Forty-One Cents

Fun with dry ice. Lately, here at the homestead, we've been having fun with science. Our dishwasher's on the fritz again, though, so this morning I got up and hand-washed the dishes from last night's corn starch + water = hijinks in the land of physics escapade. That stuff's hard to clean up. It was like a science fiction movie. (Anyone who's interested in getting freaked out and never got a chance to do this experiment in middle school might wanna try it: mix roughly one and a half cups of corn starch with one cup of water. Pour into a bowl and play with it in your hands...and get ready to be freaked out.)

Yesterday I sent off my first in a series of applications to writing programs. This one - the Stegner - is a highly coveted fellowship. Basically, I would need the mob's involvement to get it. But I figured - what the hell, I'll apply. Anyway, they require that you send them a SASE as part of the application process, and they're very clear about needing this, as that's how they notify you of their decision - which is cool. Whatevah.

It wasn't until I had sealed everything up into an envelope and handed it over to the chippie at the post office @ 5p.m. exactly that I realized that the postage rates had gone up two whole cents. ("When did that happen?" I asked chippie and, "Where you been, baby?" she laughed, and when she did, her gigantic gold hoop earrings swung like 'round-the-way-girl pendulums counting down to my personal psychosis.) So, yeah, I had put a $0.39 stamp on my SASE instead of the new $0.41 stamp. I stood there like a statue of a penguin and weighed my options: I could plead with the chippie to give me my envelope back, let me open it up, add 2 one-cent stamps to my SASE, and reseal everything back up with many layers of tape...or I could say "screw that" and bounce, trusting that, should I gain acceptance into the Holy Land, they'll try to call or e-mail me instead of relying solely on the Pony Express or passenger pigeons (actually extinct since 1914). As you might've guessed, I went with the latter approach.

Anyway, I'm soooooo not getting into that program: When I got back home, homebrew in hand, I was reviewing my poetry manuscript and noticed a glaring typo on the first page. The first page, man! Fact is, even without a jobbie job, parenting and writing and applying to grad schools is a difficult juggling act for me. Little things seem to be slipping between the cracks all the time.