Hey guys! Get ready with me while I put this cough drop up my butt

Alright. I leave for Vegas in two weeks. I just got finished with just a whopper of a cold. Since the start of the pandemic, I have been masking everywhere I go. I think I am now a forever masker. I still mask outside if I'm going to be around lots of people, like walking in a large downtown area, I for fucking SURE mask inside. I have only for sure had COVID once, a direct exposure from Derek, who was lax on his mask for one day on post and I had to pay the price for it. I have only been sick once with a cold once in the last five years, from a direct exposure from my oldest because they don't mask despite my insistence. Until two weeks ago. I wanted some WellBefore N95s, Derek got me an off brand, and my first time wearing them, I caught a really fucking nasty cold from my physical therapist. I ordered my WellBefores today. I think I want to head over to Menards and see if they have any 3M Auras to use in the meantime, because my favorite thing about being covid conscious is how I can count on one hand how many times I've been sick since 2020. Before 2020, I had a cold two or three times a year. 

I for sure need these masks for Vegas. 

I have so many shoots to do. Derek is no longer attending with me, so on the drive out, my girlfriend Bri is coming with me, but she's going to be leaving the morning of the 2nd, so I'll be doing all of my many shoots by myself. And then I'll be hanging out in Santa Fe by myself, but I'll be so busy in Santa Fe that I'm not even pressed. I'll be so busy in Vegas that I won't even really have time to be pressed about being there alone, too. 

I'm starting to get everything packed now. I'm going to have to detail the car...or clean it out ENOUGH that I can thoroughly trash it on my way to and from Vegas. I'm gonna be getting myself snacks, I'll be prepping a few days of dinners and breakfasts for myself, Bri and I are going to have Korean BBQ in Vegas (at a place that has an amazing sounding Vegan BBQ menu for me!), and I'll be going to Jinya as expected. I'm going to bring my Soda Sense so I don't have to buy sparkling waters for myself...I just do my best to  not have to go out to eat or buy snacks on the road. It's so much less expensive for me to get everything here and just fix my own stuff, and honestly, I learned my lesson when we went to Bryce Canyon and couldn't eat a morsel there. I'm trying to figure out how many days I actually NEED to prep dinners for. I will be gone for ten days, and the day I get back I won't need dinner, I'll be getting home WAY in time for that. So...the night Bri and I leave, the night we arrive in Vegas, the first full day in Vegas Bri and I will be eating at Master Kim's Korean BBQ, The next two nights I will likely eat dinner that I'm bringing for myself, then I'll have Jinya...and I very well may just eat Jinya until I leave for Santa Fe. In Santa Fe, me and Derek's favorite place to eat in Santa Fe is The Pantry. Gotta hit up The Pantry, but I'm  unsure what I'll do for a couple of nights for dinner in Santa Fe. I'll figure it the fuck out. I'm going to hit up so many places I'm excited to see, for the first time and again. I'm going to bring noatmeal and almond milk for myself, snackies, breakfast sweet loaves (I'm thinking chocolate zucchini bread and also cranberry orange). Gotta bring myself some sweet treats, because I do have such a sweet tooth (maybe I'll make myself chocolate pretzels again?), and I'm going to need to have plenty of snacks to keep me going, because I'll be go go go go go from the second Bri leaves until the moment I head out to OKC. I won't be doing any model or client shoots while I'm in Santa Fe, but I WILL be bouncing from place to place to take other kinds of photos. 

I will be doing my blog as per usual for my trip, the silver lining to missing my best friend and travel companion going with me is that, once Bri leaves, I will have all the down time to update my blog and perhaps I will be able to post every day. We'll see. I have always tried to do a day by day posting when I'm on a trip, and I have never fucking ONCE been able to manage. 

I am not at all excited to be in Vegas proper. I was just telling my sibling and their wife that I am so anti everything Vegas stands for. Being in city proper is going to make me miserable, but I am SO excited to be out in the canyons and the mountains. I have always loved hiking in Vegas. I'm nervous about how all of these shoots are going to go. Ugh. This is going to be a wild time. I miss just popping up to Chicago for shoots!

How to wear a hat as an odious woman

It is January 29th. 

I submitted my PhD application to Syracuse 19 days ago. 

I have been checking The Grad Cafe, Reddit, and my email a billion times a day to see if any decisions have been released for UC Denver or Syracuse. Obsessive is hardly the word for my behavior. 

It turns out I DO want the approval of academics. Desperately. 

I was trying to figure out the other day if I actually want the approval, or if what I want is something that I am pretty sure I cannot have. That the obsession I'm currently living through is less to do with drive and more to do with the selfishness of demanding I be given a thing that was never meant to be mine because my covetousness refuses to allow me the grace of saying, "well...it isn't for me, and that is ok". Which thing is real? One? Both? A secret third thing? 

When I finished scouring Denver's EaHD program's professor list and finally found someone with research that aligns with my research interests, she and I emailed back and forth, very pleasantly, until I asked about future funding. My focus is...broadly...queerness. The climate has never been warm to queerness in academia...in any form, really...but very obviously this moment is practically at a temperature closing in on absolute zero. When I expressed concern about what future projects may look like (because as any prospective PhD candidate knows, programs are centered on research, research is centered on funding, and thus your acceptance is pretty largely hinged on who is doing funded research that aligns with your focus), and did she have any outlook on how bleak a future we may have as a possible mentor-mentee pair, I never heard back from her. I gave it a few weeks, not wanting to be a bother. It was, after all, the beginning of the semester, and I could only imagine the stress she was under. As the weeks gave way to months, I began to wonder if NOW was the time to email, or if I would look demanding. Was now the time to email, or would I seem entitled? Had I upset her? Did I ask a bad question? 

By the time I turned in my application, I was truly worried that I had fucked up that portion of the journey. One of the things they ask you to highlight in your personal statement is a professor you've created a relationship with who is willing to be your mentor. I omitted that from my statement. I did not know if she was willing anymore. When I got an email a couple of weeks later that my submitted application needed another transcript that hadn't been turned in, I bemoaned that those two things in conjunction made me look too stupid and careless and unfocused that I surely had blown my chances period. I was assured by almost everyone in my orbit that I was still a really good candidate, everything was fine. 

But secretly something else was gnawing at the back of my mind. Something I had really only said in an unanswered email to my would be mentor. 

Was there even space (read: money) for me in academia right now?

As I looked for professors at Syracuse who shared my focus, I found none. I reached out to three professors who had foci that were adjacent ENOUGH to my focus, got an answer back from one, and that answer felt curt, honestly, and wondered again if academia was hitting a for real brick wall moment for anybody in the DEI pathway. Not like the usual white supremacy brick wall that has always been scuttling between progress and people, but a black hole of it. When I talked with the director of Syracuse, I expressed concern at this. My focus is queerness, I said, and I'm deeply worried about funding. He assured me that Syracuse is funded separately and not beholden to the whims of the federal government. Well ok. Denver did not give me any such reassurances. In fact, Denver really does not offer much in the way of funding. Which is upsetting. 

I've spent the last few weeks thinking that the ultimate foil to my acceptance into a PhD program is the lack of acceptance of queerness. And isn't it ironic that my fucking research proposal is EXACTLY that. I proposed a longitudinal study on social attitudes toward queerness if queerness is normalized in academic settings. Syracuse asks you to propose research, that was what I proposed. Denver asks what you think is missing in the field, and I said the normalization of queerness. 

Do I stand firm by those things? I sure fucking do. But I think that Denver's hands may be tied here, and I think that Syracuse just doesn't have the professorship. 

I suppose we'll see. For all of my obsessing over decisions being released, I feel confident that I won't hear from anybody until at LEAST February. Mid to late. But I have already resigned myself to a double rejection, and while I feel pretty sure that I as a candidate am maybe not ideal just by virtue of myself, I also think that any rejections I get will be in no small part because I focus on queerness in academia. 

Waiting is misery. Just give me my rejections so I can cry about it and move on.