(Given my recent 21st birthday, I’ve decided to try writing wine reviews for the blog. I will try to avoid what I, with my untrained palate, perceive as pretentiousness, and to keep them short and sweet. I’ll read around a bit more, and see what the conventions of the genre are for any later reviews.)

Recently, I purchased this wine, the Rio Madre. It is a Rioja region wine, meaning that the grapes involved hail from a small region in North Eastern Spain. The wine is unusual due to the type of grape used — the Graciano grape — as it is usually only used as a complement to other varieties. The wine is smooth, mild, and just slightly dry, with a beautifully dark color. Overall, a pleasant and inoffensive red, and well worth the price.

I have just received my first poetry rejections — or at any rate, the first ones of a more formal nature, with criticisms for each of my pieces. I am sure that these will be the first of many rejections I receive, if I do as I should, and am trying to decide what is the best way to handle rejection of a professional nature.

I can see most of the points that they made — that my poem “Allergic to Love” had a clichéd title, for example, and that authorial intrusion weakened the other two poems I had submitted — but they also called “Allergic to Love” immature, albeit with a mild yet deliberate obliqueness of wording. Was my voice too immature, or simply conversational, I wonder? Did the poem seem too personal, or simply not follow the more literary style of the other two? Certainly, the subject matter could be described as immature, in an optimistic view of life. It’s certainly vulnerable, but I hadn’t thought it would be so much so as to be unrelatable, or limited to a certain age-range. Perhaps they meant to say that the poem did not seem as looked over as the others.

The vagueness seems a little criminal, but it’s not as though I’m going to ask them to specify further. They say in writing to that it’s best to “kill your darlings,” and certainly, this is the first time I’ve felt as though someone has called my child ugly.

I received the rejection while in class, for social psychology, and on my phone when I really shouldn’t have been. We had been discussing self-esteem, self-image, and self-concept. According to social psychology, people protect their self-esteem in a variety of ways — externalizing blame yet taking responsibility for their successes, avoiding situations in which they may fail, etc. People with moderately high self-esteems tend to do better in life, even if those self-evaluations do not reflect reality. Yet, if their self-esteem became too high, they tended to externalize blame more, make more mistakes, produce less to try to protect that self-evaluation, and even were more racist and reckless, generally. Someone with low self-esteem could be more successful, if they believed that they had the power to change the ways in which they fell short, chose to, and reflected, rather than ruminated, on their perceived errors.

I asked the psychology professor after class what the best way to react to rejections was, mentioning my recent poetry rejection, and she laughed, and said that sort of thing happened all the time in academia. She suggested I read the rejection and write a bunch of mean things down on a paper about whoever wrote it. Then I should reread it again, more slowly, and try to apply the useful criticisms to my work in the future. (Slightly more practical than my original plan to stick my rejections on a spike in the wall, Stephen King-style, no?) She also said that sure, the poem could be immature — I was twenty, still finding my voice, and these people were most likely forty-somethings. This was reassuring, though I am not sure the strength of my voice has ever been an issue.

When I mentioned the rejection in passing to one of my old poetry professors, she just laughed and said, “Welcome to the world.”

It has been some time since my last check-in, so here it is. I am back at school, and delighted to be there after a summer of work and a year abroad. In Spanish class, I am reading Doña Barbara, an embarrassingly sexist book. (Imagine a glorified colonization story, except Europe is a spoiled city boy and “the barbarian” is a vilified rape-victim who taught herself how to hustle.) I am taking English with the famous writer, Ha Jin, and learning about the literature of the migrant. I am reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in my American fiction class, and find myself constantly criticizing the implicit and explicit racism of the author, though even I was shocked by how well she wrote the river scene. We haven’t yet reached the meat, in terms of social psychology — our readings seem designed to convince us that participation in class is, in fact, a good idea — but the teacher won me over within the first half hour, and the students in my discussion class are brilliant, so I think I’ll have a good time. I’ve met up with old friends, after a year away. My roommates are straightforward and cheerful. I got to see Sir Christopher Ricks the other day, and see how he was doing. Tomorrow is my first day as a writing tutor, and hell, even my sheets are clean.

All in all, not a bad start — though perhaps I should learn to cook myself something other than pasta and burritos.

I need to start writing my five hundred words a day, again, and to finish some pieces. I lapsed in Spain, and over the summer, and have been generally terrible about starting again. I need to start exercising, and come up with a system that works to keep at it. (I should also eat vegetables and be nicer to people, but I try to be realistic about my expectations.)

I have meditated enough on future plans in blog posts, and I have all the places I am thinking of working abroad — Spain, Chile, various countries of East Asia — as well as the scholarships I am planning on applying to, mapped out. Graduate school is for later, a fork in the road that I will postpone for as long as I can. Tonight is for being in the moment, and proud of what I do have. I have written and published poetry that I am proud of; I am back in Boston, finally, and so happy to be here; I am lucky enough to have people happy to see me, after all this time. I even have a ricecooker — and today, when my Fulbright commission looked over my application, they told me that they loved my writing, and that my voice and humor were a refreshing break from the monotony of other applications. 

In short: my life is full of many little and good things, and I am lucky. I must work on the usual things, and I intend to.