"you sell yourself short. aim high. go in firing," they said. they said to go in tall with unvanquished confidence. a few hours later I got the polite rejection message and thought about the futility of aiming at all when it is almost certainly always too high or low (and which is better really?). why aim at all? why hustle or pronounce or project or aspire? shadowboxing a locked vault. sweat and adrenaline into an unfeeling vortex. it's just unfortunate timing, really. the real sting is just in the red i recently penned when i drew up my cost of living. prognosis- negative. subsisting on deficit for an unforeseeable future. (if i could go back, and had not been born in the midwest to a breed conditioned toward higher education, and had had a bit more prompting in the way of self-promotion and artistic edification, would i even have gone to college at all?) in the morning, after a night of light dreams, the parking tick...