mending.

So. I am still super sore, my leg hurts a lot and I am waiting on an MRI appointment. They want an MRI because of the amount of swelling and bleeding under the skin - it is hard for the doctor to palpate the muscle, and he explained that up to 25% of Achilles tendon tears are missed by the ER. He's not concerned about the bottom of the tendon, but the top - under the gastrocnemius, the big overlying muscle of the calf. He said that if there is even a small tear and we don't know it, years from now when I am exercising, I could really hurt it. And we definitely want to avoid this. So he wants to make sure there are really no tears in my leg muscles. I appreciate that, since Lord knows, I've already had enough. At any rate, this has forced me to take a break from ALL activity. I cannot even swim right now, because of the fact that the movement could hurt my calf muscle if there is a tear. It hurts to stand for a long period of time, so I am pretty much a blob right now.

I am still really conflicted about Columbia. I am beginning to wonder if I should choose a low-res program instead. This way, I can stay in Chapel Hill, work, do the MFA work, still make payments on my student loans....and even Queens University of Charlotte, is only about 13k a year, as opposed to Columbia's 50k+. That is A LOT easier to stomach. A lot easier. How low-res programs work is you apply, like regular MFA programs. They're NOT "MFA-lite". They are demanding, but you do the work while working your regular job and at home. Once a semester, there are "residencies", which are usually a week long, and you go there and meet with your peers and professors. During the semester, you send your work in to your advisor, participate online on message boards and forums, etc. There are actually a lot of creative nonfiction programs, including Vermont College of Fine Arts, which is very well known, Queens, Bennington and Goucher College. I don't know. The more I think about this, it seems like the best of all worlds. Is this crazy? Would I be crazy to give up Columbia?

Someone told me a quote last week: How do you build a house?.....One brick at a time.

It's easy to want to build a house all at once, with broad strokes and rushing construction and losing perspective that lots of tiny bricks make up the larger whole. At the age of 30, I am finally really starting to realize the little bricks that go into building the house I am creating for my life, and the work it takes to create the mortar and build upon each previous days' progress.