I’m notoriously difficult to shop for. Not that I don’t give people ideas when gift-giving times roll around. But the things I want aren’t usually the sort of thing you want to run out and get professionally wrapped.

“Hm, Christmas already, you say? Well, I lost my tweezers a few months ago, so I could use another pair. Um, I eat a lot of cereal. I’m running low on paper towels?”

I’m one of the most easily delighted human beings on the planet, and I try to be concretely aware of just exactly why I love the people I love, every day. So when it comes to tangible tokens of that love, I’m a “buy me what I need” kind of girl. My favorite presents ever? A tie between a luggage set my parents gave me when I turned eighteen (and still use to this day) and the pairs of Rainbow flipflops that my nearest and dearest seem to keep buying me as my old ones start to embarrass them in public.

HOWEVER! My twenty-fifth birthday is coming up on July 24, and this year I’ve thought of a sheer-decadence present that would please me more than anything I’ve wanted in my entire life. (Except my Creepy Crawlers set when I was eight. Thanks, mom and dad!)

And the best part: it’s completely free. No shipping costs or anything. Genius, right?

This birthday, I want everyone I love (or like or admire or have ever gotten ice cream with) to record a message from their Five-Years-From-Now Selves to Past Kat, telling me something that’s going on in the year 2016. I’ll listen to them once, on my birthday, then burn them all onto one audio track that I’ll send to a friend for safekeeping, to time capsule until my 30th birthday, when I’ll play them again for maximum hilarity slash poignance.

Doesn’t that sound fun?

“Dear Past Kat, today I hoverboarded to the galactic-store to buy rocket fuel and organic peanut butter. Everything’s fair trade now! It’s crazy! Come join us!”

“Dear Past Kat, I’ve got to admit, things have been a lot more efficient since the robots triumphed in the inevitable Cyborg v. Human Uprising of 2013. Plus, now I can legally marry my waffle-maker.”

“Dear Past Kat, man, get with the program. Nobody says ‘dude’ in 2016. We all call each other ‘brigadier.’ Briiiiiiiig.”

How fun would fifty or so messages of that be?! I might be getting a little choked up thinking about it. But am mostly grinning my biggest dinosaur-hunter grin, imagining all the brilliant, hilarious snapshots of my favorite people I’ll be able to carry with me from year to year.

It’s all of my favorite things: visions of the future from the past; unbridled youthful exuberance; a moderate vein of narcissism; something I will never have to pack up and move cross-country. In fact, this is what I want for every holiday ever, now. You’re welcome, everybody! I will never ask you to buy me tweezers again.

What would five-years-from-now you tell yourself on a milestone birthday? How crazy’s 2016 going to get, y’all?

I just met the love of my life. It was on a bus, of course.

I wake up late this morning and wade through the shower-curtain forest of drying laundry, pick out a floaty cream-colored skirt I always feel most summery in. I get out the door with my hair still wet, tendrils beginning to curl like honeysuckle shoots. I don’t know how it’ll turn out. I don’t know how anything’ll turn out.

One of those days where the sun lays heavy on your skin. I know by mid-afternoon I’ll feel lazier than a city-zoo lion, but in the freshness of morning, I’m happy to be alive.

Small herd at the bus stop, shifting their weight from foot to foot, waiting waiting waiting.

The bus pulls up, and I hang back to leave room for people who have been waiting longer. But a young man stops and ushers me in front of him. Late twenties, I’d guess; angular jaw, small mole on his left cheekbone; plaid button-down shirt tucked into a pair of jeans, brown belt. Imposing as oatmeal. One look and you could see this was the kind of guy so placid he didn’t even mind middle school.

I don’t know why this is the kind of man I like. But experience tells me again and again that it is.

There are only two seats left on the bus, in the five-seater in the back. I grab the seat between the middle and the window, and this guy takes the middle seat, next to me. My music’s on loud enough that I don’t hear when he tries to get my attention; I look up and find him hovering above the seat next to me, delicately moving aside a flounce of my skirt I’d forgotten to tuck away.

“That’s the thing with skirts,” I apologize, one earbud out. He smells like sweet sunbaked grass.

“I just didn’t want to pin you down.”

I keep the earbud out, in case he wants to talk again, but he pulls out a worn leather-cover Bible and reads a few verses to himself. I reach into my bag and pull out the short story I’m working on drafting, a weird little reflection on Massachusetts and octopi and small towns and making out in storage units and the ache of impatience. I look at him a few times. His lips twitch a little when he reads.

His phone rings, twice, and he takes the calls quietly. When he reaches in his pocket for his phone, he jostles my hip a  little. This does not make me anxious.

A few stops later, the man in the window seat next to me moves, and for the sake of decorum, I take his old seat. Not five minutes in, though, a heavy drop of cold water plinks down on my collar bone. I jump sideways, and my shoulder catches this guy.

“Air conditioning leaking?” His voice is thick but nasal; the apex of the nasality is the exact note of stainless steel scissors whining across a piece of curling ribbon. Is he married? Does he have a girlfriend? Is he on his way to teaching summer Bible camp?

It always seems so pointless, speculating on other people’s lives. There are things he wouldn’t guess about me by looking. There are things about me that, if some people knew them, would guarantee they could never love me. I’m never going to find out this guy’s name.

I get off the bus a few stops early, to walk past the heavy construction traffic. Even taking a detour up a little hill, I beat the bus to my office, and as I’m waiting for the traffic light to change, the bus scoots ahead and I see him sitting in the back, leaning forward with his arms braced on his knees. He looks serious.

Saying goodbye always feels so heavy. But we see people for the last time ever, every day, non-stop. You think you’ll never forget, but you do. You kind of have to.

I’m making that pun so you don’t have to.

So, look, I’ve been a negligent blogger. And in that time, I’ve been pretty okay at a few other things. The twecap: spent something like three hundred hours applying to grad schools; got into five, accepted one; moving to sunny Irvine, CA, next year to star in my own mental production of Real Grad Students of Orange County; I’ve written something like seventy pages of fiction and gotten a few things published; I finally feel not just excited but calmly optimistic that this crazy thing I want to do, make a living (eventually) as a fiction writer, it’s going to happen. Things — are good.

The one thing that’s been nagging me? This blog.

When I started this blog, in August 2009, I wasn’t a writer. I was a has-been who never even was. Wrote a few awful but promising stories in college, dashed off a bit of humor writing, took a year-long break to write a novel and ended up with nothing but a (really good) apple pie recipe. Then I ninja-kicked myself across the country and said, “No, you’re going to Make Words Do Stuff every goddamn day.”

And the miraculous thing? I did. During the year this blog was totally active, I wrote something like 1200 pages of non-fiction. Sure, it was in blog form, and nobody’s exactly racing to publish it, but I chose this project and set a goal to learn narrative. Every day, I wanted to tell a story — a little story, something hardly noticeable — with a beginning, a middle and an end. I settled on the idea of doing something uncharacteristic every day not to change myself as a person, but just as a way of inventing a daily plot.

Things change, of course. And, with time, things simmer, get complex. I’m a profoundly different person now than I was two years ago (I look at archives and cringe. Did I ever really use the word retarded?! Why did I think it was scary to talk to homeless people?!), and part of that is just a natural byproduct of growing up, but so much of it, I believe, was forcing myself to change.

I am also a profoundly different writer than I was two years ago. I am an actual writer now. I’m the person who can put three hundred hours into a huge project, who can take a story through fifteen drafts and love every minute of it, who is going — by a miracle, I’ll admit, and a big one — to a writing program that, before I made the conscious decision to sit down every day and be a goddamn writer, I never would have had the audacity to even dream of applying to.

But part of being a different writer was realizing I could get out of the comfort zone of blogging, and move into the vein-collapsing work of making fiction. Which is what I’ve been doing while I wasn’t here. And should be the end of this story.

Except, like I said, things change. Things are complex.

Turns out my heart hurts when I think about people I used to connect with here who are no longer a part of my life. I miss spending some absurd twelve hours a day dreaming up blog content, scheduling half a dozen posts, managing multiple email accounts, and obsessively checking comments. When I say something idiotic or get epically rejected by a dude, I miss having a place to share it.

As is pretty apparent, my optimistic dream to carry out the project for a second year has fizzled. My need for this place has not. So, instead of beating myself up for failing my original intention, and hiding from this space out of shame, I’m just going to roll with it. My life is going to going through big changes in the next three months, the next three years, the next three decades. I’m going to figure out how my need for an online writing space is changing too, and if you want to keep hanging during the ride, by all means, stay, hang out. That would be really cool.

And the first thing I want to change, immediately:

My name is Kat.

This is me. (In my trademark fedora.)

Dear god will it feel good to finally be able to refer to myself in third-person again. I figure now that I’ve been accepted to a school and have thrown my fedora in the ring for a for-real life as a writer, dude, any future employers who google me will be disappointed not to read about blowjob classes and paying guys to break up with me.

This is a fiction thing that I have written. (I guess dudes in the biz call it a story.) This is a poem thing. (Part of my “corrected cleft palates of men I have loved, quiveringly, from afar” sonnet series. aka: all of senior year of college.)

This is who I actually am, in my real life.

Wow. Cool. Finally.

A by no means unabridged list.

I worry about my apartment burning down while I’m at work, and that there will be no one there to save my stuffed elephant.

I worry that in the twenty feet between my bus  stop and office, I’ll be wiped out by an out of control oil delivery truck, and when my family and friends get the news of my death, they’ll have to wonder for even a fraction of a second, “Was she mad at me? Did she really love me?” (I never was, I always will.)

I worry that sometimes when I say “thank you” or “have a great day,” I rush through it and don’t look people in the eyes and smile for real, say it just to them.

I worry, a lot, about loneliness and the awful things it can make people do. I worry the most about lonely people, because being a human is not, I think, often a particularly happy story. It can be a pretty profoundly alienating experience.

I worry about the future of literacy. We have to write things that will plant the love for learning inside children, and we have to teach them how to water it themselves. I truly believe the salvation of humanity is in literature. As I see time and again, left to our own devices we are consumed by the mechanics of survival; when we engage deeply and regularly with art, we seek meaning.

I worry this I’ll lose this fine healthy mind at too young an age to some genetic instance of cognitive degeneration.

I worry that people will judge me by my words and not my actions. I am a cartoon bear, dumb and good-natured. I don’t fare well when other people seek to complicate me.

I worry when I see pedestrians look through homeless people on the street like they are human garbage.

I worry about suicide and hate crime and using accidentally stigmatizing speech. And what about the word “spaz,” by the way? Can we use that as a verb, or is it hateful to people who suffer involuntary spasms? Where are the lines?

I worry that in my new life, I won’t have enough friends. I worry that I’ll have too many.

I worry that there are times I am too distracted or caught up in white noise to remember to come from a place of joy and kindness. Sometimes the cheap unkind unkind joke comes too easily, sometimes other people spend your patience too extravagantly. It’s hard, y’all.

I worry, of course, as we all worry, that at heart I’m profoundly lazy and not at all devoted enough to my vocation, and that I’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile not because I couldn’t, but because I just flat-out never did.

I worry, constantly, about not being perfect.

I worry that there are too many things to worry about, that I’ll let anxiety breed until my skin bubbles up with it, and get so distracted by the many wrongs that need righting that I lose track of the very few things I can concretely do to clean up my little corner of the world.

–

It may be beautiful outside, but I can’t be the only person wracked with anxiety. What’s ripping you apart?

This is part of a series. For the first entry, click here. If I had to apply for MFAs all over again, I’d wish someone had told me the following:

Ten Things I Learned About Applying To MFA Programs (From Actually Applying To MFA Programs)

MAJOR POINT: Do not be an idiot when you pick which schools to apply to.

Doesn’t this sound self-explanatory? And yet, I was an idiot for so, so many reasons. And just because it happened to turn out well doesn’t make me any less foolish. In retrospect, three things I wish I could go back and tell myself.

2) Most of the top fifty schools have an acceptance rate in the range of 1.0 – 3.0%. Think about what that really means. Draw a diagram or something to help you out. I’ll wait.

What staggers me the most is that, when applying to schools, I actually checked out the selectivity rates of my fifteen primary schools, and thought to myself: “Oh, I’m choosing a great mix! There are definitely some safeties on this list!” All fifteen schools are in the top forty for selectivity. The most selective school I applied to (with recent information) is University of Texas, Austin, which, this year, had a 1.11% acceptance rate for fiction.

But obviously that’s just a pipe dream, and my least selective school with recent information — University of Alabama — is only the thirtieth most selective! Thirtieth! That’s a friggin’ cakewalk, right?!

The acceptance rate for fiction was 2.5%. Yes, that’s a decimal in there.

What I needed to do was shake myself by the shoulders ’til my mouth foamed and shout: “Imagine yourself surrounded by thirty-nine other people! All of these people want nothing more in the world than to be writers, and have worked just as hard as you and have the same dreams! And one of them is Baby Chekov, and he’s totally giving a high-five to Baby Hemingway! And you’re absolutely positive the admissions committee is going to choose you?!” And that’s just the pep talk for my least selective school.

The MFA application process is so selective that schools with 15-20% acceptance rate feels like a comparative cakewalk. 20%. That’s a low F.

Fortunately, had I been able to tell past-me that, I would have consoled her with the advice:

3) There are schools with amazing funding that you’ve never even heard of. And if you haven’t heard of them, a lot of other people haven’t either. Do your research to root out these schools so you have a shot at something with, uh, a more than 2% acceptance rate.

I thought I did a fine job researching. In retrospect, I took about the dumbest tack available. I bought the first edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (an excellent resource, but for pete’s sake, get the updated one); read Tom Kealey’s descriptions of the top fifty programs; circled the ones that matched my funding/duration/ineffable standards; visited the websites and poked around for about ten seconds or ’til I burned out my meth-y attention span, whichever came first.

Using this technique, I narrowed down my list to fifteen schools. And while they’re all amazing schools, it’s a dumb list, because it was limited from the onset to the most selective and hard-to-get-into schools. Which didn’t seem like a problem, ’cause I hadn’t yet given myself the reality-check from Step Two. (Later, I added two slightly less selective schools. One because it had a free application; the other because it was in Boston and, at the time, I thought I might have a reason to keep my options open to staying here.)

The thing I wish I’d known is, while funded programs are obviously going to be the most competitive, there are lots of great funded programs that not as many people apply to, because there are so many idiots like me who don’t do sufficient research to find them. At the very least, I should have looked at Seth Abramson’s list of Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs. And while underrated programs, after being featured in a list like that, have the tendency to become annoyingly correctly-rated, even a quick peek at the 2011 Funding Rankings would have shown me a whole new world of potential schools.

Ohio State? University of South Carolina? Arkansas? These are cool programs. Since I knew over a year in advance that I was applying to programs, I had plenty of time to check each of these schools’ websites and see what they had to offer. Like, oh, I don’t know, a 70% funding and a better-than-1% acceptance rate? Past-self, spend a few weeks doing your research, and stagger your applications to different tiers of schools.

That said…

4) Before applying to a school, imagine that you get turned down from every other school on your list except for that one. Would you still go? Or would you apply again next year to see if you had better luck?

Because the thing is, past-self, there’s a very real chance you might only get into one school. And that’s actually a much better scenario than the equally real chance that you won’t get into any schools.

When I chose to apply to fifteen of the most selective programs in the country, even knowing, intellectually, that they all had miniscule acceptance rates, I imagined that I’d be turning down offers left and right, the only applicant in history to get accepted everywhere. The thing is, everyone fantasizes that will happen to them. And it doesn’t happen to anyone.

I can’t even tell you how many applicants I’ve watched throughout the season — cool, talented writers, whose writing samples absolutely shattered me — who applied to fifteen top schools with the assumption that, applying to so many, they were sure to get into one. And then, as the months go by, the brutal realization that that’s just not true. Or amazing writers who applied to a  good range of schools, then only got accepted by one. Sometimes with no funding.

It’s grisly out there, y’all. It’s a WWII movie.

Anyway, I got very lucky this season, and wasn’t left with that heartbreaking decision. But just because I was lucky doesn’t mean I wasn’t an idiot. In retrospect, there were a few schools I applied to that, really, I had no business going for. The two-year programs I applied to for name recognition, even though I knew I wanted a three-year program. The program with no funding in one of the most expensive cities in America. The medium-funding program with a dreaded (for me) language requirement. Pretty much any program at a northern latitude, when I know northern winters make me so depressed that I can’t write for four to six months out of the year.

Had I been in the very real situation of only getting into one of those schools, I would have faced the dilemma of whether to accept the offer, or whether to throw it away and go through this expensive, grueling process all over again. A problem that you, past-self, could solve by: 1) really researching your schools, and 2) oh yeah, not being an idiot.

Would this have scared past-me out of the prospect of applying to MFAs in the first place? Of course not. Past-me is a cocky bastard, and that’s what I love about her. Still, I like to think she’d have heeded caution enough to put together a slightly less idiotic list of schools.

Next time, stuff I wish I’d known about putting together the actual application.

Hey y’all, apologies for the MFA-centric posts lately, but whenever I hear that maxim, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” I always interpret it as: “Write the things you wish you could have read.” I’m drawing near the end of my MFA application journey, and there are many, many things I wish I could go back in time and tell past-me. So if you’re applying for MFA programs, or just considering it, feel free to take a peek at this series of advice. (And, of course, if you’re not interested, skip this and wait ’til I start dragging my butt back to the library four days a week, for some actual posts.)

For what it’s worth, my meager credentials: this fall, I applied to seventeen MFA programs; fifteen of them ranked in the top thirty (which was dumb for reasons I’ll explain later), and two less selective programs as a just-in-case (which was also dumb). Of these schools, I’ve heard back from thirteen so far, and had the great honor of being accepted at four programs — three fully funded and one with a not-bad fellowship — and waitlisted at two schools. Last night, I officially accepted an offer from a school I only applied to for the privilege of being rejected from. (This was not dumb.)

If I had to do it all over again, I’d wish someone had told me the following:

Ten Things I Learned About Applying To MFA Programs (From Actually Applying To MFA Programs)

1) Work on your sample. Work on your sample. NO! Stop reading this! Go work on your sample!

My basic portfolio was two stories, and ran around 28 pages. One of the stories was a piece I’d written for a workshop I took at Harvard Extension about a year before I applied to programs. It came out well in the first draft. I took it through a few workshopped rounds of edits, then let it sit ’til application time, ’cause it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve ever written (so far).

The second story was a wretched piece of trash I wrote for a workshop when I was nineteen. A few months before I applied to schools, I decided it had potential, and completely rewrote it. Made everyone I knew read it and give me notes. Completely rewrote it. Bought everyone ice cream and made them reread it again. Redrafted it. Redrafted it. Ripped it apart with colored pens and then — you guessed it — redrafted it. The last two weekends before I submitted, I spent four to six hours a day on this story. I spent so much time with it that I started getting hallucinations that it wasn’t a story at all, but a statue I was sculpting with my hot shaking hands. When I’d finally taken it as far as it could go, I knew in my heart it wasn’t one-tenth as good as the story that had come naturally; I only hoped that programs would overlook the whole lowly mess.

When I actually got the chance to talk to three department chairs about why they had accepted me to their programs, guess which story they talked about? The second one. Unanimously.

What, it’s March now and you’re not applying ’til November, past-TKOG? That’s nice. Go work on your goddamn sample.

Cutting this off before it gets unwieldy. See you tomorrow with more retroactive MFA application advice. (Or see you later, if you’re not into MFA stuff, which is cool as well.)

This morning, I was in a pretty chipper mood. I already had plans to go celebrate Fat Tuesday with Co-Worker, then on the bus, I realized my Rogaine was working.

Huh, good things always come in threes, I mused, admiring the baby-fine wisps newly curling around my scalp. I wonder what the third will be?

Wonder no more. I got a call from an MFA program. A big one. (Not Iowa.) I’m going to start saving my happiness tears in little vials then, whenever I forget how goddamn blessed my life is, drink them to remember that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

Goddamn.

Quick vignette and a shot of joy:

A few days ago, when the divine Sarah Von of yes and yes was good enough to repost my adventure with high-fivin’ strangers, had a run-in of my own:

Standing at the check-out counter of Stop’n'Shop, waiting to ring up a purchase, realized the cashier was going to be a challenge: as she helped the elderly lady in line ahead of me, the cashier was carrying on an involved hollering conversation with the bagger two counters over, discussing whether she needed to get her hair re-done immediately or, like, super-immediately.

Most people think of the no-eye-contact clerk as a dose of modern-day rudeness or an argument in favor of more self-check-out lines. I’ve got to say, though, I like the challenge. If my life were a video game, you’d get bonus points every time a stranger looks at you, straight at you, and smiles. And I play to win, baby.

As a little context for this story, an embarrassing admission: I won a year’s supply of free Lean Pockets from LiLu (thanks, bro!) and, well, I don’t hate ‘em. The only problem is that the coupons — all 183 of them — don’t scan properly, so cashiers have to manually deduct the cost of the item.

As she scans the rest of my items, the cashier keeps fracturing my ear drums with her ongoing conversation. Finally, she hits a lull while trying to scan my coupon, and I jump in:

TKOG: Those never scan right! I’m sorry.
Cashier: That’s fine. What is it, $2.50? I’ll just deduct it.
TKOG: Oh wait! Those are on sale and I haven’t scanned my card yet. It’ll only be two dollars off! I don’t want to steal the extra fifty cents.

And she stopped. Stopped talking, stopped scanning, stopped punching buttons, and looked me up and down, like the grizzled old-timer appraising his heart-filled-but-oafish young apprencing after the opening credit sequence.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”

“Oh, y’know, I’m just trying to keep it ethical.”

And she lets the coupon flutter to the counter while she leans in and gives me a big ol’ high five. She cracked into a small smile during the rest of our transaction, and even struck up a conversation. She asked me whether she needed to get her hair re-done.

–

Just a teensy interaction, but between the timing and her immediate sunniness, it put a huge grin on my face. Plus, it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten high-fived for the phrase keepin’ it ethical. Big-time dork cred, y’all!

So that’s my current happiness. In other news, I’m quiet here because I, along with a few other MFA hopefuls, have gotten wrapped up in an ad hoc national short story month (or as I prefer to think of it, NaSSty WriMo). Nothing more thrilling than banging your head against the keyboard ’til you realize you’ve got stories in you you didn’t even see.

Not that they’re actually good. My two latest works? “Buddhism for Douchebags” and “Cruiseship of the Motherfucking Damned”. Um, one Pulitzer please.

That, and with the weather heatin’ up to the low 40s and the sun making its annual transition from silver to lazy butter yellow, the promise is spring is finally upon us!

I don’t know ’bout you, but I’m planning on high-fiving some cashiers, drinking a lot of red tea, and listening to this song on repeat ’til it finally comes.

What blog negligence? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Apologies for my recent absence, but I’ve been busy with the rock’n'roll lifestyle of MFA admissions angst, topical hair regrowth ointments, and the vague, all-consuming malaise that is life in a northern climate during the grey months. Yeah, when people talk about living The Life, mine is the life they mean.

And while I vowed I wouldn’t blog about any MFA admissions particulars, if you don’t follow me on Twitter, I’m happy to say with 100% certainty that I will be leaving Boston in a few months to go get paid to live my dreams for three or four years. And while I haven’t yet heard back from most of my schools, the current frontrunner is located in a city whose name provides a punny answer to the eternal question: “Why are pachyderm dentists busier in Alabama?”

At least I won’t have to train myself to stop saying “y’all”.

Okay, that’s all I had in me today. Time to return to the unfathomable depths of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Happy Valentine’s Day, kittens. Make sure to save the prettiest valentine in the box for your crush, and don’t wimp out on the signature this year.

And in case you didn’t buy any valentines for the rest of the class, check out Life As A Human, where I made some presidential valentines just for you.

[Also, forgot to link it when it first went up, but check out on Life As A Human, how to make someone you love stop doing something you hate.]