What if I'm secretly an ostrich, what then?

I'm being courted, in a sense. In the really Victorian-era sense, with all the interacting parties putting on their best faces and acting polite towards one another to prevent even the slightest suspicion that they are in any way unsuitable.

By colleges, not people. (Well, yes, people, deans and directors and whomever else puts their name at the bottom of a piece of paper, all claiming personal interest. Some I've committed to memory for no explicable reason--Todd Rhinehart, Karen Schrum, Marc Harding, Jessica Eads--my own little group of suitors.)

It's weird, this whole process: kind of exciting and ego-boosting and wanderlust-inspiring and overwhelming and just a fuckton of mail to sort through. At the end of emails and letters, they all say to keep in touch or something like that, like we're buddies already. I'm pretty sure it's someone's (possibly not the person whose name is in the closing) job to insert my name into the opening paragraph about how exceptional I am and how much potential I show and how the educational institution would love to have me and then click send. Or they've got computers doing that, I don't know.

I play my part too, not exactly keeping in touch with all my new dean friends, but mailing in cards for brochures or logging in to the school's website, being engaged and studious. Being the lovely person full of potential that the letter was meant for. There are things I'm not telling them: that I'm not really well-rounded, that I haven't shaved my legs in over a month, that I have no sense of direction, that I entertain myself by lip-synching Disney songs, alone, apropos of nothing, at midnight, and most definitely that I'm terrified they'll all hate and reject me and I won't be good enough to get into any college at all. These don't seem like college-bound-person traits. There are things they're not telling me either, though: that the showers are mildewy and the English professors have distractingly unkept facial hair and things like that, I'm sure. We'll learn these things about each other eventually.

I should go to bed.