Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

In latest news; I’ve been Waitlisted by Oregon State.  Woot, woot?  By this time last year I was waitlisted by Minnesota and Oregon State and I hadn’t applied to Mizzou so I’m about par for the back 9 now. 

All J-dub does is compose Oscar-winning jams, damn.

Again, “waitlisting” means that if a program receives 100 applicants and accepts 5, it might put another 10 other applicants on its “wait list” who may be offered spots if any of the original 5 accepted applicants reject their offers.  To make it a topical analogy; if Meryl Streep turned down her Oscar in favor of some hypothetical Super Oscar—perhaps a De La Hoya—then Viola Davis would be offered the regular Oscar instead.  If Viola Davis turned it down then I assume they’d just give it to John Williams because, you know, he’d give it a good home, right?

Schools usually never tell you how many total applicants there were or how many were accepted, and they never tell you what your “number in line” is in terms of the waitlist.  In Oregon State’s case, however, a secret little birdie told me there were over 360 applicants and out of that number, 4 were accepted—that’s a little over a 1% acceptance rate.  Apparently, I’m 4^th on the waitlist.  And that’s great and a tremendous accomplishment of which I’m very proud, but after a certain point, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades… unless some of those horseshoes and hand grenades reject their offers to accept other horseshoe posts and targets, and then you’re the winning horseshoe and/or hand grenade. 

This also means that as Oregon State was one of the last programs that I applied to and Minnesota was one of the first,  I might have now heard from all who I’m going to hear from and the table is set for decision-making.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I’d say from past experience that if I don’t hear from anybody else by the end of next week then no others callers will be com’n a’court’n. 

Regardless of whether I hear back from any other schools or if I get my Viola Davis acceptance into Minnesota or Oregon State’s MFA programs, I still have an outright acceptance in Mizzou’s MA program.  I know that if I get an MA in English that I’ll really have to get a PhD to make it worth anything, and now I also know that acceptance into Mizzou’s PhD program from its MA program is not automatic.  In fact it might be far from it.  And on top of that stack is the fact that I don’t exactly hate my life as it is and I’m not overly eager to leave it, though I don’t know if I’ll be able to say the same thing three years from now. 

As Old Blue Eyes once put it; “Fear is the enemy of logic”.  Damn your poignant silver tongue, Frank.  Damn it all to New Jersey.  

"Man-up, pansy-ass.  Man-up before I put out my cigarette in your eye and use your  gut as an ash tray."