Labor Day/Be Late For Something Day/Teachers' Day (India)/Cheese Pizza Day
2005-09-05 @ 11:48 p.m.

First things first. About Quills, some of the best seats in the house are still available, so if the people I've messaged would kindly reply and pay me, I can get this sorted out as soon as possible to ensure we get seats. I cannot emphasise the necessity of paying me before I buy the tickets (I can't afford to pay for them out of my own pocket), and of making up your own mind quickly (I hate waiting for people who will only go if someone else is going). The MFA meeting was by far one of the most useful I've attended these past few months, and I'm now quite open to the idea of working in the foreign service. Obviously, the ideal situation would be to get an Open scholarship, which might allow me to experience both the MOE and the MFA. To be perfectly honest though, I'd take any scholarship as long as it gets me to the UK and allows me a decently comfortable lifestyle there. (Should that be "comfortably decent"? It sounds like a small step down from the alternative.) Have a concrete idea of what's going into my personal statement, including a nice quote from Hoban, which seems to me to capture an important aspect of literature's appeal. Anyway, stepped into Borders today because we were in town after the MFA meeting, and we wanted to avoid hitting the books again. Bought another book from the Faber & Faber Poet to Poet series, a selection of John Berryman's poems by Michael Hofmann. Borders has so many books from this series, and I was sorely tempted to buy more than five at one go. Nonetheless, I resisted and my bank account is, though ailing, not yet comatose. I will indulge myself in three weeks' time! I think it's a really cheap way of getting your hand on a diverse selection of poetry. Available poets so far: W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Dryden, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Ted Hughes, Ben Johnson, John Keats, Robert Lowell, Louis MacNeice, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, William Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats. You know what I want for Christmas now...