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m&ms487
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2010 5 December :: 8.49am
I turned 23 years old yesterday. It's hard to imagine that I've had this journal for about a decade. Almost more than half of my life.
I didn't really do anything 'special' for my birthday. It's the weekend before finals and I'm entrenched in some tough paper and exam writing--but I know that I'll get through it. I just keep chugging along and crossing things off my list and eventually it will be Saturday.
Oh yeah. I graduate from college on Saturday. I'm going to walk across the stage and everything. I'm graduating Magna Cum Laude (I think, whatever the second best one is). I get to wear a big metal, but not as big as the highest honors people get to wear.
Last week was a week of lasts: last undergraduate classes, last Kappa Kappa Psi meeting as an active Brother, my last band concert at CMU, last week of being 22 years old. I thought I was going to be a mess, but I'm actually quite zen about it. I will miss it, but I have the feeling it's just time for me to go--to move on, to do other things.
I will be a graduate student in January and I think being a graduate student is going to be easier than the last few years of undergraduate work. I'm only taking 6 credits, and they are both literature seminars. I'm waiting to take more until I get full funding at a graduate assistant. That is, if I'm still at CMU.
I'm almost done with my application for the joint PhD program (English and Women's Studies) at the University of Michigan. I'm scared to move away, scared that this could be a real possibility, but at the same time, it feels so good that I've come this far. They only accept 3 people per year, and that would mean that I would beat out out over 100 other applicants, most probably with Masters degrees already. We'll have to see. It would mean that Rueben and I would be apart for a semester, so that would be tough, but fuck, it's a PhD program with complete funding.
Exciting, exciting things happening. I can't wait until Christmas break when I can sit around in my owl pajamas and eat bon bons (well, okay, popcorn).
::cut me open...::
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m&ms487
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2010 1 October :: 9.38pm
I took the GRE today. The testing center is in the basement of one of the old dormitories at Central. It was weird. And dark.
I earned a 550 on the verbal section and a 480 on the quantitative section. I'm going to take it again in a year if I don't get admitted to University of Michigan's joint PhD program in English and Women's Studies.
1 ::watch me bleed:: |
::cut me open...::
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m&ms487
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2010 21 August :: 11.10pm
:: Mood: calm
It's the end of the week, but only the beginning of the end. This is the Saturday before I start my last semester as an undergraduate college student. This was also the first week that I have been on educational leave from The Company since my freshman year of college.
I spent the entire week devoted to volunteering at CMU's band camp: meal set up, instrument sorting, wind suit dissemination, water cooler wrangling, to name a few of the tasks. Tonight, I and several of my Brothers went to see Jeff Daniels perform a concert in the streets of downtown Mt. Pleasant as volunteers for the Red Cross. They were raising money specifically for their infant pantry and I was able to collect the largest single donation: a $100 check.
Standing in the middle of the barricaded road with my Red Cross Volunteer Vest made me think about what I am doing. I intend to apply for a joint PhD program in English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan this fall (for fall 2011 admittance). I want this degree because I think it will allow me to have a job in the eventual downfall of the University English Department; but the real reason I want it is so that I can understand. I want to KNOW. I want to examine those socio-economic hetero-patriarchal hegemonic power structures so that I KNOW how to turn them in on themselves. I want to expose them and say "AHA! I've got you now!" I want to understand why things happen the way they do so that I can make others understand. I want them to be empowered so they have a chance to make a choice for themselves; to be able to have some semblance of freedom (I know there are several hundred theorists which would, at this point, as if freedom is even possible; Janis Joplin would tell me it happens when there's nothing left to lose).
But, at this point in time, an academic has just so much hold. There is so much to do and not every woman (or man that cares about these power structures-yes, men can be feminists, too) is going to be going through a university class which others like me will teach. What to do? Why aren't there more of us helping organizations like the infant's pantry? Why didn't I know that the Women's Shelter probably needed volunteers? That's how I can start to make a difference.
I was thinking this as I stood there under the street light as the sun began to go down and about one hundred people crowded around the small stage to meet Jeff Daniels. I stood there, holding my donation bucket, smiling as everyone walked past me, guiltily looking away because they did not want or could not afford a donation. I didn't donate any money simply because I don't have any to give; but I have my time. I gave my time and my thoughts and stood there, smiling, hoping that at least each person walking by thought about what it might be like to be a woman or a man going into that pantry, how he or she got there, and why.
Why?
::cut me open...::
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