You know who else better not hold their collective breath? The cats.

Most bizzare feeling ever: being offered over a quarter of a million dollars in two weeks but knowing that it assures your poverty for the next five years. It just doesn't quite add up.

I applied to nine graduate schools, including one school that I was almost sure would reject me and two that would certainly accept me, no matter what. The other six are solid, if not Ivy League, and they have good matches in my interest area (psychoanalytic criticism/memoir). So far, I've heard back from four (Mizzou, Wash U, and Iowa), and they've combined to offer me over $250,000. Well, Kansas offered me diddly squat, so they can probably just not hold their collective breath. But the rest of them are solidly in the running, at least until I hear back from the other five (Cornell, SUNY Buffalo, Vanderbilt, Kent State, and University of Washington).

The thing is, though, that no matter where I go, my salary is going to be cut in half, and I'm not living large now, although I'm certainly not poverty stricken. But if I accept, for example, Wash U's offer, I'll be living on less than $1,000 a month, which could be a challenge. Although maybe it won't be so bad, as I'll also have no friends and thousands of pages of reading to do. I'll spend $600 on rent, $100 on transportation, and the rest on chocolates until I'm so fat I can't leave the apartment anymore and the cats eventually eat my face. These are the things I think about when I wake up at 3:30 a.m. and have two pairs of slitty eyes staring at me. Sometimes it's unclear why I'm going to graduate school and not a mental institution.

Really, my big question is this: I don't know if it would be better to know that by the time this is all over, I could have $500K or $750K in offers and pick whatever school I want, or to have one $100,000 offer and be grateful that somebody wanted me and that I'll be able to become Dr. N.N. Mind without filing a Chapter 11.

In other news, I spent the weekend looking gift horses in the mouth. They have big sharp teeth.