I know, I know, I'm behind again. I suppose I was busy enough to be short on time, and not so busy as to use this journal to procrastinate. As weird as that last bit might sound.

Let's see, where to begin?

The Mellon is for people who haven't started grad school, who intend to begin a doctoral program in the U.S. It pays for the first year of schooling, plus fifteen thousand bucks, with the condition that winners do no other work on the side; the idea is that they're covering your expenses so that you can devote all your attention to your studies.

Given that said stipend is far more than I make in a year, this would be a Very Good Thing to win, assuming that I don't get the Fulbright and go to London instead.

The catch is that the deadline is in a few weeks, and, in order to apply, I'd need to take the GRE, choose the U.S. grad school(s) I want to apply to, possibly apply to them (I need to check that requirement), and write up a couple of essays explaining just what I want to do in grad school and why I want to go to the school(s) in question.

The GRE would need to be taken by December 4th to make the deadline... which would require me to actually study for the GRE before then. This in addition to studying for the GRE in English Literature, which I'm scheduled to take on December 11th.

And while I know exactly what I'd want to do for a year or two in London, given the opportunity, I don't really know what I'd want to do for a five-year doctoral program. I suppose I've gotta figure that out now, but I haven't quite had the chance yet.

Either way, the stuff I wrote for the Marshall and Fulbright applications isn't going to help very much for this.

None of this is compatible with prepping for and taking the flippin' GRE, finding and applying to grad schools, and settling on a focus for the latter. So I had decided, earlier last week, to forget the Mellon, focus on my classes, and leave the GRE and grad school stuff for Winter Break.

No sooner did I make that decision than the nice people at Honors and Scholarships reminded me that most grad schools have application deadlines in January, and that I'll need letters of recommendation for said applications, and that it'll be much harder (if not close to impossible) to track down my professors to get said letters during Winter Break. My options, then, are do it now, or wait another year before starting my doctorate.

I don't really want to wait another year. Dammit.

If any of you happen to have any suggestions, now is the time to send 'em, the only caveat being that I'm specifically looking for a doctoral program in English (or perhaps Interdisciplinary Studies), and not a Master's or M.F.A. (Which incidentally rules out every creative non-fiction program I know of.) If I'm gonna stay in the States, I wanna just get on with it.

Ideally, I want something in an urban area. I like cities. I like the hustle and bustle, the anonymity of crowds, and the 24-hour convenience stores. And I don't get along very well with Nature, except in small doses. And proximity to an Orthodox Jewish community is also a must.

Academically speaking, a good English department is key, of course, and the stronger interdisciplinary ties it has, the better. Ties to Women's Studies would be especially good, but Linguistics or Cultural Studies would be nice too.

In one blitz of the Web on Thursday night, I requested applications to the University of Chicago, Columbia, NYU, and Lehigh. (That last is the exception to the urban rule, and an extreme longshot. Long story.) I'm not looking for anybody to do any actual research for me, of course. But if you happen to know of a potentially suitable place off the top of your head, please feel free to drop me a line, okay?

• Wednesday night, I meet a friend and his wife to watch the balloons be inflated for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. (His wife and I are both a bit unconvinced about the entertainment value to be found therein, but what the heck. Hey, I've never seen any of said balloons, not including newspaper photos. And the real point is being able to spend time together, after all.)

• Saturday night, dinner with Mary Anne. I've really been looking forward to this.

• The following Monday, in late morning, I fly to Chicago for a friend's wedding that night. I'll be staying overnight at said friend's parent's house, which, I understand, is going to be packed with others also staying there. Well, it's been over a decade since I've seen their cats...

• Tuesday, I have just enough time for a quick tour of the University of Chicago before heading back to New York. This is also the day my term paper is due in my drama class, so I'll need to finish it in advance. Except, oops, this was supposed to be the list of the nice stuff. Sorry about that.

I've got to learn to be more assertive on the phone, I think. I mean, we're talking a five-minute procedure, and one that really oughta be done quickly. Which is to say that my eye hurts, darn it, and the longer it keeps getting irritated, the longer it's gonna take to heal, and I have enough problems without this.

Which reminds me. I never did tell y'all what happened at the ocular plastic surgeon, did I? Well. I went to the ocular plastic surgeon on the Monday before last. During the visit, I got another eyelash plucked out, but that's a minor concern.

(For new readers, most of the eyelashes on my left eye got sliced off -- with the bit of the eyelid they'd been attached to -- in a car accident one year, three months, and three days ago. Long story, which I still haven't gotten around to writing about here yet. I'm told that the eye really doesn't look that bad to anybody but me. Okay, you're caught up.)

So. The good news is that the eyelid is continuing to heal really, really nicely. From anything but a cosmetic standpoint, it looks as if no surgery will be required at all. Okay, the one or two eyelashes I don't want need to be permanently dealt with down the line, but that's about it.

As for that cosmetic standpoint, there are two issues. One is that there's this sorta puckered bit in the middle of my eyelid. Apparently, he can smooth that out, no problem, once the lid finishes healing. Fine.

The bigger issue is the matter of my eyelashes. I want them back, darn it. And apparently, there are four possible approaches to dealing with that:

1. Learn to live without the eyelashes. As my eye doctor explained, I'm male anyway, so it doesn't really matter what I look like, right?

2. Glue fake eyelashes on. The advantage of this is that it doesn't involve any surgery. The disadvantages are that I have to glue the things on regularly, and that -- Murphy's Law being what it is -- they're bound to fall off at the worst possible times.

3. Transplant some of the eyelashes from my other eye. The obvious concern with this is that not only might there be problems with transplant working on the left eye, but I run the risk of the good eye looking weird, too.

4. Transplant some eyebrow hair. The big problem here is that eyebrows are thicker than eyelashes, so the possibility of Things Going Wrong goes up rather a bit.

However, seeing my reluctance to settle for that, he did give me the names of two dermatologists, who, coming at the problem from a different perspective, might have another opinion to offer. I figure I'll call on at least one of them once Winter Break arrives. But I'm no longer optimistic about this.