Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

I caught the last half of The Colbert Report last night, and he had on the congressman from Georgia’s eighth district (Lynn Westmoreland, I believe). One of the first things he said was that the eighth was “a good conservative district” and “a good family district.” Okay, so I was already prepared for some humorous responses to Stephen’s questions. But when Stephen asked what could be cut to help ease the deficit and the congressman said, in either complete seriousness or it was the best acting I’ve ever seen, the department of education, I was shocked. Contrast that to lovely Dennis Kucinich, who sadly will probably never get most of his ideas passed let alone become president, who supports tuition-free higher education for kids in state schools. Can you even imagine free college? Wow.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Stephen brought up the congressman’s efforts to have the Ten Commandments put up in the House building and in the Senate. Stephen asked if he could think of any better place than a public building to put up the Ten Commandments (even my little brother thought immediately of a church), but the congressman said no, they were good things for people to see. And yet as important as they are to him, the congressman only managed to name three. As much as I’ve tried to forget my Christian upbringing, I still remember more than that: don’t take the lord’s name in vain, have no other gods, keep the sabbath holy, honor parents, don’t covent neighbor’s wife (and this excludes the three he named: don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t lie—I guess that counts as not bearing false witness).

I think I heard more people laugh during this “Better Know a District” than I have for almost anything else on The Colbert Report. I kind of hope that that congressman and his family weren’t watching last night.

Inspired, perhaps, by An Inconvenient Truth (and because I’m supposed to be an environmentalist) to become more knowledgeable about environmental issues, I started scanning the articles on truthout’s environmental page. I came across this article about the ads released prior to the “alarmist” film assuring people that green house gases are good.

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one ad celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

“The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love,” the ad runs. “Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed - what would our lives be like then?”

I almost want to cry. No sensible person is trying to say that we should give up electriciy and return to walking around dark houses with candle lanterns and riding horses to the next farm to pick up some milk in the morning. We can have the same energy we have from the fuels that produce CO2 (nice way to avoid calling them greenhouse gases, because even that name sounds scary) without damaging the environment. Solar power seems an excellent choice considering that, according to another article, the world’s deserts are gradually becoming inhospitable. If people can’t live there, we might as well use the space to collect solar energy.

But I’m still far from knowing as much as I would need to to make an intelligent post. I only wanted to point out those ads, since they weren’t aired in the Philadelphia region. As much as I don’t want to think about it, I’m sure some people believed the ads and think that there are no alternate sources of power to rely on if we can’t use fossil fuels.

When I was looking at transfer colleges, Swarthmore topped the list, followed by Bryn Mawr and then Haverford. Swarthmore has a really nice campus and an Aikido club, and it’s terribly easy to travel between the college and my house; not to mention that it’s one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. But Swarthmore is impossibly hard to get into, so I pretty much counted on a rejection from them.

Bryn Mawr was the only college for which I had a tour and an interview over spring break, and I really loved the college after that. (One of the reasons I didn’t want a tour of Swarthmore after the Bryn Mawr tour was because I didn’t want to fall more in love with the school least likely to accept me.) Bryn Mawr is really neat: we get lanterns in our class color (red for 2009); the whole campus looks like a castle; and there’s a May Day celebration and a cloister with a fountain and a tradition—established by Katherine Hepburn—of skinny dipping. On top of that, most of the dorms are singles and a lot of them have fireplaces and window seats. So I got myself pretty excited to go to Bryn Mawr; my application for this college was best, too, because I wrote it over spring break and not from New York two nights before it was due.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’d been checking the mail every day waiting to hear from the colleges. Bryn Mawr was to mail on the 15th, and Swarthmore said they would notify by the 15th, so I figured I would hear from both colleges by this coming Wednesday. Yesterday Ricky and I were playing ddr when the phone rang and my mother called me to get it. Thinking it was a friend who wouldn’t mind waiting a moment for me to finish a song, I kept playing. But my mother gestured that it was important, so I got off the dance mat and on the phone with the woman in charge of transfer admissions who had interviewed me at Bryn Mawr. She called to say, first of all, that congratulations, I was accepted (yay!); and second, that they were having technical problems with the letters and would be sending them out Monday or Tuesday at the latest with the financial aid information. So I’m going to college!!! It’s such a cute little school that the admissions people call students to congratulate them. That would have taken weeks at NYU.

Today while I was out, a letter came from Swarthmore. My stepfather told my mother that it wasn’t a small letter (rejection), but it wasn’t a large letter (admission) either; it was kind of in-between. So my mother told him to open it (without my permission—isn’t that breaking some federal law?), and it was indeed neither a rejection nor a letter of acceptance. I got wait-listed. But isn’t that so awesome? Swarthmore College says I’m qualified, and the person who wrote the letter (who actually bothered to use my nickname in the address) seemed genuinely sorry that there weren’t enough spaces right now. The letter-writer even hoped that I had other options to pursue. Nearly 5000 kids applied for freshman class, and nearly 200 were trying to get in as transfers, so I understand that I didn’t get one of the coveted positions; I’m just amazed that they didn’t actually reject me.

So it looks like I’m going to Bryn Mawr. Or, at least, I’d better be after I dragged my mother and Stephen and Dave all around the campus in the lovely rainy weather today to look at the school and buy lots of shirts and pens and mugs, etc. in the bookstore. Luckily, the shop was open, and we were even able to get inside the buildings. It’s possibly because today was graduation (I swear I thought the website said it was the 20th). I think I’m still going to keep my name on the list for Swarthmore, though. They may just want to give me a free ride after wait-listing me, and I don’t know if I could really pass that up. I haven’t actually heard about money from Bryn Mawr yet, and I haven’t heard anything from Haverford, but they’d have to give me a lot of money for me to choose them over Bryn Mawr. The thing is, though, if I go to Bryn Mawr I can do all the cool traditions that they have and still take part in Swarthmore’s Aikido club and enjoy their campus (as well as my own). If I went to either of the other schools, I wouldn’t get to live in a castle or dress up in white and dance around May poles or any of the cool things that Bryn Mawr kids do.

Mood: V. happy

Edit: Amusingly enough, Haverford rejected my application for admission. It’s okay; I didn’t really want to go there anyway. They sent out an email on Tuesday, and I thought maybe they were emailing rejections rather than wasting the paper to send out all of the bad news letters. Apparently, though, they were just emailing as a rough draft; a physical letter came with the mail on Wednesday, along with my acceptance package from Bryn Mawr (complete with temporary tattoo). It’s still very funny that Swarthmore would accept me if they had room while the so-thought safety school would not. The only problem is that if I want to learn Japanese, I’ll have to take courses at Haverford.

I’ve spent the last five or six hours cleaning my room (I work best when I stay up all night), and I decided to be really thorough. So, I took down the crate from the top of my closet and began to sort the junk from the stuff that could be donated. When I go on these cleaning sprees, I often come across old notebooks in which I wrote very many silly things. I usually enjoy reading whatever childish poem I’d composed years before or old journal entries about disagreements with parents as well as checking my handwriting to see if it changed at all. I guess I can look at what I wrote and think that I’ve really matured since then.

This, however, was not the case last night. In reading essays that I wrote even just one year ago, I am usually upset by the unharmonious grammatical structure of overly-complicated sentences; errors are always appalling. And those are essays written in 11th grade. What I have come to determine is that I must have been illiterate as a middle schooler. That’s why I’m not pleased to have become more grammatically-correct and knowledgeable since then; there had to be some improvement or I never should have deserved to graduate high school. There was one pretty much unforgivable mistake that I am far too ashamed to describe here, but other than that everything seemed on par for an average, uninterested unperson (kids below high school level = unpersons). Some of what I wrote took me a minute to process—I am no longer accustomed to reading “l8r” and “b4″ (that one really shocked me) in real sentences.

I was also a very silly girl back then, far too concerned with being liked by certain people. I think I wrote in pink, too. And to top it all off, I discovered a (to my credit, never used) Backstreet Boys calendar at the bottom of the crate. It wasn’t even a practical calendar with boxes in which to write things, only lines across the bottom with numbers.

I realized after a few pages of the horriffic writing that I was clearly terrible with English back than and that, for my sanity, I should just stop reading and assume it didn’t get any worse. But no, once I started I had to explore all of my past. I survived and am ecstatic that I starting caring about English. I basically owe my life to Christina, without whose influence I shudder to think what would have become of me. (Thanks, Pookie!) At least I can give Stevie a proper foundation in grammar.

I was doing so well with posting somewhat regularly and then I just lost it again. It’s partly because I had midterms and a paper due. It seems like I worried too much about the exams because I didn’t think they were that difficult, but I haven’t gotten the grades back yet.

Friday night Ricky and I attempted to walk up to Christina’s dorm, but we ended up taking the subway. It was already 1am and it actually felt like winter this past week. They had Cranium up there. I tried to resist playing; how could I take part in an activity that Mr. Connelly hates? Eventually I became a limited player. I feel like I betrayed him.

Possibly more important, I’m applying to colleges again. Late last semester I got really stressed and wanted to transfer to somewhere closer to home (since I come home almost every weekend anyway; I know that’s pathetic), but I’d missed all of the application dates. I wasn’t really considering it this semester until it came time to study for midterms. So now I’m applying to Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. Needless to say, I’m quite worried. Although I’m not sure that I would transfer yet (I just want to have the option in case I decide to), right now I’m rather fond of the idea of transferring, so getting accepted seems like a much bigger concern than it needs to be. After all, even if I don’t get in to any of them, I’m still in college, and it’s not terrible. I think my wanting to transfer is somewhat influenced by Honey and Clover—it’s an anime about these students in an art college and they have their little group and they’re very friendly with the professor. Maybe I want something like that (as if transferring would automatically create that situation).

Other than that, there isn’t much of import except that it’s the second night in a row in which I’ll be up till five if not past then. Rearranging my sleep schedule is not a good idea when I still have 8am classes to attend.

I’m taking Calc I, which should be pretty easy since I had a lot of it before. Still, calc was my worst subject in high school, so I’ve been worried about passing it with a sufficient grade. It’s even better that our only grades come from two midterms and the final. The first midterm was Thursday. I studied for probably four hours total (that is so much time compared to my usual studying) Wednesday night, but I didn’t know how to do one (simple) problem, and the chain rule had been giving me a lot of trouble.

So today the professor emailed us the results in a list. I first looked at the score for a person with a very similar NYU ID—F. I almost panicked, but then I realized that the A underneath that score was attached to my ID. Yay! This is silly bragging, I know, but I’m excited. The curve on that test was very reassuring. I could have gotten a C with 55%; passing didn’t even require having half of the answers correct.

I don’t think I’ve been out of my dorm for more than three hours since Friday despite the lovely weather we had yesterday. I managed to finsih this week’s homework for all but one of my classes, though. Friday was quite busy—a class of Seido (it should have been two, but I overslept), Japanese, another class of Seido, and anime club, all back-to-back.

The main purpose of this post was to show Stephen in his gear:

He’s really excited to start sparring. That’s a bit surprising, considering how gentle he is.

Sorry the picture is so small.

Since the high school where I tutor on Mondays and Wednesdays is having testing this week and next, I had off today. My one class wasn’t canceled, but it wasn’t bad, either. I got to sleep in a bit, too, because the class doesn’t start until 9:30. I’d been feeling really weak and unknowledgeable in the blue belt classes as Seido, so I decided to go to the early afternoon class that I’m usually never able to make. Kyoshi Akira taught the class; I’d forgotten how much I like him. I’ll have to make an effort to go to more of the classes he instructs.

Ricky and I are very pathetic sushi-eaters. We went to my Japanese restaurant to take advantage of its last customer appreciation $1 sushi $2 rolls day (there were three total). A review I came across online said that the place has the best sushi in lower Manhattan, so I had pretty high expectations, and I am happy to say that they were met. Granted, I haven’t tasted all of the sushi in lower Manhattan—in fact, I don’t believe I’ve had sushi since coming to New York—but it was probably the best sushi I’ve ever had. Normally I don’t have much of a taste for sushi for a while after having some, but I think I could get sushi from there again soon. Despite its being really good sushi, Ricky and I had to pick it apart to scrape out the tiny bit of wasabi hidden under the fish, and though neither of us used the soy sauce, I did manage to dip my hair in it. [Note: I do know the name of the restaurant, I just chose not to disclose it. And Christina, Ricky’s iced green tea had a little tree in it; there’s a picture on my phone to prove it.]

In the free time after lunch I was able to finish all of the work that’s due tomorrow (so now I have nothing to do in my boring 8am class). Then I went to two classes of Seido, and I felt great afterwards. Recently I’d only been going to one class Wednesday nights, but doing two gives me so much energy and puts me in a very good mood. I’m glad nothing bad happened tonight to ruin that. I’m just about able to do modified (girl) knuckle push-ups pretty well! It’s very exciting; three and a half hours after the class ended and my knuckles are still red. Funny, three months ago that would have been a complaint.

So I had a very enjoyable day off. I only regret that I have to go back to school tomorrow.

A somewhat related subject: My little brother got his letter of invitation to MKA’s Black Belt Club yesterday. He was very pleased, though not necessarily excited. Being a confident optimist, he insisted that he would get invited.

In an attempt to be more careful with my money and to consolidate it a bit, I closed my savings account and transferred the money from there, as well as the cash my parents gave me and a paycheck, into my checking account. I figured it would be easiest to keep track of it all that way. Not even an hour after I finished at the bank, I walked up to the front desk at Seido to sign in and was told that they’re canceling the pay-by-month plan that I’m on. Now they’re only accepting payments taken directly from checking accounts. Blah.

My mother and I thought it best if I opened a new savings account and just transferred funds over when I needed to. This would be most inconvenient, though—having to make sure I have enough in my savings account to switch some over into checking and still keep enough in the savings to avoid the $2 fee if the balance falls below $100. I have decided, instead, to open a second checking account just for Seido. I suppose they just had to make things difficult.

It appears I have been robbed. On Monday last I had $189 in my wallet. Today when I opened it, I had $3. I spent $52, which leaves $132 unaccounted for (allowing for the change I’ve left out of the equation). I’ll be damned if I ever give money to a beggar. I suspect one of the ones I encountered took my money. Although I didn’t think I was doing anything stupid, apparently I’m a very foolish girl. Well, never again. I’ve got some more lamenting to do now.

Edit: And please, no comments about how losing money isn’t the worst thing in the world.  I’m quite aware of that, but probably only my roommate, who had her wallet stolen, is in a position to lecture me.