log web page visits Blaaarrgh!: 02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006

金曜日, 2月 17, 2006

So help me, Saint Elmo

UCLA is out. At least for me. Got the email last night, and the decision was "we regret to inform you..." Sorry, Dan. We will have to visit you to taste the culinary delights that are LA. On the other hand, there was no indication on the online status form that anything at all had been received by them since December. Ie: No transcripts. No recommendations. Well, suffice to say I trust my recommenders. But the registrar's office... no. Security Husband had to request transcripts twice (he, unlike me, actually was concerned and contacted another school before the deadline to assure that they had received them). I assumed that my airmailed request (well ahead of the deadlines) to the registrar would make certain my transcripts got to the school well and early. I can put on my best face for rejection, if it was on my own merits that I failed. But so help me, if the registrar didn't bother to send my transcripts in, thereby sabotaging my chance at entering a really good program, Saint Elmo burn them please.

月曜日, 2月 13, 2006

Advanced Degree Blues

This is either the last lap or the gauntlet, depending on how you define it, for Security Husband. Last semester with a packed courseload, and write his thesis to boot. He's busy, doing things to strings of numbers that look like nonsense to me. Arcane science. Soon, as he commented at dinner the other night, he will have his master's... and that will entitle him to claim to know everything about anything. We laughed.

But underpinning that is the spectre of lost time, experience spent a different way. You can't judge your own timeline by what your loved ones or friends accomplish. This leads to frustration. But occasionally you watch your changing face in the mirror, pull out another hair gone silver, and you wonder... sometimes more hormonally charged or bitterly than normal.

Our plans have been violently shaken, and it remains to be seen whether our goals will slip as well. Graduate schools are slow to respond. We hold up March as the revelatory time, when some path will solidify in front of us, and we can stop fussing with the unchartable possibilities and start in on some real planning.

For no creature shall keep my kotatsu away from me. It comes back with us.

日曜日, 2月 05, 2006

Searing Change

Leaving options open is perhaps the great flaw of my life. I never expect to have my bridges burned behind me, but all too often that seems to be what happens. Time is the great healer, it seems, but not until the faded land has passed from view.

Losing Nate is the hardest, most significant thing that has happened to me, perhaps both of us in the last four years. It burned me (us?) both so severely that I think I lost all desire to return home, ever. Certainly the places that were home are that no longer. Home has infused itself into new places, into new pathways that grow increasingly foreign the more time not spent wandering them.

The more time I spend here, however, the more I realize that in order to fight for the kind of change I want to make in the world, I need to go where my voice has power, and where I am not isolated in an island of muteness, nor stripped of a voice by the system.

We have dreams to achieve. We have new battles to fight. New fires to temper in.

And here is where it gets interesting. Death burned the bridge back to where we come from, and now life will make it new again.