the voices dying with a dying fall

Songs of the Hour: 16, Maybe Less; Cinder & Smoke by Iron & Wine
          Rob Dougan "Nothing at All" (my new favorite song)

Statistic of the Week : 100% of all College websites describing their PhD program for Clinical Psychology SUCK.

I finally got some sleep last night, or more specifically this morning, as I slept until noon (minus of course getting Joss on the bus. sort of…).  I hadn’t gotten much sleep the last week or two because I had been obsessively reading Stephen King’s  Dark Tower series until like 5 a.m. rather consistently. More on that later. Anyway, I was in a rather good mood with all that yummy sleep… until I found out the one remaining P.E. class with open spaces filled up during my slumber. I think I’ll be taking PE in summer school. That’s like the lamest thing I’ve ever consigned myself to. Archery, racquetball, bowling, weight training– whatever. Sounds like fun, secretly, but not so much 5 days a week with a shitload of paperwork attached to it.

After that depressing tidbit, I decided to look into grad school stuff. There are interesting 3 year programs in the U.K., and 5 year programs in the states. The "good" schools want a a GPA of 3.7+ and a GRE of 2000+ (I just took a sample GRE online, and I sure as hell didn’t get a 2000). My overall GPA right now is a 3.63 or so.
I don’t know what to do about any of this. Maybe it doesn’t matter that much, I dunno. I like the rigorous 3 years as opposed to the 5-6, but  I have no idea how the APA works with learning abroad. Lots of tedious research to do have I.

The main factors I’m balancing are time & distance, and then cost. My father’s 68 this year, and I don’t want to be away from him very long.  If I’m going to be more than a few hours away, I don’t want it to be for long. Thus the Duke, UVA, UMD, options. The University of Glasgow, and Cardiff in Wales both have highly rated programs that are 3 years (I think it’d be great for Joss, if not a little complicated as far as pragmatics go). I guess the ratings only matter insofar as how I want to have an actual job when I graduate. Otherwise, I dream of getting into Berkley. When I wake up, I’ll make better plans.
As I’ve mentioned, navigating these sites is an atrocious experience. Not a mood enhancer for such as I.

OK, I’ll try not to rant too much, but I have to write about this Dark Tower business. If you haven’t read it and would like to, for the love of god skip this paragraph. I’ve never been a King fan, not liking horror at all, but this particular series isn’t horror… it’s more of a Carnivale/Firefly genre. About 2,000 pages ago, I realized how brilliant King really was. TS Eliot took Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and a massive amount of other literary works, and wrote The Waste Land. Eliot alludes to contemporary social issues, drinking songs, King Arthur, and really it’s more that I can even grasp much less explain.  King takes the same Browning poem, and turns it into a Tolkienesque epic; he sorta does what Eliot does, but for his generation– alluding to the Beatles and ZZ Top and Harry Potter and the Wizard of Oz. It’s really absorbing (thus the 5 am reading sessions), and really long.  Of course, everyone you grow to love dies in horrible ways, and not until the last 500 pages of 6,500 page series, and it gangs up on you and you kind of want to die immediately as soon as your done. Like I did yesterday. I have constructed a list of things not to do when writing an epic series, and perhaps one day mr. king will find it and recognize the error of his ways:

1. Don’t ever, ever, kill the loyal dog/animal if you want your fans to love you.

2. Don’t kill the children in gory, unnecessary ways if you don’t want your readers to hunt you down to tar and feather you.

3. Baby werespiders are NEVER okay. When a creature is a newborn baby one minute, and gianormous tarantula the next that eats its mother, and then a minute later it changes back to a baby– you’ve gone too far. You just have. Some of us hate spiders and love babies, and it confuses us and never lets us look at babies the same way again.

4. Do not write yourself into your story as a character and have a far more lovable child-character than you as a human being will ever be, die saving your life ; even if the car accident that almost killed you fits nicely into your plot.

5. Don’t give your characters premonitions of 9/11, especially  when it is wholly irrelevant to your time frame. that’s not cool.

6. If you want your readers to be content with your cowboy riding off into the sunset of his life’s ambition as the ending, then don’t write afuckingnother one tucked into your epilogue bitching about how your readers should be content and not read it.

7. If you feel you MUST write a second ending, then for fuck’s sake do NOT punish the readers for reading it by making it so godawful horrifying as to put your main character in a Nietzsche nightmare loop sending him back to the first page of the first book to do it all over again, implying that he had already endured you screwed up sadistic plot of pain suffering and death a hundred times before. This is not acceptable.  it’s just not. it upsets us, precious.

I have school tomorrow. I was going to write something more, and far more interesting, but I’m out of time. I suspect DD is the only one of you who may actually have read the series. Thank you for your forbearance. Next time, really, something interesting.

love