The funny thing about stereotypes is that they're built on some truth.

I know I shouldn't be doing this, but right now I am feeling an incredible wave of regret. This past spring I was rejected from every graduate program I applied to, even though I worked really hard to make myself an attractive candidate. At the time I wasn't devastated by the news, but for some reason it's stinging now more than I thought it would.

I applied in science writing programs, one of them at UC Santa Cruz. Every year UCSC publishes the works of their grads, and for the most part they're all very good. Actually, they're all very good. The only fault I can find with them is in the inclusion of short biographies of the student writers at the bottom of their stories. If I ever want to feel inadequate as either a scientist or as a writer all I need to do is to read these bios.

I read one tonight for a guy who is a dead-ringer for Jason Schwartzman, and whose ego is unrivaled. He declared that it was Nobel laureate who told him he should be a writer, egging him on in a passion he'd carried since childhood. As if the endorsement of a Nobel winner makes him a certifiable genius, he at least assumes it gives him the liberty to take head shots wearing corduroy jackets and collared shirts, tilting his head as if to say, "Yeah, I'm smarter than you."

I hate this guy. I feel it deep down in a place I don't even like to think about and it really doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good when I'm struggling to find work and trying to go to school while trying to make new friends and get back into life. I hate this guy for his pretentious picture and his ability to succeed where I so blatantly failed.

Maybe that's what's pissing me off the most about it.

If I were meant to fly, I'd have wings

First off, I am not your textbook definition of an athlete. If you really held me down and threatened it out of me I'd call myself a runner more than anything else, but really my gait probably more resembles an awkward shuffle than anything else. But it does the trick. Growing up I wasn't particularly physically inclined, I played my fair share of softball and managed a good time out of that, but once I got to high school I was entrenched in band and was more apt to spend my time studying or playing music than anything else.

The last few years I've been flirting with sports participation, explaining my most recent devotion to running from point A to point B, but in the last few weeks I've stepped it up in ways I never thought I would. This term at school I decided, mostly on a whim than anything else, to take a springboard diving class. I have no idea what possessed me to do this. I am not fond of heights, let alone jumping off them. When I told a friend of mine what I was going to be doing they said, "You know pirates used to make people walk the plank as punishment," I guess he meant the diving board was my personal form of the plank.

And it was with that in mind that I found myself on Monday standing with my back to the pool on the end of the board and the diving coach literally 6 inches from my body. He wanted me to do something completely against my self-protective nature. He was telling me to reach up over my head, look at my hands, and reach back towards the pool. The theory was that by doing so I would execute a passable back-dive, something I'd never done before. To say that I was terrified was an understatement. If I had been wearing pants I'm sure I would have peed them. Being as it was it was rather anti-climatic to pee your bathing suit I settled on some shaking breaths instead.

He counted to three and when I starting tilting a little bit he sped his voice up and started saying, "gogogogogogo". I wanted to punch him, and I'm sure I could have if it wouldn't have ended up with me being dropped into the pool anyways. Sure enough upon leaving the board I suddenly saw the water coming up at me. Rapidly at me. I had barely enough time to think, "Shi-" before breaking the surface, my eyes completely open.

Flashing back to my favorite movie as a kid where the heroine went blind because she dove into a pool of water with her eyes open I surfaced and gasped for air while making sure my eyesight was still intact. I could see the coach laughing from the board, the other students on the deck trembling a little in fear but smiling at my success at not killing myself. My eyes and brain stung from the sudden onslaught of chlorine, but all in all I was intact.

Maybe the constantly facing my fears part of class will cause me some personal growth or something along those lines, but for now I'm just hoping I can avoid shaking pool water out of the back of my skull after back-dives. Then we'll consider it a win.

change...can ya spare it?

I don't know how many times I've changed this blog, the layouts, the pictures, the tone, the themes. Bah. It's getting old. I even remember those days when I thought I had important things to say. Now I just realize that whatever I say is important pretty much only to me and at the end of the day that's an okay thing. There's a certain arrogance about blogging, about putting your thoughts out into the world. Or as much of the world as the two people who have ever read this are a part of. But goodness knows I love those two people...