Saturday, March 26, 2011

0 for 5 or 5 for 5? (Are you a Pessimist or an Optimist?)

In the past 10 months I have applied to - and been rejected from - 5 conferences. Actually 4 conferences, b/c I submitted twice to ALA. The others: Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Narrative conference, and MLA, my most recent diss. 

I got the "Thanks, but no thanks" e-mail from the MLA panel organizer just this Monday, four minutes before I got the e-mail telling me my article was accepted by the journal I'd submitted to. Unsurprisingly, the article acceptance trumped any disappointment I might have felt (which was minor anyway - an MLA rejection is pretty much a given). 

Still, my streak is worth noting and appreciating. If, like me, you are a realist - I balk at the claim that I'm a pessimist! - I'm 0 for 5, quite the feat of loserness. Can I can go 0 for 10 by the end of 2011? Butcher found me a good panel at the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conference, and there are 1 or 2 others there that I might submit to, so the possibility for getting to 10 in the next 9 months seems wholly possible. 

However, the optimists out there might say I'm 5 for 5. Five tries and five rejections: I'm nothing if not consistent! 

Although, even if you are a so-called optimist (or, what I yesterday termed "delusional" while talking to the chiropractor), you can't get around the fact that this is still an amazing feat of loserness . . .

2 comments:

  1. Look at it this way, my dear....it'll make it all the more sweeter when, it finally happens. Sort of like winning the lottery (which probably won't happen in my life time), but I keep on throwing money at the cashier at my local grocery store. And every bloody week, he hands me a crap ticket.

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  2. I'm too cheap to play the lottery . . . doesn't stop me from imagining what I'd do with the winnings though!

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