Several items of note.

I haven't really made any formal announcement, so now's as good a time as any: as of April 7 I've been on the Columbia J-School waitlist. At the time -- for about a week or so -- I felt pretty good about it. Considering that I'm up against the cream of the crop, so to speak, I figured for crazy little fucked up me, making waitlist is quite an accomplishment. The letter I received which explained the waitlist policy was very nice and personal and signed by Robert Mac Donald, the dean of admissions, himself. The policy stated that all acceptance letters were due back by May 4, then, given two weeks until the 17th, the class of 2005 would officially be determined. Then, and only, then, would the admissions team turn to the waitlist to fill in any openings.

I waited patiently until May 10th or so and called the school to see what was up. Of course, the woman I spoke with, Kathy Palagonia (assistant dean) was curt and unfriendly and rather discouraging. She also informed me that the class wouldn't actually be determined until the end of May/first week of June. Alas, this was the sum of the information she was willing to divulge. All other questions re: the waitlist (how many people are on it, is it ranked, how many people usually are accepted from it, should I send in additional clips, when do these decisions get made and how...) were met with curt 'I can't tell you,' 'this isn't a competition' and 'There's no real way to tell.' All I was able to glean from her was that the waitlist is 'very small.' Meaning what? 5 ppl, 10 ppl -- heaven hope -- only one person(!) I could not garner and with that the conversation was over.

Since then my good cheer has much subsided, as Sam can unfortunately vouch. I have once again become depressed and anxious and feel like a loser. I am not good at waiting, clearly, but especially not knowing as the time draws nearer, where I will be living in mid-August. Especially, because the letter also explicitly said that sometimes people are accepted off the list as late as several days before class starts! Everyone around me has insisted that if it comes down to that, and that's when I get in, I'll have to just pack and run. The notion of which does not excite me, obviously.

This past weekend I spoke with a woman who is a post doc in cultural anthropology at Cal Berkeley, who shared with me her tale of being waitlisted at UCSC back in the 90s. She seemed to think that my chances of getting in at this late stage of the game were grim indeed, but also said that if I applied again next year, then I could almost be assured a spot. She and her fellow post docs are the ones who deal with admissions at her program and she said that this was the procedure that they followed.

I appreciated her advice, though of course, the wind was knocked out of me when she said I probably was not getting in this year. I'm not sure if somewhere deep inside I secretly think I will get in or secretly think they will realize they made a gross error and meant to waitlist the other San Francisco-dwelling Israeli lesbian who applied and will tear my whole application into shreds while laughing and discussing some passing-by coed's nice rack. My guess is that both of these possibilites are living quite large in the ol' noggin and this is why I am so incredibly short-tempered, anxious, insomniatic and generally unhappy.

On Monday, following the conversation with the post doc, I determined to take the bull by the horns and called Columbia again. I spoke with Kathy again. (I've had the pleasure of meeting Kathy on several occasions as I take every opportunity that I am in NYC to stop by the J-School building and mope around dreamily. She is fat, sweaty and harried.) This time she was decidedly more pleasant though still unfuriatingly vague. I asked her flat out if it was time to just give up and move on. Her reply was bascially, no. She said she'd wait a little longer until the beginning of July to see how things shake out, 'right now we are overcommitted but these things change all the time' unless of course, there's something else 'you really want to do, then you should go ahead and do it.' I'm not sure if I should take that as any form of encouragement. Again, she said that she can't give me any statistics on how many people get placed off the waitlist -- 'it varies so much each year' and reiterated that indeed 'the list is very small.' So I return to the same waiting pattern. Secretly hoping for admission to the golden palace while secretly self-loathingingly convinced of rejection.

Reading articles like this are of no help at all. Alexandra Polier is the woman who was assumed to be the intern with whom John Kerry had had an affair. The entire smugly self-satisfied, woe-is-me, dripping-with-privilege account of her trials and tribulations with the big bad media machine, how even her studies at Columbia J-School hadn't prepared her... Yich. These are the people who are accepted to this program. This is the kind of person with whom I have never had any real contact in my whole life. Give me someone who lives as a full-time female-to-male transgendered masochistic slaveboy; that I know how to deal with...

Anyway, that is how things stand today.

In other news, this week I managed to force a story out of my constipated and majorly blocked ... um, brain? ... I don't know how to end that metaphor without being gratuitously gross. Therefore, I present bishojo games. The publication of this masterpiece was an excercise in journalism on many fronts, not the least of which was the hands-on lesson in the epic, age-old and universal battle between writer and editor.

After the story had been submitted to my editor, changes made by him and approved by me, the story then was dropped to the copydesk. Here the brave and mistreated copy editors get their chance to work grammatical-spelling-punctunation magic. There's is not to go into a story and hugely and prudishly hack away at it, remove key sentences, twist out cheeky turns-of-phrase until they are dry as a bone and in fact, change enormous passages around until they are factually incorrect.

And yet this is the treatment my dear story received. It was not until late the next day, after the story had been on the site all day, that I caught wind of the butcher job that had taken place. I complained loudly to the copychief, dashed off a brusque and deeply accusatory letter to the copy editor responsible, and went into the story and changed it back. Lucky for us all that we publish in the ever-flexible world of the Web. Otherwise, her daft and dazed version of my story would be out there forever with no chance of correction. Today, when she called me to straighten things out and explain her decisions, she admitted that she hadn't wanted to call me since it was so late, and that she sent me an e-mail (which mysteriously I never received) and also that she assumed I would have read the story the next morning anyway. Poppycock! Basically, it was agreed that she had completely fucked up and had no good excuse for it.

I have often -- very often -- heard reporters complain about the vagaries of copy editors, and have often -- very often -- defended those very same copy editors against these accusations. No more!