MFA

I sort of think my whole life has been a series of unending kinds of crises, so I'm not too sure if I can call my current reevaluation of my life any different than when I decided to be a filmmaker in high school.

See, that's what is called starting "in medias res," because I didn't explain what my crisis was before I started talking about it. Hooked? Well, as you all know and could probably tell from the title, my current situation-that-might-be-viewed-as-a-crisis-by-losers-in-law-school is me going to poetry school for an MFA. See, for a couple of brief semesters I was taking pre-med classes a few years ago, and then I decided that poetry was what I wanted to do, so even though it would put me in a substantial amount of debt and not guarantee me any kind of steady income in my life ever for as long as I live, I dropped all of the pre-med and applied to MFA programs. Now I'm almost done with my MFA here in Houston.

But maybe what is different about this phase in my life is that unlike rock star/astronaut/filmmaker/rock star/novelist/doctor/rock star, I am fully planning on continuing with the poetry writing and hopefully eventually teaching. So much so that I am applying to phds right now, which would be another 5 years of edumacation. So I guess I can understand the need to evaluate one's life in the mid-twenties.

For me the major catalyst for all of this latest change and evaluation started when I taught middle school. Long story short (you've all heard it before)- Sucked, people dumb, students lame, public school bureaucracy unsalvageable. That's when I was really in a funk for a while. I applied to 50 fucking jobs, and the only two I got were at a call center in Lake City where they hire everybody (I quit after I discovered they were going to pay me less than they had promised) and a job as a bag boy at Publix. I moved in with Laurie and her then boyfriend in a house in the Tallahassee ghetto at which we routinely had prostitutes bringing their johns onto our porch. I reenrolled in school to take pre-med classes. I aced them all, but all the pre-med students were whiny jerks, and it just wasn't any fun. My friends in Tallahassee who were all doing poetry stuff seemed to have so much fun, and although I could talk to them about poetry, I felt disconnected from the academic group. So after taking a class with Barbara Hamby, I decided "Fuck all this financial security business, Jeeves, I want to go to poetry school." Poetry was what I did that I liked the best, so why shouldn't I find a way to do that and get paid (someday, perhaps in crackers. Maybe the kind with peanut butter in the middle.) So I applied and got in the end.

Now things are going pretty well, and I'm happy with the decisions I've made, even if I can't get any of you guys to read or like poetry. Oh well! At least I've managed to talk everybody into agreeing that the Original Series is way better than Next Gen.

PS - A BSG milestone - this is the 800th time on Blog Supergroup that I've posted about poetry. A celebration is in order, I believe!