Divine Intervention

I don’t believe in a higher power. Not believing in a higher power is kind of incredibly important to me. I’ve based my entire world view on the fact that there’s no one manning the controls and that we are entirely alone. I think that feeling metaphysically alone is what defines the human experience, not thumbs, or language, or (as I heard recently on NPR and thought was a really interesting perspective) cooked food. No, I believe in feeling alone. But every now and then I think that’s all Modernist bullshit and that in fact the whole system is being run by a vindictive eleven year old boy... or at least he runs the internet.

My last post was Thursday and on Thursday I claimed that I was nearly done with my artistic goals/personal statement thing for this application I’m working on. That was not, strictly speaking, true. Although I had done a lot of work on them I was nowhere near done and I honestly have no idea whether I was knowingly lying or merely exercising my considerable gifts for self deception. Well, now I’m done. I took me three (I’m not counting Friday) days to write a single-spaced one page document with slightly expanding margins, half of which was taken directly from a practice artistic statement I wrote in May. The point isn’t that I’m pathetic, the point is I did it. Or maybe the point is that it still isn't very good and probably isn’t what they’re looking for.

No, here’s the point, and believe it or not it connects to that first paragraph (and to the paragraph I wrote but am not letting you read because it stretched the metaphor too far and completely lost focus). The point is that the internet wants me to fail. Now that my artistic statement is written, my references are secured, my play is complete (though as always it needs considerable work) the only thing left for me to do is fill out an incredibly simple basic form with simple basic information. This is what the internet thinks of that idea:

Not Found
The requested URL /images/festivals/ewg_application09revised.pdf was not found on this server.

I clicked this link a lot last week, I looked at that particular PDF with its heavy lines and sans serif font several times, I could probably name almost everything they ask for on this form, but as soon as I need it it’s gone. Gone. It’s not ironic, unless of course you’re Alanis Morissette and don’t now what ironic means, it just sucks.