I have been over here hyperventilating about my Fulbright application. Though I started preparing several months ago, and am well on track to finishing before the deadline, my heart beats fast every time I think about it, put paper to pen, or fingers to keyboard, and work on my proposal (I will share some elements when I gather my thoughts).

My proposed project is in creative writing, of course, which is my forte, so why am I so shook? I guess it's just having applied to so many residencies this year and being rejected, having now had too much par for the course I think one more might break me. I wish I could so easily set an intention, submit my application, and release it to the universe with no expectations. It would be marvelously Zen of me. But I want it too much to be so casual about it.

I am not good with deadlines. So I quit my writers workshop (yes, the one I started not three weeks ago) because I realized there was no way to find ten extra hours a week to read my colleagues manuscripts and submit feedback while trying to find ten extra hours to work on this application. I am on the fence about the Akwa Ibom Convention this weekend because I should really be writing. And I'm giving myself an upset stomach.

There's a possibility that I'm blowing this whole thing out of proportion. There's also the possibility that I'm not. At any rate, I just hope to feel less sick over the next couple of months.

Writing mercies please! --AL.

New York Governor David Paterson is trying to balance the state's budget by cutting arts funding by 40%. The UK Department of Culture is also facing similar cuts. Boo.

I used to like Paterson (the whole underdog thing, his being blind and all), but he's put so many artists and organizations that I love at risk, among them Imani House where I take a women (of color) writers' workshop. Their afterschool program serves 154 low-income students year-round, and has essentially been cut.

I am very upset by this, although I'm not surprised. It's such an old story--politicians trying to clean up their bad economies by cutting (presumably frivolous) art funding. A part of me has begun seeing it as some kind of ritual sacrifice to appease the financial gods.

I'm a firm believer that art allows us all to rise above our tedious lives and connect with our shared humanity/divine creation. I think that more artists should be activists so that things like this don't happen.

A devil of an information session for the Jerome Foundation travel grant tonight. You'd think going to Nigeria to research a novel would be interesting, but I had to be about the fifth person "going to Africa" to "do research" on something "interesting." So I asked the session facilitator whether it was important that the applicant have a connection to the culture in question, and the answer was "yes and no." Interesting. So I might have just as good a shot applying for a grant to go to Iceland to study whales than Akwa Ibom to study my people? That notion gave me a moment of pause, thinking, Maybe I should reconsider?

I also wonder about this phrase "emerging artist," like I am hatching from an egg. I do not know what it means. My brain thinks "artist in the rough who has not found her way yet." I feel very confused and conflicted creatively. Slightly immature or maybe amateur. But I think the phrase is supposed to be empowering. Then the facilitator drops a name, a choreographer who's been at it for at least a decade, but is still "emerging." I am confused again. He tries to explain the delicate tension between having not yet emerged, but having a strong enough body of work to be "competitive" for the grant (their words, not mine). I feel an inherent contradiction there.

I look around at the other emerging artists, the rabid New Yorkers and misunderstood Eastern Europeans, couple of fresh-off-the-boat Chinese video installation heads, the handful of sistahs (mostly from Brooklyn), and the overwhelming majority of white female choreographers. All on the edge of our seats, clamoring for the same money (and what the hell can you really do with $5K?), thinking the same thoughts of our superior/inferiority, having long since become irrelevant to the world-at-large living in this damn fishbowl NYC. Mostly left wanting to be rid of the strange phenomenon of the New York artist all together. (You know, there is a world in which to live out there.) I am having a cynical moment. My apologies.

Oddly enough, today I ran into one of my friends who says she left her job and is now writing full time. I asked if she got a grant and she said that she had some "savings" so she's working full-time on two book projects. I was speechless. Here I am running to work every morning, never finding any time to write, and seeing the days of my "emergence" stretch on in perpetuity. I am extremely frustrated that I do not own my time. My boss does.