coexistapart's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- peripheral vision I just woke up. On the one hand I feel bad--there's no way I'm going to get much of anything done before Big comes home from work (early) at 4pm--but then on the other hand I've been tired the last few days. Going to bed at 2 or 3am, and then waking up at 7am or 8am, has been completely my fault--I end up watching hours of senseless TV instead of just reading until I fall asleep--but it was nice to go climb in the nice warm bed at go back to sleep for five hours after Big left this morning. Yesterday, I finally got the last of my school apps sent off! I say this with more of a flourish today than I did yesterday. Yesterday there was no real sense of relief or belief for that matter. I spent the morning finalizing my MA personal statement, then the afternoon working on a new, supplemental statement for the scholarship. Then when Big got home from work I had to go to Walgreen's and get passport photos, then to FedEx to do photocopies and check that I had assembled everything in the two packages correctly. (I realized after I sent out the first envelope last week that I had sent one copy, not three of my statement for THAT scholarship--which, while I was kind of able to remedy in time this week, was still a close call.) I had 0.95 lb of paperwork; it was a lot. It cost me $53 to send it two-day service to Toronto (the cheapest) to a place that is just a stone's throw from my old house, uptown at Yonge & Eg. But for the millisecond I stopped and wondered if there was a cheaper option using USPS or UPS (there isn't) I remembered the debacle with Xpresspost just two weeks ago and of course ponied up the money. So now they will have my application in Toronto on Monday. Conservatively I hope they will let me know by March 1, way before I go to Boston, but on the flip side Middlebury has been very quick in their turnaround time on applications so honestly I hope it's sooner. Though, I also don't know how the scholarship timeline fits into all of this, so I'm not going to think about it really since it's out of my hands. If they say it takes four weeks, but there's fewer applicants because of the US's stagnant economy, then who knows. I have not been to the gym in a couple of days, but I feel good about this because I have been eating very little and losing a pound or two here and there simply on having ramen for lunch--which I love and is not some bizarre form of asceticism. We finally found some good, imported Korean and japanese "expensive" (almost $1 each) ramen at the commissary on post at White Sands the other day. I was particularly blue on Tuesday or Wednesday so because I had to go to pick up Big again anyway, he offered to take me to the commissary because I have been asking to go for ages. Obviously I need to be with him to get on post, and then he needs his retired card because contractors can't shop at the commissary. Somethings are inordinately cheaper (and rightly so): Campbell's soup is a $1, frozen veg are $1.50 a bag, you can save 20-30 cents on eggs, but other things are not much better than normal. I can see how it would be helpful to anyone who lives below the poverty line, so it's good that they have this resource--PLUS they have a nice selection of foreign products for all of the wives. I'm just not sure that food stamps are the answer for the regular need poor. This is obviously a hot-button topic that I'm not going to get into now, but I rarely see people using food stamps at the farmer's market to buy produce than to, say, buy Chef Boyardee at Albertson's. This in conjunction with a really depressing piece in Texas Monthly two weeks ago about this white woman who took care of five black kids under the age of 8 who'd moved to Houston with their mom after Katrina, except the mom just deserted and went back to do drugs and live in the slums for two years--leaving her a notarized legal guarandianship. The kids were doing really well until the woman decides to claim them, only to have them legally returned to the black woman who hits them and feeds them potato chips. Arg. Regarding the commissary: it was probably the only grocery store for three states that doesn't FEEL mexican. Oh, and on an exciting unrelated note, they have steel tortilla presses for sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond from Columbia for $20. I didn't buy it because that seems like robbery (they also had bamboo steamers--regular three for $1 in C-town--for $14.99! ack!) but I really need to go down to my favourite taco truck and see if they will let me help out one week. Spoke to one of the wives today of this Super Bowl party we're attending. I'm insanely excited because I've always wanted to go to a football party, but never been invited. It's going to include hot wings and burgers and hot dogs and everything; I'm glad I called because while I was thinking of bringing cheesecake brownies and some kettle korn from the farmers market, but Mindy said it sounds like there's not going to be any vegetables or salads. So at this point I'm going ot make something healthy that I'd like to eat. My sinuses are feeling a little dry after they've been very, very itchy the past couple of days. I hope it's just the desert air and not that I'm getting a cold, although that wouldn't be altogether surprising at the culmination of "stress" and the fact that because I now take my vitamins regularly I rarely get sick, so I would be due. I was reading a blog that was a link of a link of a link yesterday and they were talking about insulin not working properly (i.g. leading to high blood sugar levels) in women who are overweight and have PCOS. This got me to thinking that while I'm not overweight--an honest representation of my BMI is 24%, with 25 and up being the start of "obese"--ha! my original doctor only ever looked at PCOS in the context of very long, delayed periods. Because I was 16 I don't think we really went over anything else-symptoms wise, and while I don't want to self-diagnose the one site I was reading talked about how it leads to higher than normal (whatever that number actually means) incidence of heart disease and diabetes, which my family already has a very long history of. So that's food for thought one of these days when I go to the doctor for real before I'm 30, and not just some student clinic. I'm thinking that in the leadup to getting applications answers, I should probably chart my interests/preferences as I get further and further away from actually having written the application. (Sorry, I know that sentence didn't really make sense....) For example if you had asked me two days ago what I felt, I would still go with "I don't care" because I was reviewing my personal statement for the 10th time and it just didn't feel any good. On the other hand, yesterday afternoon, while I had a lot of notes to get me started, I pretty much wrote the scholarship letter in two hours. It was easier in the sense of it was more from the heart, more creative, and I had the opportunity to highlight my strengths while the other statement was pure form letter as taken from Anna's PhD cover letter. After doing the scholarship statement I was thinking--hey I CAN write and hey I definitely COULD do this if someone flung money my way. I think at this point that's really key. It's hard for me to separate whether going to Middlebury for the summer would put those ghosts to bed, or whether just someone validating my hard work with "hey, we feel you could go somewhere in life--here's $10K" would make me feel better. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to have a pity party here...but I do think that even if I had applied to YUS middleclass, if my father had still been alive, and I had a much smaller education fund, and payments coming from my mother, I would STILL feel that the financial aid system would require a major overhaul. YOU DO NOT QUALIFY FOR MERIT SCHOLARSHIPS UNLESS YOU DEMONSTRATE NEED, and instead of making "need" different for every scholarship (say a $1000 grant versus a four year free ride, not that YUS would ever do that) you must qualify for OSAP--the Ontario loan program. And no one with any money is actually every going to do that, rather than say borrowing from their parents, it's just insane. I've seen many a great scholarship go to an underqualified applicant because the real good students, who (I'm sorry to say) don't have to work and can focus on their studies, don't qualify to get their work recognised. And I wouldn't mind getting my work recognised, because if I'm not offered any money I'm going to have to go through a seriously process of discernment to see if spending $30K+ on a graduate degree in the next two years is really what I'm all about. I mean I'd probably be very happy making $40,000 to go teach ESL in Seoul for a while, and then just go the foreign service route. So I think I"m going to try and make a point of recording how I'm feeling, before I get options. Obviously if I get a free ride from either than I'm just going to go ahead and do it, and while I'm cautiously optimistic, I still doub that SHOULD be allowed to happen. And there is so little information out there in terms of statistical numbers that I really have no idea. I have more to say, but I'd really like to go read my book so more before the afternoon gets away from me. 11:22 a.m. - 2009-01-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||