u/perennialsocietyy

sorry if this post is a bit uninformed and kind of rambling. i’m 20 years old, and a current undergraduate student in English and Creative Writing. i’ve known since starting college that i want to apply for an MFA. i’m strongly interested in being a university professor, want to break into writing professionally, and feel that the uninterrupted time to hone my craft will really benefit me as a writer. i have a few practical concerns about this though.

for one, i’m worried that i don’t have a developed enough portfolio to get into a fully funded program. i think i need more time and life experience to fully find my direction as a writer, even though i know i want to eventually do this/teaching writing full time, and i’m not sure applying for an MFA when i don’t feel like my artistic identity is developed enough is a good idea.

i’m also concerned about burnout from being in another full time academic program after four years of college without interruption—there’s the risk of burnout, and i think i could benefit from doing something new and different for a couple of years beforehand. i’m looking at teaching english in thailand or vietnam, so that i can benefit from the low cost of living on a salary of USD, and on the side i would try to get positions as a submissions reader, some kind of editor, etc, and try to submit my writing to contests and literary magazines. my concern with this pertains to the lack of immediate applicability to getting into an MFA—at least the teaching abroad. there’s also the issue of becoming distant from the professors and workshop instructors i worked with in college. i plan to stay in contact, but i worry that having my only sources for letters of recommendation be from a few years ago and not a current literary position will hurt my chances of getting accepted.

i know an MFA is what i want to do, and have known this for a while—i just don’t feel like i’m going to be immediately ready for that, as a writer and as a person, at 22. so i’m asking—is it better to apply immediately after, when i don’t really feel ready but have the benefit of closer proximity to good letters of recommendation, or is it better to do something unrelated for a little while and hone my craft in the meantime?

i’m 20 and have very limited cooking experience. i’m self taught, vegetarian, and i use beans a lot in my cooking to try and supplement protein in my diet. i just got back from college as well, so i haven’t cooked in a long time as i’ve been eating at the dining halls and don’t have a kitchen.

a couple weeks ago, i tried a recipe i found on instagram that involved cooking butter beans in a homemade peanut sauce. a couple of hours later, i became super, super sick. i vomited ten times in three hours, and i figured it was my fault because i must not have washed or cooked the beans thoroughly enough (i was heading out to work, and was trying to go quickly). today, i made another recipe with butter beans—this time including them in a thai coconut curry that i was making—and now i’m extremely sick again. i made sure to wash them thoroughly, dry them, and let them simmer in the curry for a long time. they didn’t seem hard or anything, so i assumed they were cooked all the way through. is there something i’m missing that keeps making me this sick? i don’t think i have an intolerance because i eat beans in other dishes without issue. this might just be me missing something really obvious, i learned how to cook mostly through youtube videos and barely know what im doing.

edit: to clear up some things, i used canned beans from the same brand in both instances, and the two recipes that i made had 0 crossover ingredients, so i’m very certain that the beans are the problem. i also got sick last summer after eating edamame beans, but e-coli was going around and there was a warning on some surrounding town’s water supplies, so i wrote off the issue as me getting sick from the water that i washed the edamame in. i’m realizing now (after my third time of repeated puking after eating beans) that it might be connected as a problem with the beans themselves, and not the water supply. additionally, i have no sensitivities to the other ingredients i used across the two recipes (peanut products, coconut, the vegetables i used, etc). i eat peanuts, peanut butter, and other peanut and nut products regularly and have never had a problem, and while i eat coconut less frequently, the same thing goes for that. i had no idea that allergic reactions could manifest as this kind of severe vomiting—i only really knew that it presented as anaphylaxis or hives. i’ll be sure to avoid these bean products until i can get allergy tested from here on out—thanks for all the comments pointing this out!