Mistakes

It had to happen sooner or later. With eight out of my 13 school portfolios currently in the mail, I finally found a typo in one of my stories. Even worse, the way in which I found the typo was especially excruciating. I was casually reading a random section -- the last two pages of my second portfolio story -- when I got the second to last sentence, and read: "She felt the weight of his head come against on her shoulder." Horrible. You read and reread your story a bajillion times to proof for these kinds of things, and when you're nearly free and clear, you find an error sitting there, poking you in the face, in a read-through that is entirely random. The worst part of it all was the randomness in how I found the error. If I had chosen any other section to read, then what? If I hadn't decided to review my story for fun, then what? I would've been oblivious, thinking that everything was okay, and the reviewers would've been reading my story, thinking that I couldn't even cobble a simple sentence together.

Okay. So I'm exaggerating. I know this error won't sink me. After a couple days of pulling my hair out, I've finally come to my senses, and certainly understand that in the entire scheme of things, this isn't a big deal. Of all the thousands of words we write for the dozens of applications and forms we fill out, this is but a drop in the bucket. And never mind the fact that we're talking about maybe a couple thousand other applicants with their thousands of words and dozens of forms. Errors happen. If a school likes your work, and as long as you're not making ten grammatical mistakes a page, then they'll give you a chance. I understand this. But to have an error come at the very last part of the second to last sentence of my last story... Man, does that suck. And as a matter of principle, I can't help but to be angry at myself. You work so hard for so long, planning and planning, just to have something like this happen -- and you really can't blame anyone but yourself. And that's probably the worst part.