I’ve opened a dangerous vault and returned to my critical writing from undergrad.  How terrifying to view myself as a critic again.  Even more terrifying, I actually made salient points.  My paper on Plath (how her biography oppresses those reading her poems into a very particular view of her life, OH JEEZ WHAT A NERD I AM) is actually quite good.  And.  GASP.  I want to write a book on the anti-feminist reduction of famous (dead) women writers.  Obvious chapters: Plath (already half-written), Dickinson, Woolf, Sexton, the Brontes.  Zora Neale Hurston maybe?  I’m going to have to read for about a million years.  Is this my academic clock telling me it’s time to apply to graduate school before it’s “too late”?  What does “too late” even mean here?  Is my anxiety about even pursuing this tied intrinsically to the way these women are perceived—batty spinster spook tales even if they did have families, children, real full lives that are easier to ignore than integrate into our ideas of woman hood?  I’m scared of going to grad school because I don’t think I’m nearly smart enough.  What an ugly, horrific thought.  I am smart enough.  Cass told me that the people at her grad school info session said the hardest part of grad school was coming up with paper topics.  I could do that in my sleep.  I just want to write and research until my head is so large that it is impossible to do any more reading and writing except from a supine position.  I’ll buy a chaise lounge and set my typewriter next to it and just keep growing my giant-headedness until I need a separate apartment for everything I know about things no one cares to discuss with me.  Drat.  I want my PhD something awful.  Call this my gap year of abject misery.  I think it’s time to prep for the GRE.