It's Been Too Long

I've disappeared for almost two months, and I've been keeping busy. The Festival of Cartoon art was awesome! I got 18 autographs and I have several artists who have told me to keep in touch, including Ray Billingsley (the creator of Curtis). I'll write more when I have time...which may not be until January: I'm in the last stages of applying to grad school, so I don't really have the time to do much else but panic.

I was trying to get three people to write letters of recommendation for me, but one of the people I wanted to ask (my advisor from when I was an undergrad) had since retired and has been very ill, so I finally asked my supervisor and the VP in my department. One is writing a letter for the English department and the other is writing for the Comparative Studies department. Let's just hope all of the letters will be complimentary.

The Jewish Graphic Novels course wrapped up in November; just in time for the article about the group to be published in the New Standard. I'll provide a link later, but the quote from me actually makes me seem not as crazy as the whole interview process must have been for the author (who is the wife of one of my co-workers, if I haven't mentioned that already). I think I got a great deal out of the course, and I may have shown people a thing or two about life for non-Jewish people. When we discussed Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, I ended up opening up about my life and family back in Cleveland; revelations that I was surprised were being said to a group of strangers. That deserves a longer post, so we'll see.

In bigger news, I am scheduled to take the G.R.E. on December 17th, so I need to spend a lot of time studying for this exam that has me freaked out over the verbal (very important) and the math (important to only me), as I don't have a very large vocabulary, and it's been more than a decade since I've had to do the kind of math required for this exam. I just hope and pray that I can do well on this exam. I just want everything to come together so that I can have a shot at getting into grad school. I even worked with the Comparative Studies professor (who told at least one person that he really wants to be my advisor) to get my Statement of Purpose up to caliber. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that I did have it in me to write at the PhD level; coming up with terms like "cognitive empathy" and using phrases that sounded very scholarly but make no sense to me now seemed to do the trick.

All I have left now is to make sure my transcripts from Kent State make it to OSU safely, confirm (yet again) that my OSU transcripts will be gotten by the Grad School Application office without me having to pay for them, get all my letter writers to get their letters in ASAP, write the autobiographical statement for the English department, choose a stellar writing sample for both departments, and pass the exam. All that, and holding down my internship while changing my schedule drastically for the next three months so that I can audit a Comparative Studies class, and taking steps towards my first attempts at getting published in a scholarly journal. I'm very serious about what I want to study [Strong female characters in sequential art = super heroine comic characters from the U.S. and abroad] and I really want this. I'm not sure that I'll get it, and I'm in a panic for the first time ever about affording it, so I've got to give it my best from now to the end of the year.

I want to set up a schedule so that I can make regular posts to all of my different internet haunts, but I'm probably going to be gone again until at least after the exam. Please pray, wish me luck or whatever you're into, for me as I make one last push towards the end.

Let's see how this works out, so I can tell people what went on in the interim.

I mean, I haven't even gotten to talk about my department's move to the main building on campus, so I'd like to come back more often.

C-ya, peeps!