One Abnormal Girl

Well, finally scrapped together something worthy of an entry, and wouldn’t you know, it’s fandom related. Should be a story posted soon as well. I finally heard back from the final university, and I didn’t get into any of them. I’m not emotional about it anymore, but the biggest obstacle I’m going to have now is not feeling upset whenever I hear about people in grad school. Jealousy is one of my bigger faults. I may end up trying again at some lesser universities, but for now the plan is to try and find a job that uses my undergrad degree. If I can do that, I’d be content. And I probably need to be making about twice what I’m making now (which isn’t impossible) so that I can actually start paying off my debt while still getting on with my life. “Getting on with my life” means moving to a bigger city, closer to at least one group of friends, or making enough money to drive, which would at least let me travel to my friends. Really, just a better paying job in general would solve a lot of the issues that are dragging me down emotionally. Grad school would have been one awesome method of adding fulfillment to my life, but there are others. Making $8.50 an hour, however (although this is my favorite job so far), is not going to get me any of the things I need and want.

It’s a bit embarrassing to juxtapose the above paragraph with this one, but in my defense, I ordered these action figures in November. I didn’t really have the money for it then, either, but I can’t be blamed for something I did almost 6 months ago. Also this purchase made me productive again, so it’s not all terrible.

Onward! About two or three weeks ago I finally received Medicom’s Roy and movie!Al in the mail. I promptly took pictures, then found a foam piece that was just right for a couch, then made a cover and pillows for the couch. I also fished around in the basement of my parents’ for our old Barbie kitchen set, which is really a Sindy kitchen set. Must have been Barbie’s rival in the 70s, but I still think this stuff is cool. They don’t make Barbie furniture like this anymore. Dude, the sink has a drain in it, and a plug, and a little basin under the sink to catch the water you could put in it. Check out the pictures! I’m hoping to rummage some more this weekend for any other pieces I can find.

(more…

The world will still be here when you get back. Honest.

Last week sometime I got the rejection letter from Cornell, so that’s one down, three to go. Ohio State seems to want me to apply for some of its scholarships, though, so I’m not sure if they’re just leading me on or what. I’ve got a bad feeling about this first rejection because I think it follows that the other three (being higher on my list of hopes) will do the same, but I’d rather not think about it until I have to. It’ll take some major overhaul to come up with an alternative life plan where I can still do and be something/someone useful.

In the meantime, I’ve got a new temp job, but it should be a pretty steady one. I’ve been at this place before, but not in the same department, and I like the atmosphere a lot. I have a cubicle, I have a computer (although I can’t get away with Intarwebs), and the phone use is limited. This in particular is good news, as one of the primary sources of stress I get from jobs is unpredictable phone calls. When you’re a temp and you barely know what the company does, it’s almost agonizing never knowing how to handle the customer/business who’s calling for a reason you can’t fathom just yet. I want to have a job doing something I’m good at. And, while insurance certainly isn’t my forte, I think I could be okay at this.

One of the definite perks, however, is that the company is replacing everyone’s old CRT monitors with widescreen 17″ flatscreens, and because IT had to bring a computer into the department for me to use, I’m the first one to have one. It’s not exactly fair to them, but IT says they’ll get theirs soon. I hope so. I’ve seen a lot of people eyeing it up, and for good reason. Their monitors are atrocious, especially with all the data screens they have to sift through all day. Definitely easier on the eyes.

Later today I have a viewing to attend, and while I have no work tomorrow, there’s the funeral. My great aunt died after a brief illness. That leaves two sisters out of five alive; my grandma was the second one to go. This aunt didn’t have any grandchildren, though, and one of her daughters had already passed due to cancer. I guess there’s only more of this to come.

ETA: Just opened the rejection letter from OSU.  2/4 done.  This had been, according to my profs who knew profs there and had written me recommendations, one of the most promising, so I’m pretty down about things at the moment.  But I guess I won’t have to worry about those OSU scholarship apps they e-mailed me about.

Just pull out the knife.”

About a week and a half ago I finally sent off the very last bit of application material to my fourth and final potential university.  I have four chances to advance my education and my life goals; I hope at least one of them pans out.  I hope for some more than others, but at least one would be sufficient.

I thought one, at least, was doomed: I remember reading on Stanford’s application Website that the #1 reason for rejection was receipt of materials past the deadline.  I was thus nervous about my submission materials getting there in time, with the beginning of the holiday season and the sheer distance between the two points.  But I ordered my transcript in time, and with the time estimate given on the GRE Website, I could have expected those scores to arrive in time as well.   But I didn’t receive my own GRE scores until after Stanford’s deadline, which implied that Stanford certainly hadn’t received them in time, given that the scores are sent from New Jersey.  Furthermore, my transcripts were returned for insufficient address just before Christmas–again, well after the deadline.  I figured that by now, it was a lost cause, but since I had paid for the transcript, I called and beefed up the address, and it was re-sent.

Doomed on many counts!  But apparently it might still be all right so far: I got Stanford’s confirmation e-mail that all my materials had been received and they’d be in touch.   No mention of anything being late, so maybe they don’t care.  Or maybe they just take a little while to send out that particular e-mail.

But now I wait.  I should hear a final word from all four before April, but I might hear from them sooner via phone interview.  Phones and interviews . . . does the nervousness add in that case, or multiply?  Egh.  But whether or not I go, it will be better for me to know which direction my life is going to take so I can make the best of it.  :<

It feels like I’ve been working all day, and yet I didn’t get so much done.  I did however conquer a few tasks on my list, of both “have to do this” and “want to do this” types.

•  Sent OSU recommendation forms to my recommending professors after a long and un-victorious fight with my black ink cartridge.  A new cartridge will print about 10 pages of text before it mysteriously prints nothing at all, or just a few streaks here and there.  A soft cleaning does nothing, and the printer doesn’t report an ink shortage.  Its inconsistent behavior leads me to believe it’s not the cartridge drying out, but a driver, or some other piece of the hardware.   But that makes less sense when you consider that it prints fine when you replace the cartridge.  I’d just rather not have to pay $15 for 10 pages of text.
• E-mailed about 10 professors at other schools to beg  ask them if they’d work with me if I were admitted.  Not looking forward to those responses; should have done this at the beginning of the process rather than somewhere in the middle.
• Took my music out of the iTunes library, set up a sync between music on my harddrive and music on my external drive for backup purposes (and so I can play it from the desktop or laptop), and added it all to foobar instead.  Feeling somewhat crippled now but mostly freer.

Using this flavor of foobar.

Now I can watch some Dexter, actually eat something for the day, and get some sleep before I have to accost my mail man for what happened to the mail I didn’t feel like bringing in for a few days.

This post will probably ramble a bit, since I’ve been composing it in my head for half the morning in an attempt to stay awake.

Finally took the GRE yesterday.  Could have done way better, but it’ll have to do.  I have to say though that Barron’s GRE study guide barely helped at all when it came to the math portion.  It prepared me for the format of the questions, but not at all the content.  Maybe it was just coincidence, but I found I wasn’t familiar with most of the questions it gave me.  A lot of the time I didn’t even understand what it was asking–not that I didn’t understand the sentence or paragraph itself, but that there would be a key math word in it whose meaning I didn’t know, and never knew.  Even when I did understand what it wanted, I usually came up with an answer I couldn’t simplify in a short amount of time, or my answer was obviously wrong and not one of the choices, so I had to disregard a lot of my scratchwork and just take 10 seconds to guess.  Apparently that wasn’t a bad strategy, because I did way better on it than I expected.

I did worse on the verbal, though.  Not only is my vocabulary just plain lacking, but I have a tendency to second-guess all the wrong answers, involuntarily coming up with ways they could be right, compensating for their deviation from the right answer so that I have a hard time distinguishing them as wrong.  I can usually avoid this by coming up with a plausible answer before looking at the choices, but that only works when I’m absolutely sure in the first place, and that didn’t happen often.  But I swear to God I’m literate.

Let’s hope I did better on the writing portion, whose score I’ll get back later. :/

I did manage to submit my scores to the wrong undergraduate institution, though.  I think that only matters inasmuch as my real undergrad won’t receive my score as a statistic, but it was the first thing I did, so I started off with intense stupidity.  It was confusing though, and you can’t go back to any previous section, so they set me up for it. :P

Aaah break is over already.

My NaNoWriMo, which was already dreadfully behind, has been put on hold until I take the GRE on Monday.

Did I mention I was taking the GRE on Monday?

Proceed to freak out on my behalf.

(Probably will not be winning NaNo this year, which is rubbish.  I know it’s just an easy excuse, but NaNo always falls on the worst month.)