I did not fall asleep!!!

Yes, it's true. I made it through the GRE (Graduate Record Exam), which is an entrance exam for graduate schools, without falling asleep! As some of you know, on Monday while taking a practice exam after work I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay (a very interesting essay mind you!). That did not happen this time. This time Ang and I made it to San Diego State University with a few minutes to spare, realized we had the complete wrong directions (thanks ETS website, you stink!), and then found out it was family weekend to boot! However, Ang was so great and she got me to the test building and then parked all by herself and entertained herself for the three hours I was testing.

My unofficial scores are 450 for the verbal section and 480 for the quantitative (math) section. Not super high scores but not low scores either. I was in the 54th percentile for the verbal section which means I scored better than 54 percent of people who take the test. And I was in the 20th percentile for the quantitative section which means I scored better than 20 percent of people who take the test. So all in all, not fantastic scores but not bad scores certainly. Also, can I just say, I still do not understand how I scored better on the math section than on the verbal section. I haven't got a clue.

So I am going to work on my grad school applications this week. A lot of the paperwork is done, it's just organizing and proofreading now. But I thought I'd include one of the pieces I wrote for USC's application, an autobiographical character sketch in the form of a short story. So here it is, my raison d'etre:

Her Life

She’s almost ten years old, and Sarah can count the number of movies she’s seen on her little fingers. It’s 1987 and while many movies have come and gone in her short lifetime, she’s grown up in a small town in the middle of Michigan with a one-screen movie theater and it’ll be five or six years before a VCR shows up under the Christmas tree.

A trip downtown to the show is a big event, and this time it’s undertaken by her father and the father of some friends. The men corral the children into the darkened theater and they await their film: Harry and the Hendersons. Two hours later when the lights come up, Sarah’s in tears. And of course, the boy next to her pokes her and makes a joke about being a big baby. She’ll never forget this moment but not because of the ridicule.

There in that theater, she became a member of the Henderson family. She felt their fear, their excitement, and ultimately, their sadness. Sarah connected with Harry, the furry giant who endeared himself to a human family. And right there, at the end of that aisle with the sticky floor and worn-out seats, she wondered if she could create a story that made people feel something.

For the next ten years Sarah wrote. She filled up spiral notebooks and composition books. She crafted long, involved stories of women who had to support their children on their own, of families who lost loved ones, of people facing illness and loneliness. She wrote settings that went on for pages and chapters of dialogue. She even tried writing a screenplay about a girl who sneaks into the wonderful world of Hollywood and is accepted as one of their own.

And then, right one schedule, real life intervened. Real life whispered in Sarah’s ear that she needed to put away her stories and notebooks and concentrate on getting a real job, one that would make her family happy and would provide her the means to support herself. So she plowed through college, taking an occasional creative writing course, and walked away with a journalism and communication degree; the ticket to acceptance and normalcy for writers. And by the end of that summer she had a job, as a secretary.

It didn’t take Sarah long to realize this was not what she wanted out of life. Sure she got to write and research stories while her boss was out of the office but it wasn’t enough. So she did what any smart girl just out of college does and applied to graduate school. She was accepted at the one university she applied to, into the one program she’d researched and before she knew it she was studying organizational communication, a topic she’d barely touched upon in her undergraduate work. But she was back in school, it was familiar, and she was doing something productive. She was learning and exploring and she loved it. Her family loved it and she met people that would stay with her for her entire life.

Meanwhile, Sarah still had that pesky problem of supporting herself. So she accepted the university’s offer of a teaching assistantship. Although terrified, she quickly realized this was something she could do, and do well. She’d go on to teach for the next eight years and not regret a single moment of it. She’d made a good choice. However, it still wasn’t enough.

Upon completion of her Master’s program, Sarah bought herself several screenwriting books. She immersed herself in others’ scripts (being couch-bound for several weeks due to a broken ankle was the perfect excuse to do nothing else) and started writing and rewriting her own. By the end of that summer she had a finished screenplay but no job. For the real world, this was not enough.

So Sarah went back to teaching and even landed a part-time job writing for the local newspaper. She learned about deadlines, editors, copyeditors, working with others, and good writing. She learned more than she ever did back in college. For the next four years Sarah taught, wrote, edited, consulted, and did more than she’d ever imagined, professionally. And all the while she kept writing, entering countless competitions, sending query letters, even contacting a script consultant in Los Angeles who read her work, for a fee, and suggested she change everything about it. Along the way, Sarah had made a life for herself in that city. She had a strong community of friends, she was part of a large network of professionals who kept her in mind when jobs came up and were eager to work with her and yet, it still was not enough for her. She wanted more.

It was spring and Sarah was walking the Celery Flats, a gorgeous set of trails in the middle of her busy city, when she finally knew what to do. She knew she had to jump, not just move, outside of her comfort zone. She realized she’d done all she could in the world she’d created for herself. So she took a job offer in Yuma, Arizona, 2100 miles away. She sold most of her belongings, packed the rest in her car and took off for the desert.

For the next two years Sarah would live a life unlike anything she’d ever imagined. She’d teach reading and writing to seventh graders in a town bordering Mexico. She’d deal with parents yelling at her in Spanish, gang violence, fights over teddy bears, black widow spiders and nouns all in the course of a job that paid her just enough to share an apartment with another teacher. She’d fall in love with all of her students and make friends that would change her perspective on life. She’d visit new places and care about test scores and spend endless nights grading poorly written essays. And she’d write in the ten minutes before she’d fall asleep, knowing all along, that it was good and it was where she needed to be at that moment in time, but it was still not enough.

Then Sarah received a gift from her little sister, the sister who had gone to school to be a teacher and who would always teach middle school because that was more than enough for her. It was a little yellow bubble magnet, no bigger than a nickel, and it said “my life is up to me.” Every day as she sat down at her computer, she saw that magnet and she thought about it. And finally she made the decision that she’d wanted to make for so long. She’d try to do it; she’d learn how to be not just a good writer but an excellent writer, an award-winning, script selling, better than the rest writer. And so she started applying to graduate schools.

No one, not even Sarah, could have imagined that a showing of Harry and the Hendersons, twenty years ago, would inspire her to attend film school. No one in her family remembers seeing the film and others are still skeptical that she’ll make it in the business they all read about in the entertainment section of the newspaper. But she’s determined and because her life is up to her and only her, she’ll do it.