I'm really mad at myself. Yesterday I decided to do a little opportunity scouting to see if I could really get into U of A for my master's degree in English...and I discovered that my average is 3 percentage points below cut-off. I can't fix that, either - they derive an average from the English courses you take during your degree, and my degree is over, done, all gone bye bye. So I scouted a few other locations. U of T & York (my two choices in the city) are similarly off-limits, as they take my entire degree into consideration and my overall average was 79%.
What really kills me is that I was an interminably lazy student in my undergrad. I was ridiculously happy most of the time, but my happiness was built on creative thinking, a less-than-rigorous approach to editing and a tendency to skip half my classes in order to sleep or socialize. If I had applied half the effort to my undergrad as I now do to student teaching, many more doors would remain open for me.
I'm trying to make myself feel better through rationalization & displacement, but it's not really working. My displacement comes out in anger: anger at myself for squandering my talents or anger at the Whole Language Movement for teaching me language arts without a grammatical skill base. And the anger is useful for awhile because it's distracting from the big "I Failed" sign hanging in my head. But the anger leaves me champing at an invisible bit & taking it out on whatever conversation topic happens to be around at the moment. The anger is silly.
As for the rationalization, it usually takes the form of "I should be proud of myself for all I've done," like a happy marriage demolishes a master's degree just like paper covers rock. It doesn't work, though. Such reasoning is not only fatuous, it introduces ridiculous oversimplification. Writing a book might equal a master's degree because both involve a particular aspect of intellectual achievement; and raising a healthy & happy baby might equal a successful marriage because of the lifelong relationship inherent in both...but trying to match up marriage with a degree is like trying to mate an elephant and a pig. There is no equivalency. Besides, my marriage is less my exterior life work than my interior world, less my job than my medium. It's not something I do, it's something I am.
Oh well. I suppose I have to leave some mountains unclimbed; the daughter's going to need something big to achieve. Fortunately, there's still lots of territory out there.
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2 years ago today: another weekend lay in ashes.
