I had a little more time to prepare (I need to figure out how to correctly pronounce some stuff in the lit crit paper) but I'm still rather excited. :)

As one more down side, my spring break is over, and I haven't started any of my homework for this upcoming week. I am also missing a book that I need for a paper. :/ Hopefully I find it soon; the paper is due next week. Getting back into the swing of the semester isn't going to be easy (I'm definitely suffering from senioritus) but the semester is already half up. :] There's less than 2 months between me and my degree, and then onto bigger and better things. :D

Denver, Thesis, and Japan.

So, I've come to the conclusion that I won't be going to Denver. I'm trying to force it to happen, and I still have 6 more schools to hear back from. I don't want to limit my options just for a summer program that I can't even get a loan for. (Basically, no creditor in their right mind will lend me money for an educational program that's not a school loan.) :/ UCF still seems like my best bet, but I still haven't heard from a lot of other schools in Florida. So I'll wait and see what happens.

Thesis work is slow-going, and its not really going the way I thought it would go... but I'm glad its progressing. I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I wanted over Spring Break.

And basically because Japan has no idea what's going on, I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to help. I'm going to hold off on plans until I can figure more out. I just feel so bad for them right now. It's really bad over there. :(

Plans.

So, in the wake of the devastation in Japan, Boyfriend and I are seriously considering going up there to help with the relief efforts after we graduate. We'd love to go sooner, but right now we'd just get in the way. I'm hoping we can volunteer through an aid organization like the Red Cross and stay for two weeks or a month or so--maybe longer if we can spare it. I'll be sure to take notes while I'm there. I would stay all summer if I wasn't planning on going to Denver for the Publishing Institute. I did some number crunching and it looks like it's going to cost about $6k total, with a nonrefundable $1K deposit due in a week. To go, I'm going to have to take out a loan, which I'm not happy about at all, but I should be able to pay it all off within a year thanks to the Stipend UCF was so generous to offer me. I am just waiting to hear back from UCF that my assistantship is renewable, and then I'll go ahead and decline everywhere else.

Things are falling into place and it is really rather bizarre. It's a good thing, I guess. For now, though, I need to focus on the task at hand. It may be my Spring Break, but my Thesis is due in a month and I do not have nearly enough of it finished. So I'm going to work on that, and hopefully get 70-80% done this week. I realize that's ambitious, but I really don't have the extra time to spare. :/

Japan. :(

I have been keeping a dream journal lately as a part of an extra credit exercise for a class. Normally, first thing I do when I wake up is grab my iTouch and tap out a note describing what I can remember from my dream. This morning, I did not do that. This morning, the first thing I did was turn on the TV.

Normally I don't watch TV, but my mother sent me a text message that Japan was hit by an earthquake and tsunami, and that overrode everything. Even being upset at not being able to sleep in on the first day of my Spring Break.

I woke up Boyfriend with the same message my mom sent me. We were both up and watching the progress on news stations and websites pretty much instantly. We kept texting back and forth to collect facts. He said We should help. I said Absolutely.

So now I'm trying to see if I can help organize an effort with one of the bigger aid distributors to see what we can do to help. Collecting food, clothes, and money all seem to be the priorities. I'm going get Aikido Club and maybe the Japanese Club also involved in this effort, and hopefully by the time we get back to school next Monday, we have some sort of strategy for this aid effort.

Good News and Bad News.

We'll start with the bad.

I found out this week that Vanderbilt rejected me. On top of that, I had to pull my first all-nighter of the semester. I went to sleep around 8am, and woke up at 11am, so I guess it wasn't a true all-nighter, but it could have totally been prevented. Deadlines just snuck up on me; it seems that on top of midterms, EVERYTHING IS DUE this week. Including submissions to awards that I've been putting off. I have almost everything I need for the award about being an outstanding graduate (just missing a recommendation letter I'm going to pick up tomorrow), and for the creative writing awards, I finally have a piece written, I just need to edit and expand on it. I'm behind on my thesis--I wanted to be pretty much done with drafting all of the pages by now--so if I'm lucky, I'll get all of my midterm and studying stuff done early in the weekend, so that I can spend the rest of next week creating formats. That way, when I meet with my thesis director next Thursday, he can tell me yea or nay before I commit the comic to detail and color over Spring Break. (so much work!! >_< ugh.)

And as for the good? I got accepted into UCF's Creative Writing MFA Program! Yay! I have choices (Now I just need to get an assistantship or something somewhere to help offset the cost...) I'll have to spend my Spring Break getting all of my financial aid work together to start submitting to the schools I got accepted to, so that they can start processing the fact that I absolutely need their aid or I won't be able to attend. :/ (So somehow, I turned the good news into bad news again.)

Next week I get to order my cap, gown, & tassel, along with my honors medallion (for attaining a 3.5+ GPA) and hopefully my honors society sash (for my participation in Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honors Society). I've registered for Commencement through the University and the Honors College, and I'm planning on signing up for membership at the Alumni Society soon, too. I wanted a class ring, but they're just too expensive, and since my Bachelor's degree isn't going to be my last degree, I figure I'll just wait until I finish my MFA (or even my PhD). Graduation is so close, I can almost taste it! I just need to survive the rest of this semester first!