why not start today

I love fall. I feel pretentious calling it autumn, but it's a more beautiful word and more accurately fits the season, don't you think? What I love best about autumn is that school starts again, and this year I actually got to go back to school, too. I am working toward an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore. I feel like I have found the place I really belong. I wish I could be there all day every weekday instead of at work. (Alas, without that tuition remission I get from my job, there would be no chance of affording school.)

I have two courses. The first is an intro class that all new MFA candidates in my program are required to take their first semester. It's called Creativity: Ways of Seeing. So far we have made our syllabi into little accordion books, taken photos of the city and compiled them into slideshows, and started making intense sketchbooks detailing our experiences of becoming more creative. This week we watched videos of Sister Wendy, and this weekend we're going to the BMA to each find our own work of art to examine closely and describe as though we were Rilke talking about Cezanne. The class is a lot of fun and I've met some pretty cool people in there.

My other course is my favorite of the two -- my poetry workshop. It blows my mind every single week because my classmates are so brilliant, insightful, funny, and generous. Not even everyone considers themselves poets -- there are a few fiction and non-fiction writers taking it as electives -- and their poems are amazing, too. I have been fairly satisfied with the poems I've written so far this semester. The object poem was difficult for me because I had this [wrong-headed] idea that there couldn't be people in the poem, and I really like to have human characters in my poems. That poem turned out okay, though. I will revise it soon.

I used to post poems on here but I think I may stop doing that. I want to start submitting poems to journals soon, and having my poems floating around on the web before they land in an editor's inbox seems wrong, somehow. I am not currently prolific enough to have spare poems, you know? I hope that someday I'll get there and be able to post poetry here again; in the meantime, I hope to regale you with tales from my life.

On that note, I was in the post office one day last week to mail a box, and an old man pooped on the floor right next to the counter. Poop just came out of his pants-leg, right onto the floor. A lot of poop. And it smelled terrible. I felt horrible for the post office employee who had to clean it up. I didn't stick around long enough to mail my box -- it was too awful, and the line was really long. The old man just shuffled toward the door and never looked back. It was like he didn't even notice, but is that possible? I hope I never lose total control of my body like that. How humiliating. I felt really sorry for him.