2008-06-19 - 9:48 a.m.

One day recently I was prying open my tiny metal mailbox and a large package fell out. It was nondiscript and from an unknown sender. I had a headache and had been sick for several days but when I tore open the envelope and the letter fell into my lap, with the word "Congratulations!" bright and bold on the page, there was nothing wrong in the world. Enclosed in the envelope was a copy of a university-published, semi-annual poetry magazine, full of photographs printed on glossy paper. It was book-sized and relatively thin. And right in the middle of the book, the second or third page I turned to, a poem of mine, printed adjacent to a photograph of a butterfly on a yellow flower. My first publication ever, unless you count the story I wrote for the nature column of my local newspaper about being attacked by angry birds, which I don't. I have been submitting poetry to contests and submission calls for at least a year now, collecting piles of rejection slips and deleting rejection emails from my inbox periodically. The more rejections that pile up, the more I send in, averaging at least once a week. With my first publication comes the serenity of knowing I am indeed on the right path, although the path is convoluted.

I have also been learning French, wasting time on myspace, watching old American, Italian, French and Asian films and making money and then spending it on groceries, booze and DVDs. I just finished a semester at community college, securing a 4.0 average for the nine units I took of psychology, history and conversational French (bien sur!). I have been whittling down the summer to its very bones and dreaming of long summer nights on a porch swing. I've quit smoking when I am sober. I have not been around this place too much but I love my diary here and do not want to abandon it. I simply have been refusing to waste my literary efforts on internet pursuits and instead have turned to my body of work. I am on chapter six of the novel I am working on and I am currently procrastinating on working on a poem for the Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse.

I dream of Paris everyday.