The waiting is finally over, and Tom Petty, as it turns out, was wrong: The waiting was not, in fact, the hardest part. That honor belongs to being rejected, again, for graduate school. Sigh. But that sigh is actually good news, because it’s a signal to you all that my old pal Magilla has finally gotten his big fat butt off my chest and I can breathe again. The downside is that he couldn’t wait to crap all over me with the disappointing news before leaving.

All things considered, I’m in pretty good shape today. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been working on my rejection post for weeks now, just in case–so that’s a good thing, I was really prepared with what to write this morning. I will confess to having had a rough time of it last night–I spent some quality alone-time in my closet, crying my eyes out where my children couldn’t hear or see; had ice cream for dinner; and stayed up ’til the wee hours of the morning watching Jim Caviezel and Richard Harris in The Count of Monte Cristo. Now there’s a guy who really got screwed–after the first hour of that movie, I felt so much better about my own travails.

So what will I do now, you wonder? Well, unlike last year at this time, when I had placed every single egg I had in the grad school basket only to watch the U dump them all on the ground and stomp on them, this year, I have other plans. I’ll continue slogging along with my graphic design certificate. I’ll continue shopping my current manuscript around to publishers and agents–I’m actually contemplating making a rejection slip-collage as my new hobby. I’ll start massaging my network a bit more aggressively.

Above all, I will continue to write, because, as my dear, long-suffering husband reminded me last night, writing is what I love to do, and I am good at it, and at some point, all the rest will fall into place.

That sweet husband of mine reminded me of something else last night, something I had long forgotten. In the “olden days” when I was a teacher, my colleagues were encouraging me to pursue my master’s in education. I told them I couldn’t–that I had hated my education classes too much to sit through any more. “But you love teaching!” they countered. “Yes,” I replied, “I love teaching, but there is very little in those education classes that has anything to do with the love of teaching. If anything, those classes were designed to make students hate the profession.” Hubby asked me, in a gentle way, if it weren’t possible that sitting through three years of writing classes, then, might not have the same effect on my love of writing.

I thought about what he said this morning as I sat down and re-read an interview in one of my writing  magazines with author Meg Cabot. She said, “[A] random guy I met at a party [she eventually marries said guy] told me not to study creative writing because in his opinion studying creative writing sucks the love of writing out of you (he was a creative-writing major, so he said he would know)…I followed his advice…Instead, I had the love of art sucked out of me.”

Would grad school have sucked the love of writing right out of me? The world will never know, I guess. This whole experience has certainly sucked the love of graduate school admissions processes out of me, to be sure–oh, and let me just say, for the record, I think the university should have to reimburse me for the admissions application fees (both of them) as well as the exorbitant GRE fees (not to mention the therapy bills I incurred while trying to pass the math portion.) It doesn’t seem right for them to keep my money, somehow…

So, today is another day, and I will survive. I did last year, and I will this year. As Meg Cabot also said, “If you really love what you do, you should just be doing it because it’s what you love…don’t give it up just because people are saying you suck…”

Thanks, Meg, I needed that, because I really do love what I do, and I will keep doing it. Thanks for following along, everyone.