You guessed it kids - CW Post has fucked me over again, one last (Deity willing) time before graduation. Extremely abbreviated story: no where and at no time was I informed by either the Education or History departments that I needed to take comprehensive exams for two my history courses in order to graduate, in addition to my student teaching experiences and my professional portfolio. My professor, who is the graduate advisor in the history department, has fortunately agreed with me that the circumstances are unfair, and is allowing me to take the comps later than everyone else so that I can graduate on time.
This, in the scheme of things, is not a big deal. It's only two hour-long essays, I'm sure I'll pass without much trouble. Inconvenient? Hell yeah. But not damning. The absurdity of the situation is: this is the second extremely important requirement that the administration at Post has failed to inform me about in the past year. My frustration level is enough that I really do want to find out where my advisor, the former graduate advisor in the History Department, and every Dean in the School of Education live so that I may set their cars on fire and inconvenience and psychologically hurt them as much as they have inconvenienced and psychologically hurt me.
And despite my inner turmoil at this disturbing news, I can admit that when I got that dreadful email from my professor (thank Deity for her diligence), I really wasn't surprised. It seems that Murphy's Law has enacted it's cruel reality on me yet again. This just further provokes my suspicion that there is no such thing as fate or a unifying Force in the universe. So thanks CW Post, for destroying whatever residual faith I may have had left after these 2.5 terrible years at your school. Hope your institution collapses in upon it's own incompetence and I never have to pay back my student loans. Fuck you very much.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
What If It Doesn't, In Fact, Get Better?
Since the recent suicides of bullied gay teens, I've been pleasantly surprised by the positive messages sent out there by celebrities and charities. One of the campaigns, however, unsettles me: I refer, of course, to the "It Gets Better" campaign. Although I feel the premise is basically true (that life after high school is amazingly better because you have freedom of movement/expression and you don't have to put up with as much homophobic harassment), I'm not sure that anyone can actually deliver on that promise. Will life get better? Obviously it didn't for that poor boy who was victimized by his roommate at Rutgers. Or for the hundreds of adult gays who die in hate crimes each year.
But I digress. The point of this post is: when we tell ourselves that a certain period of our lives is going to be brutal, but then things will "get better," isn't it just a lie we tell to convince ourselves not to give up and die? Because my life is fairly terrible at the moment (excluding the fact that all my basic human needs are being met), and everyone keeps saying "a few more months/years, and it will 'get better,'" and I feel like that couldn't possibly be true. Yes, I'm at a low "bad" point in my life, and in accordance with life-cycles, things will become less stressful and depressing and I'll have a short run of happiness. But the mountain range past that clearing is going to be even more terrifying and miserable than the one I just climbed through, is it not? After student teaching, I'll be married and out on my own, which means I have to start paying back the exorbitant amount of money I owe in student loans. Fate willing, I will have babies and will have to finance everything they do until they themselves are moved out and married. Having a career and a spouse and children are things I thought would signify my life "being better," but upon further examination it appears they will only complicate and add stress to an already unhappy situation.
Does it actually "get better?" Or does life just morph from one shitty situation to a different shitty situation, and the lesser of the evils becomes labeled as the "better" time?
But I digress. The point of this post is: when we tell ourselves that a certain period of our lives is going to be brutal, but then things will "get better," isn't it just a lie we tell to convince ourselves not to give up and die? Because my life is fairly terrible at the moment (excluding the fact that all my basic human needs are being met), and everyone keeps saying "a few more months/years, and it will 'get better,'" and I feel like that couldn't possibly be true. Yes, I'm at a low "bad" point in my life, and in accordance with life-cycles, things will become less stressful and depressing and I'll have a short run of happiness. But the mountain range past that clearing is going to be even more terrifying and miserable than the one I just climbed through, is it not? After student teaching, I'll be married and out on my own, which means I have to start paying back the exorbitant amount of money I owe in student loans. Fate willing, I will have babies and will have to finance everything they do until they themselves are moved out and married. Having a career and a spouse and children are things I thought would signify my life "being better," but upon further examination it appears they will only complicate and add stress to an already unhappy situation.
Does it actually "get better?" Or does life just morph from one shitty situation to a different shitty situation, and the lesser of the evils becomes labeled as the "better" time?
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