A Piece of News

Several posts ago, I mentioned this quote by Conan O'Brien:

"Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

Turns out, he might have been speaking to me after all. I thought I would either get accepted to or rejected from the PhD program, but I received word from my graduate director today that I've been put on the waitlist for admissions this year. This means that a spot might open up for me if the right people choose to pursue their studies elsewhere or if they are able to secure more graduate student funding than they expect. So the waiting continues. I think I will find out if there is a spot for me sometime in March, after the other admitted students visit campus for the "admitted student day" that corresponds with our graduate student conference.

Not great news, but not bad news either. I guess half-good news is appropriate to get on your half birthday.

All day, it has continued to snow. Billy says we have exceeded 18 additional inches in the past 24 hours. I decided it was time to go investigate. I felt compelled to jump off my deck and into the snow (perhaps I've been watching too much Rob Dyrdek). I thought Billy would yell at me, though, so instead I just jumped as high as I could and leaned backwards.

I sat like that for a while, thinking. It was surprisingly comfortable and unbelievably quiet. It occurred to me that if nothing else, being waitlisted assures me that all the extra steps I took to try to strengthen my application were necessary. Without the extra credit hours, extra research, and extra paper, I might have received a straight rejection letter today. Because of them, I might be able to get through by the skin of my teeth.

All that extra work exhausted me, and I could not have done it by myself. I owe my most sincere thanks to some of this blog's regular readers: among those of you who visit me here are the people who have given me the support, encouragement, and continued determination that have been necessary to help me get this far. You're also the same people who remind me that whether I end up in the program or not, everything will work out just fine. Those reminders are what keep me on track and make all this anxious waiting tolerable.

I also thought about how the snow that was falling consisted of the same water molecules that have been evaporating, condensing, falling, freezing, melting, and crystallizing for millions of years. That helped me keep in mind that waiting an additional month to make my future plans is relatively a very short time. (It also confirmed that my middle school teachers effectively instructed me about the water cycle.)

Then I decided to stop thinking about all of that to play with the little guy, whose curiosity overpowered his fear of the snow today.

First, he turned the places I had stepped into a worn path for himself. (And yes, the pile of snow behind him is taller than our 5 ft fence.)

He didn't make his path quite wide enough for himself to turn around, though.

When we first brought home baby Oscar, he didn't have all of his vaccinations yet, so we were afraid to take him outside. We lived in an apartment complex and I didn't want him around other dog waste. One day, after a snow accumulation of a few inches, I decided it would be safe to take him out. He had no idea what he was standing on, and he was so light that his feet didn't penetrate the slightly crusty top layer.

As it turns out, when there is enough snow on the ground, he can still walk safely across the top of it.

I still believe Conan is right. All I can do is keep working hard, being kind, and waiting for these amazing things to reveal themselves in whatever form they will take.

("A Piece of News" is a short story about a young woman who does not quite know what to make of the news she receives during a bad storm. Its full text is available here, thanks to google books. The story is written by Eudora Welty, whom my professor recently declared "the first writer to come after Faulkner and not be crushed by him." You might know one of her other stories, including "A Worn Path" (linked above), "Death of a Traveling Salesman," or one of my very favorites, "Why I Live at the P.O." All are available in her Collected Stories. And, if all of that doesn't yet convince you that she was brilliant, she was also close friends with Katherine Anne Porter.)