dubious.biz(ness)

I need to:

• Get my acceptance letter
• Get a visa
• Get a room
• Get a plane ticket
• Sell my car

Panic has set in. eeeeek

Well, that is probably the best title for the way things were, things are now currently heating up. My original administrator had a baby and will apparently be out until 2006, and her replacement seems to be almost impossible to get in the office. I submitted my documentation for finances in July, and I am unfortunately just being notified now that I am supposed to have the full amount of cash for three years sitting in a bank account with bank statements that they can see. That is a pretty significant amount of money.

This is the real down side to going to school outside the US. Financially, you are on your own, and you are held at an arm’s length. You cannot compare to the poverty the most talented Asian students have and thus are out of range of the full need based international scholarships (which are few and far between anyway), and that’s only because your currency is stronger and your average income is higher no one currently takes into account cost of living estimates. That wouldn’t even be feasible, so I’m not suggesting that they do this, but it is really frustrating to be treated like someone who couldn’t pay, and not to be offered any assistance. Basically you are treated like an Asian because of Asians. I do not mean this in any negative light to Asians, but they constitute the largest consumers of international college education, and also tend to have the lowest incomes. It isn’t hard to imagine the situation where the entire family works hard to earn barely enough money to scrap together to give a particularly gifted daughter an opportunity to study overseas and for families in volatile economies it might be very important that they have all the money they will need before they are accepted.

However, in my case my family could easily make the gap between the amount that I have in loans and the amount that I have saved, but it is still a requirement that I be able to show a over $50,000 in savings. Fortunately it looks like this will be possible, but this really makes it difficult.

Also dad has asked me to make a “cash flow statement”. This is actually much more difficult than it sounds as most of this information (like when tuition is due) is not available on line and I would have to ask the admissions people, which at this point might imply that I will have difficulty paying for the education on time. The “maintainence fee” which is really a budgetary number for room, food, and school necessities is £6000 pounds per year, which works out to $1800 per month, which is exorbitant. I do know some costs, such as meals catered in the college cost about $5.30 per meal. Room and board is about $440 per month. Meals for a month would be about $350, and that would still be almost half of the $790 total. I cannot really fathom where the rest of this money is going but I have a feeling either they’re correct and I’m going to be severely impoverished, or they’re not and I will save money off what I had originally anticipated. My stomach continues to turn, and unfortunately the only thing that will cure it will be time.

I woke up today, and found myself with a horrendous headache. Probably induced by the vicious purity of my current system. I feel like I’m getting old. I hate the idea that bodies are as durable as they seem and that people age. I can imagine why people like Aubrey DeGrey seem so driven to make people live forever because aging is terrible.

I immediately go back to sleep and wake up in an hour, which is, as it is every morning, a bad call. When I awake again I get off my ass and haul into the bath and dig for medicine to make me feel better. In more drug dependent households, perhaps, they differentiate between the myriad pills available over the counter, but in my house, we call whatever bottle is in the medicine cabinet aspirin. So I took two aspirin. In the shower, I started to feel better. I mean I still had a headache but I felt a bit better. Then I started to feel much much better. Then I realized that I had taken Excedrine and Excedrine has caffeine. Later out of the shower I looked at the back of the bottle: 65mg per tablet, making a total of 130mg, which is about the same as a two cups of coffee, which is about the same as a Starbucks “Grande”. I feel much better. The weather was again threatening, but I decided to drop the top anyway.

So I am absolutely addicted to caffeine. And now I’m off the wagon. I feel great. I had two cups of decaf coffee, none of them nearly as good as the buzz I got from my headache medicine.

For the past week, the week prior to my gala tiki party and this one as well, I have had a persistant annoying eye twitch. A blepharospasm. A bane of nerdy existence. It seems to come at random perhaps 20 to 30 times a day. While I am driving, while I am staring at the screen, or while I happen to be doing something that isn’t one of the previous two things. Like right now. Arggh.

A quick bit of research on blepharospasm reveals four culprits: fatigue, stress, caffeine, and smoking. Well, I’m not particularly fatigued and by my own self assessment I am not very stressed. I don’t smoke either, which leaves just one thing. That magical drug that has a large part of my life and daily existence is devoted to. When I was a kid, a long long time ago, I wanted to make a webzine. That was what they called blogs back then. My webzine was going to be called Caffeine Magazine. I painted in white out on my backpack “CAFFEINE”, along with “SLEEP IS FOR THE COMPUTER ILLITERATE”, and less fortunately, “HACK THE PLANET”. I carried around a coffee mug so large it would cover most of a school desk. To every class. It was the totem of my geekiness and warded off pretty girls and attracted heckling and sometimes beatings.

I’m addicted to it, it seems. Several times previously, I had gone cold turkey off it for several weeks, and fortunately decaf coffee is still just as good tasting, just lacking in the caffeine. So for the past two days, I have been caffeine free. Although, caffeine’s half life is something around 3-4 hours, so I have really been slowly coasting off. The first day of caffeine freedom was no problem. The eye twitches still came and went. Today, however, was crappy. I woke up, didn’t bother to open the top because of threatening weather, drove to work in relative silence, and sat down with my fake coffee which I wholely resented. The whole day has been a drag and even more so of one because I worked until 9:30. The pain of tomorrow will be unimaginable but hopefully less than today.

Ok, as if I didn’t have enough excuses to love flickr, I present to you flickr + google maps = GEOBLOGGING! Pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I’ve only covered a few spots in the US, and a few more than outside. Eventually my camera and I will have taken all the photos in more spots around the world. So awesome.