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Fire & Ice
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Politics, culture, and other oddities.
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Saturday, December 16, 2000
I haven't posted in too long! This has been quite a stressful time in my life. I am thoroughly convinced that the college admissions process was fully designed and executed by Satan himself. (Not that I technically believe in the Devil... but details, details!) Everybody cares too much, but it's nobody's fault, really. How are we supposed to laugh it off when we've been driven like cattle to this one point for the better half of our seventeen years? I applied early somewhere. I got deferred. (Note: "Deferred" is that lovely word meaning that I'm not exactly good enough to take yet, but also not bad enough to reject right now. Go me!) Some of my friends got accepted. I'm beyond happy for them. Of course, firstly because they're happy and I want them to be happy, but also because, for them, this evil process is officially over. That's it. They don't have to deal with any of this shit anymore. And I think that this aforementioned "shit" is really bad for people. I don't like what it does to the people I know, and I hate what it does to the people I love. It screws with everyone's values system, skews our sense of what's important and what's not.
Who cares? I do, for one. Still though, I was not crushed when I got my deferral letter in the mail; it was what I expected. I did not think for a second that I must be failure, or that I'm not deserving of admission, or that I'm somehow a lesser person because of it. Au contraire! I rather agree with the admissions committee. If I saw "me" as presented on a few neatly typed pieces of paper, I wouldn't take me either. After all, what am I on a piece of paper? Nothing too impressive, I'll tell you that. But that doesn't ruin my sense of self, or make my self-esteem plummet; because "me" on paper is only the smallest fraction of who I really am. Only the people closest to me and me myself have any real sense of who I am. That's why I care about their opinion of me, and that's why I care what I think of myself.
So I'm fine. I would have liked to get in early, to have this all done with and behind me, but the choice was not mine to make. I'll just turn the other cheek and fill in all my other applications like nothing matters more in the world. But I'll know that that's just not true.
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