I’m alone during the days. These last two weeks without a project, without other work, the days are bottomless and I wake to the perch and plunge into them not looking at what passes or for an ending. Right now, I’m content to let it stay like this until I know whether I will enter graduate school this year.

But I’m in the tight interstice between wanting to go outside and interact with more people in a professional, scheduled, way, and seeking more time to myself. It’s true that I spend most of my time in solitude, but not true that I spend that time doing something enriching. Most of the time is wasted out of avoidence of some scary things to do, but also some fun things. I don’t understand the mechanism responsible for avoiding the pleasurable activities, but it happens. And when I do nothing like this, reading useless stuff on the Web, I can feel the wasting. My head hurts, I feel queasy, my consciousness congeals.

I think it’s this waiting, which has gone on too long.

I called the department today to find out where they are in the selection process. The woman on the other end of the line asked me to wait while she pulled up her database. I told her my name and she looked at her records and said that letters were sent out a week ago, and didn’t I get mine? I haven’t. She replied that the review committee had decided another school would be a better fit.

I’d just typed the news into YIM and began to feel the heat of disappointment when the phone rang. It was that woman, asking me if I was me, and then apologizing for making such a big mistake: She had read the wrong name. Several people with my last name had applied, but I’m the only one still in the process. She said interviews were still being conducted and that I would hear in a few weeks.

That brought a surprising degree of relief, and it did do a little to jilt this limbo.

But then when I came home this evening I got an e-mail from Angela that said she finally had the courage to talk to the professor, with whom she works, and the professor said I was not on her interview list. That, in fact, the competition was fierce this year and some applicants had an incredible list of accomplishments, such as multiple publications.

So now it really does hurt, except the issue is no more concluded than before: my application still hasn’t been denied. It sits on somebody’s desk awaiting review. Or it sits on the desk, already reviewed but not in the running, just not turned in for denial.

It’s unlikely my second choice of advisor will interview me because many applicants will have picked her as their first choice. So, I am mulling options for the year, but it is difficult to close the chapter completely. It’ll probably take the letter to do that, and that might be a few weeks.

The good news is that my application survived the first round of review. I wasn’t rejected outright as a bad fit for that type of program. That’s positive news. It means that I just need to build credentials, as insane as that is considering that the reason for entering the program is to learn how to get such credentials. But that’s just the way the climate is right now. A lot of people are trying to go back to school to escape the recession.

I’m just so disappointed not to be able to begin a path the way I want to when I want to. I’m so fucking bored and eager to be challenged. Now I have to find a more creative way to begin, and that "creative" part is not the type of challenge I mean. It will probably involve a lot of my time volunteering on research projects; I might even have to pay for it.

The worst is having to inform the people who helped me and who wrote my letters. I have some time to postpone that, though. Perhaps in a month or two it will be easier to do.