The Worst Way to Pick a Graduate Program Ever

...but one of the coolest things that ever happened to me.

As I'm still on my long cruise down "denial" until the Ultrasound of Truth delivers me from these agonies into new fields of worry, and as I've already waxed poetic about some of the music I like, let me tell you a story from my first trip to the Obscure Corner of the World, the place I've dedicated the lovely years of my grad career to.

The first time I ever went there, I traveled by train. The train to this particular part of the great OCOW takes 5-6 days.

Have you ever ridden on a train that long? Oh, the delights you have missed, if you haven't! You start out excited as the train pulls out of the station, all prepared with days worth of ramen, chocolate, and (you believe) enough booze to get you there. The first day, as the sun dips below the thrumming horizon and the trees whipping by, you toast the journey.

The second day, you're cracking a beer around 2 PM.

The fifth day? Shit, you're doing shots at 11 AM. And you smell as ripe as the smoked fish they're selling on the platform at major stops.

After this exciting experience with three good friends (actually, two of them were complete strangers, but we became good friends by the end), we finally stepped off the train in the Sad City that is the capital of OCOW. Our friends, who were actors we met in NYC and members of a certain indigenous group, were all waiting at the station, overjoyed that their American friends had somehow finally gotten halfway around the world in one, stinky, hungover piece.

This being OCOW, we had to follow custom: We were summarily driven to friends' apartment, where we were stuffed with ridiculous amounts of meat and hard liquor. After hours of gastronomical and liver abuse, we finally begged to be put to bed.

I wound up in the care of a sweet young woman singer who had stayed in the tiny "bedroom" of our NYC apartment for weeks while performing in the East Village. She took me to her relatives' place, in some strange neighborhood of a strange city, and put me to bed in a big, shiny, pink bed.

That night, I had the strangest dream. I was standing on the balcony at Friend Number 1's apartment, looking out across the city, the river, to the bare hills beyond. A finger pointed toward the hill (where, I had been told the night before, there was a Hun burial mound) and a voice said in another language, "You're buried there." Then, suddenly, I was flying off the balcony, into a huge flock of black birds, all chanting a single name, over and over and over, with a thousand low, rough voices.

Then I woke up, freaked out of my mind. And I knew that I was doomed/destined to study OCOW.

Of course, I asked my friends what they thought of my dream. The name I heard? "Oh," my friend said, taking a drag off her cigarette, "that's just our sky spirit. You must have been born here in another life."