This morning I mailed the last piece of my final MFA application. It was done early last night and it got postmarked a whole 24 hours before the deadline so I'm feeling pretty good right now. It also helped that the section I left to finish this past weekend was an essay on why I would make the world's best-est-est TA along with an exercise that asked me how I would go about giving feedback to the student that wrote the sample essay they provided. Can't you just see me with my fingers steepled and a wicked grin on my face as I settled down to my computer ready to type up the notes that would shred poor little Jimmy or Peter who wrote this lovely, but fatally flawed essay?
Anyway, I left the post office still feeling pretty good about myself and since I was out I thought I'd swing by the book store to see if I could flip through a couple chapters of this one writing book I thought they had. Well it turns out they didn't have it (or anything similar) so I just browsed a little and went home. But you want to know what they do have at Barnes & Nobles on Monday morning: retirees. Other than the three year-old who looked like she was there with grandpa I was the only customer without silver hair. And they were almost all male. So ladies, if you're looking to pick up in the over 65 crowd, Monday mornings at the bookstore.
It's strange how you wake up one morning and it's just another day starting same as the day before it, except that this day means you're another day older. It's this vast leap in logic. We don't look at each morning and consider ourselves another 24 hours older, or every thirty days another month older. No, we reserve the demarcation for yearly intervals. I find it odd but fascinating.
Ah, if you cannot glean it from my rambling, today is my birthday. This makes me a Capricorn: supposedly down to earth, stubborn, good with money and a long term player (so people banter around that quote about wine or cheese I smile politely because Capricorns really do get better as they get older).
Once upon a time, I spent time with a friend and a book that was supposed to get more in depth to my astrological-whateverness, except I couldn't remember when I had been born during the day. I only knew it was somewhere between 6-8am. The problem was that at 7am some celestial body of importance was rising or setting and the person I was doing all this with got very huffy with me. Turns out I was born at 6:53am as recently told to me by my mother with a great deal of asperity. Twenty-some years later she's still annoyed that I decided to be a morning baby.
Some signs are easy to remember. Scorpio is the scorpion, Leo's the lion, Pieces is the fish, Virgo's the virgin. And for some reason people even seem to all remember that Cancer is the crab. Dunno why they just do. Capricorn is one of those ram/goat things that rounds out the bunch. He's actually half goat half fish. Story goes that at one point he was entirely goat until there was an incident. Goats, and goat-like things such as Satyrs, in Greek mythology are notoriously lascivious. That being said, something caused the goat to shove his entire rear end into some magical river to cool his passions. [Please note the first cold shower reference in history.] When he pulled his rear end out of the river again it was now a fish tail.
And then he found five dollars.
Moral being, if you jump halfway into a river you might turn into a partial fish. Or you might find five dollars.
