89 in total. Yes, I counted. That’s for one chapter.
Vocabulary’s a bitch!
A place write I write things about stuff
89 in total. Yes, I counted. That’s for one chapter.
Vocabulary’s a bitch!
Now the bad news:
1) My financial aid for the year got pulled. Basically, I was dismissed from school 9 years ago for failure to maintain satisfactory academic progress – an assessment I don’t dispute – and that came back to bite me in the ass when the school went to audit who all was receiving aid this fall. The kick is, although I am technically in good standing with the school for having successfully applied for readmission, I didn’t actually do anything to reverse the situation I was in on campus. The on campus/off campus distinction is important – although I have a full year’s worth of credit transferred in from the community college in Omaha, that does nothing to either help or hinder my progress in Lincoln.
So the short version of this little story is that I rushed down to Lincoln the day after finding out and filed my appeal. I stated that in the interim, I had been slowly racking up transferable credits at another school and that the situation would simply correct itself after 3 months now that my head’s screwed on straight. The committee who oversees these things looked at my appeal and approved it on the condition that I take at least 10 hours’ worth of classes in the fall and pass them all. Fine, they’re all softball classes anyway.
In the meantime I’m looking at private options for the fall term as I think it’s going to be a little tough for me to scare up $7000-$8000 between now and the fall, and I think I’ll be okay in that department. This is just a giant pain in the ass to deal with.
2) The price of the new iPhone. Ok, first of all let’s get something straight here – I realize I’m not the target audience for this contraption. I greatly prefer text messaging to phone conversations, I don’t care one way or the next if I can surf the internet and/or check e-mail when I’m on campus and probably 5 minutes away from a public terminal anyway, and most of all I don’t want to pay $50 or more a month for phone service. Especially when I can get a Skypeout account for like $3 a month. I just jumped on Sprint’s SERO plan, which gets me 500 minutes of talk time and unlimited text messaging for $30 a month. In the whole quest for cell phone service to replace my company phone which is soon going away, that is hands down the best deal I found. By far. That’s the kind of cell phone customer I am. So having said that…
The new iPhone is going to cost $199, whereas the old one used to be $399. Basically a 50% discount. This looked like a really sweet deal, and I was just about ready to take the plunge… then the details started coming out. To wit: the data plan is going to be $10 more a month, and you have to pay $5 extra to get the 200 SMS package that used to be included. Do the math – or better yet, don’t, because it’s already been done:
Steve Jobs himself said the primary reason people weren’t buying iPhones was because of the cost. In response, Apple’s and AT&T’s bean counters diligently moved beans from one pile to the next until they could come up with the biggest crock of shit farce I’ve seen so far – a phone being advertised as “half as expensive” that carries a higher total cost of ownership than its predecessor.
Steve, you are one crafty son of a bitch, but do you really think that’s going to make people jump in line? The iPhone was too expensive before, so now that it’s even more expensive that should fix the problem?
Really, come on.
Uh, I guess the only other thing I don’t like this week is that somehow the Yankees managed to climb out of the AL East cellar. Pinstriped bastards!
After spending every free moment possible studying, including several hours immediately before, I walked into the calculus class one morning a couple weeks ago and wiped on the first test. It wasn’t because of the material; I had done all the homework along the way and had absolutely no problem with the material I was being tested on. When I got the test back, there were two things wrong: first, I had completely blanked on procedure for one problem, and second, there were stupid mistakes riddled all over the remainder of the test. In other words, I should have aced the test, and instead ended up scoring myself out of even getting an A for the term.
The stupid mistakes have crept into my Japanese homework and tests too, but they haven’t been bad enough to cause any problems yet. Probably because I aced that class seven years ago and this is a glorified review.
Meanwhile at work, the last month I’ve shown up late more frequently than I’ve shown up on time, I’ve been forgetting things here and there, putting off more important things for easier things that were less important, among other things.
In other words, I’m trying to balance a more-than full time job against an almost-full time class load, and in the process I’m not doing particularly well at either. As much as it pisses me off, I had to drop out of calculus. I was absolutely sure I could do everything, even though it sucked being responsible for being someplace every day of the week including Saturday and Sunday. I’m extremely disappointed I had to do it, especially considering I enjoyed the class. What it comes down to is, if this is how things are going to be after just one month, there’s no way I’m going to be able to sustain everything for the course of an entire year as had been the plan. I guess now I know what my limits are.
Figures I’m now doing everything in spurts to get it out of the way and make room on the schedule for the next task… I just got through packing lunches for the rest of the week, now I’m getting all the bloggage out of the way, because I certainly won’t have time for the next few days. This is now what my weekly schedule is looking like:
Monday: Work from 8am to 5pm, spend lunch working on Calculus homework, Japanese class from 6pm until at least 930pm
Tuesday: Work from 9am to 6pm, spend lunch working on Calculus homework, go home and do the Japanese homework that was assigned Monday (2-3 hours worth)
Wednesday: Work from 8am to 5pm, spend lunch working on Calculus homework, Japanese class from 6pm until at least 930pm
Thursday: Work from 9am to 6pm, spend lunch working on Calculus homework, go home and do the Japanese homework that was assigned Wednesday (2-3 hours worth)
Friday: Work from 8am to 5pm, spend lunch working on Calculus homework, hopefully chill and watch some glorious mid-major football game the rest of the evening
Saturday: Calculus class from 9am until 1230pm, fail at getting any homework done because college football runs continuously until midnight
Sunday: Calculus class from 9am until 1230pm, go to parents house and do an hour or two of homework while they are making lunch, go buy food for the week, then go home and do laundry – and more homework
So Monday through Thursday I am booked completely solid, Friday I get a little bit of a break, Saturday I do basically nothing because I’m hardwired to take in as much collegiate violence as possible, and Sunday I just get ready to repeat the process all over again. The days I don’t have class I have work and homework, and the days I don’t have work I have class and homework. I’m glad I quit World Of Warcraft and sold my account, because I wouldn’t have time for that shit anyway. (Incidentally, I noticed my character hasn’t been updated in the Armory since I sold the account so it looks like the Chinese farmers paid me $150 for nothing! Owned.)
Due to a flub on a certain company’s part – the whole, “employee steals info for countless thousands of accounts” kind of flub – I had to go put a fraud alert out on my credit tonight. Equifax kind of blew at that process; after spending 5 minutes answering random questions on their automated hotline, they politely informed me they were unable to access any reports with the information I provided. Well screw you then, Equifax! I went to Experian’s website instead, and they had a form to fill out right there that worked just fine. So that’s taken care of now, and even better is I got a peek at my current credit report in the process. No damage appears to have been done. In fact, it’s nice to see the amount of progress I’ve made since the beginning of 2006 when I really started keeping on top of things.
On a mostly-related note, I can definitely say this: if you come across some spending power, sit on it until you really need it. Don’t think that just because some place gave you a $1,600 credit line you can go run out today and buy a shiny new object x unless you’re absolutely sure you’re pulling in enough money to make more than the minimum payment each month. I made this mistake multiple times over the course of three years before it all caught up to me, and I and ended up in pretty bad shape for awhile. We’re talking going paycheck to paycheck, skipping a payment on one bill to make a late payment on another, completely draining the bank account midway through the pay period because of the sheer amount of crap that needs to be paid each cycle, things like that. Not only was it not fun, but the money to do constructive things in my life like fixing the air conditioning in my truck or taking classes at the community college simply wasn’t there.
As easy as it would be to do, I find it impossible to blame the credit card companies or the “instant gratification” society for my current predicament. There were many decisions made that could have prevented a few snowflakes from becoming an avalanche, and I chose not to make them in the name of screwing around and playing video games until 5am. My thought is… there are poor people, and there are stupid people. The poor people are the ones who do everything right, but through one circumstance or another, have difficulty making ends meet. And the stupid people are the ones like me who start out fine, then spend every last available dollar on dumb shit – new computers, DVD box sets, video games, you name it. Some things you’re better off learning the hard way… and that’s part of why, two months from my 27th birthday, I’m still chasing after a college degree.
Also, an update on something I mentioned previously: UNL does in fact have a Chinese program in the works. Ni haos, bitches!