Winter Break '09: To-do list

To-do list for Winter Break '09:

-Apply to Teach for America. Deadline is January 8th, so I still have some time.

-Apply to ACE. The Alliance for Catholic Education is basically like TFA, except it's run through Notre Dame. It's a two-year commitment where you're teaching in Catholic schools during the year and taking classes to get a Master's in education over the summer. My mom found out about it when she was dropping Katherine off at college in August and has been pushing it ever since. It's a good deal and all, probably the better of the two, but I'm applying more to placate her than because it's what I really want to do. Eight years of Catholic school was enough, thanks.

-Finish the first draft of my thesis. We were supposed to have all sixty pages done by the end of the first semester, but I told my supervisor around mid-October that that just wasn't gonna happen. He laughed and said to do as much as I could. I submitted a fifteen-page story and a twenty-page story, but the second one is a complete do-over that I wrote in 36 hours so I'd have something to turn in. Coming up with ideas, brainstorming in my Moleskine, jotting down outlines are easy. Writing is the hard part. I have to learn to to silence my inner editor, to write crap knowing that it's crap, to get quantity down on paper and worry about turning it into quality later.

-Set up a move-in date / cable / electricity for my new apartment. Just a few phone calls I have to make. I'm moving out of Jefferson West into my own place at 37th & Speedway next semester, and that's all I care to say about that on the Internet.

-Hang out with Danny, Emily, Michelle, and others TBD. Now that I'm back in town for good, I can start making plans with people. Danny and Em are no-brainers; we keep missing each other when they visit Austin. And now that all but the closest of high-school relationships have faded out, I think we're at the point where "catching up" is enough of a reason to get together with anyone we ever knew, regardless of how close we were or how long it's been.

-Read. Just finished a book of short stories by Breece D'J Pancake and loved it. A lot. Colum McCann's new book is next. Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski, is after that. I like how I can read for fun as much as I want and chalk it up as thesis research.

-Watch movies. I've been keeping a list of movies I learned about in my film history class (shudder, long story for another day) all semester, and now it's time to rent 'em one by one and enjoy. A lot of it (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for example, or Annie Hall) is stuff I'm kinda embarrassed to have not seen yet.

-Apply to grad school. Oh, yeah, that. It's a back-up option.