So, excited?

Freshman orientation started today at OU, which meant that I got to go sit in MemAud and happily sell a few dozen copies of the 'required' freshman English class reader, Cion. It actually went disturbingly well, especially compared to last year. Sure, it was the first day, but a girl can hope that THAT is the way things are supposed to go, right? With a wonderful lack of complaining about having to buy a book (AS IF COLLEGE IS ABOUT NOT BUYING BOOKS) or countless people INSISTING that their child tested out of Freshman English, which is a class almost no-one tests out of. Administrators can count on ONE HAND the amount of students who pass the test every year.

I wish I was joking.

The problem with orientation is that it serves as an ugly reminder that classes start soon. Of course, soon appears to be seven weeks away from tomorrow, if I am counting right. That seems really far away, but I know it will past like a dream. The little voice in my head is already starting the nagging, the quiet muttering about all the things I need to do, like review Chinese and buy notebooks and get that pink slip that I've been putting off getting and... the list goes on. The list gets particularly nasty when it gets late. My brain refuses to shut down and I lay there, curling into a ball, wishing I could look forward to next quarter without all the worrying I am living through. The 'what-if's have left me alternating between crashing hard and staying up until the wee hours, a cruel insomnia that has left me in love with streaming video on the internet. I watched the first season of Dexter a few weeks ago. At two am. Oddly, my dreams revolved around arguments, babies and cars, none of which has to do with Dexter.

It's almost amusing to see all of these people in Athens, after so many weeks of quiet. They all seem to be filled with this nervous buzz, this mixture of excitement and nerves. It's hard for me to not grab them by the shoulders, shake them and say, repeatedly, 'DO NOT TAKE 20 HOURS YOUR FIRST QUARTER!!!'

The voice of experience is always trust worthy when coming from a young blonde who is screaming in your face, right?

My nerves aren't helped by the state's current financial situation. We finally passed our budget, but they got rid of the tuition freeze (I'm expecting to hand over an additional $100 a quarter as soon as Winter Quarter), razed the Ohio College Opportunity Grant ($2496 turned into $1080 or something along those lines, and limited what institutions received that money), and... reinstated the Ohio Academic Scholarship, a scholarship I received when I graduated high school. It lost some money, but not a lot(all info I used here was taken from the Board of Regents site). But OU isn't listing the OAS until they get a formal letter from the state telling it that the OAS is being given out to students again. I had a VERY FUN TIME at the fin aid office finding this out today.

Like pretty much every other office on campus, OU's fin aid office has some student employees that they have working the front desks. This drives me INSANE, because these students are often stumped by my questions, and I'm not quite blunt enough to insist that I'd rather wait for a non-student to answer my questions. Today, I had to explain what I was asking about multiple times, explaining no less than THREE times that the OAS was a scholarship, not a grant, and NO, I was NOT talking about the OCOG. The girl had no idea what I was talking about, at all, and after about five minutes, a higher up came over and explained why the OAS wasn't on my fin aid letter. Basically, I just get to sit and wait and hope that Ohio gets those letters out before mid-August, when fall's first payment is due. If it had taken any longer for someone who actually knew what I was talking about to walk over and explain this, I probably would have ended up storming through the office, harassing people until I found someone who could answer my damn questions.

All of this has me wondering, how can anyone be excited about classes starting back up? My only saving grace right now is that I am very, very likely to be switching my degree program (or adding a third major - what's a little more insanity?) into an area that I find myself increasingly passionate about, which you'll hear all about once I've gotten everything worked out.

Blown away and blown down

Jack's Mannequin was spectacular. I usually measure the greatness of a concert by how I feel when the performer walks off the stage, and I felt both sad and surprised when he and the rest of the band walked off the stage (before coming back for an encore). They played for over an hour and a half, and I still can't believe how quickly the time passed.

At the concert, I learned an important thing about Columbus-dwellers/Ohioans. They don't fucking dance. Seriously. Out of a crowd of at least 300, I was the only one dancing that I could see. At the end of the show, I got a fist-bump from the event staff/security guard person, who said "You were rocking tonight!" Well, yeah. JM isn't the most danceable music in the world, but I was so jazzed to be there that I didn't much care if it was or not. 

I had my digital recorder with me, and I recorded the show, not sure if it were turn out decently or not. It did, but it's just for me. I often struggle to remember stuff if I have no record of the experience, and to get to repeatedly relive this experience is something I cherish. I also snagged a few photos with my phone. They turned out pretty decently for how tiny and bad they looked on my phone. Here's one from his encore, feel free to ignore the camera in the lower left hand corner: 

So there is that. Amazing. If you have the chance to see him this summer, DO IT. He is touring as the headliner for the next few months, then he will be touring with the fray. You can check out his site here. 

On the flip side, I came home, went to bed, and woke up to an e-mail from the Ohio Board of Regents, informing me that the scholarship I was awarded last year (the Ohio Academic Scholarship) is not being renewed next year. At the moment, there are no funds in Ohio's budget for this scholarship. On the one hand, I understand there is a financial crisis. I understand there is a massive meltdown of budgets right now. But this is a scholarship that I earned, a scholarship I received based on merit. MERIT. 

I will still be able to go to school next year; I was reassured of this by one of the workers at the financial aid office. But a lot of the aid I will be receiving is need based. It is hard to feel proud of my accomplishments at OU at this point when my aid is so heavily funded by 'need.' Yes, I NEED the money, but I was SO PROUD of the fact that I had more than one scholarship that I could point to as something I earned for working my ass of the past few years. I have studied myself to the bone, to the brink of sanity, to the point of severe sleep deprivation, and I am quite probably losing a scholarship because of a mismanaged budget and a financial crisis that I did not cause, that I am a victim of. I am so angry. I am also disappointed. 

I was given an e-mail for someone to contact, and hopefully she can lay out some sort of game plan for what I should do if this scholarship is eliminated. Because going to a bank and punching a CEO in the face is, sadly, not an option.