Diplomas

I finally got my diploma from Eastern which was this whole drama. They
sent it to me via UPS but they required a signature. I only got the last
notice of a final delivery. Luckily I found the other notices in the
bushes because I was all set to call UPS and bitch them out. There were
some pretty wet and windy days so the notices must have blown off my
door. I ended up having to stop by campus to pick it up myself.

I kind of wondered why they insisted on sending it signature required
because who would steal a diploma? I mean, it isnt like it would have
any kind of value to someone else. It has my name on it after all. That
got me thinking so as a joke, I xeroxed it and then whited out my name
and wrote my name back in with a black sharpie so it would look extra
fake. But that was just something silly to do with it.

I ended up throwing the thing into the trunk of my car. That is where it
is now. I cant think of a thing to do with it. I suppose I could throw
it into a drawer or something. That is what I did with my high school
diploma. It seems kind of pretentious to display it although part of me
wants to because I get happy every time I look at it since it means no
more school for me.

Anyways, I am just curious. To those of you who have earned some sort of
diploma, what did you do with it. Where is it now? Do you think it is
pretentious to display it?

The Road Not Taken

This morning, I heard a story on the radio about Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. They are in real danger of closing and are at the moment only staying open because the alumni have managed to raise enough money to keep them open.

I never was a student at Antioch but there was a time when I really wanted to be. I even visited their campus. I loved the place. It was exactly the sort of hippy dippy free thinking kind of place that I know I would have both loved and would have suited me best academically. When I first heard about Antioch and told my Dad about what a cool place it seemed, he just started laughing and said that every weirdo in our family has always wanted to go to Antioch so Why Not? My uncle and one of his cousins went there.

But I ended up deciding not to go. I got a scholarship to the local community college. I had a new boyfriend and I was all in love with him. The tuition at Antioch was way more than my parents could have afforded. EtC ETC. I took a different road.

It hasnt been bad. My life, in many ways, is really darn good. But every so often, I wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I had just gone to that school. Who would I have met? What would I have learned? It is during those moments when I think of a certain famous poem by Robert Frost. And then I laugh

When it Rains, It Pours

I have kind of fixed my computer. I have fixed it up enough that I can get on the internet anyways. I think I can replace all of the applications I had on the old computer since so much of it was freeware anyways. I might have to buy a word processing program but then again, I might not. I mean, now that I am not going back to school, I don't know how much word processing I'll be doing.

I spoke to the graduation audit person at EMU yesterday. She had called several times while I was in Nova Scotia. She said that I hadn't listed a minor on my graduation application. I said that I didn't know that a minor was *required* but she said that it was. I told her that I never picked a minor because I never was able to make up my mind. I spent about 30 seconds wondering how many classes I was going to have to take to pick up a minor in something...ANYTHING. I wondered if there might be a minor in belly button lint picking because that is about all the higher education I felt up to. And then, she chimed in with her happy cheery voice, "You have enough credits for a minor in Psychology"

So I was all like, "Hell FUCK yeah! That's what I want!!!" (although I didn’t say *exactly* that) And ta-da...I am a college graduate with a BS degree in Economics and a minor in Psychology. I am glad that I got a BS degree too rather than a BA degree because somehow the BS seems more appropriate.

And what would a new college graduate need most you might ask? A new job perhaps? Well, hunky dory lucky me, I have one of those too. Hot DAMN this has been a good summer for me.

The job thing is totally a silver lining behind the dark cloud sort of thing too. I had a conflict at work that was enough to get me looking for another job. I happened to check craigslist for reasons I don't even know because I would never have thought to look for a job there. I guess I was thinking that it wouldn't hurt to be thorough. Anyhoo...there was only one job there but it was The Job. It was the kind of job where, when I read the job description, I just couldn't even believe it. It had crossed my mind that one of my friends who knew I was job hunting had put it there as a prank. It was that good. It is a tech support position at a small software company but one that is growing and one where there will be many opportunities for me to grow along with them. I am going to learn some really exciting things.

I sent my resume. It never hurts to do that. Within a couple of days, I had my first interview. It was one of the best interviews I have ever had in my life. The guy who interviewed me even used to work with one of the people I had listed as a reference! I met some of the other people who work there. I thought everyone was really nice. I got this feeling that I would fit in well. The offices have WINDOWS! Seriously, work for eight years in a windowless cubicle and then laugh when someone suggests that something like a window can be the icing on the cake of a good job. Anyways, a couple of days later, on my last day in Michigan before leaving on vacation, I had a second interview and a job offer. Man, did *that* make my vacation extra nice.

So, I have a week and a half here at my current job. I start my new job on 8/27. I’ll be working in downtown Ann Arbor. I don't know what I'll do about parking yet. Most likely, I'll start taking the bus to work.

Oh and the week I got my job offer, my brother got a really good promotion at work and my parents won all of their sailboat races. So when it rains, it pours eh? My mother says that someone in our family needs to buy a lotto ticket!

School's OUT forever!

I know I have not updated the old blog much recently. My apologies.

I have been busy but I should have some extra free time for at least the next couple of weeks. You see. I am done with school. And I don't just mean that the semester is over. I mean I am DONE with school. FOREVER. Or at least I think I am. It wont be official until someone actually reviews my application for graduation and then gives me a diploma. But by my careful calculations and by running the EMU online graduation audit 8 million times, I am pretty confident that I wont be taking any more classes.

After I was done with that last final exam though, I will admit that I went home and sat around waiting for that college degree to change my life. But alas my life is still pretty much the same as it was earlier in the week. I guess you need the actual diploma to arrive in the mail before getting the life changing advantages of having a degree, right?

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!!!

I used to go winter camping a lot and I'll freely admit that there are certain things about winter camping that I dont like. For instance, sleeping in the cold or rather *trying* to sleep but not being able to because it is TOO COLD does not rate high on my list of things I like about winter camping. But there are things that I like about it and oddly, two unrelated things have reminded me of very positive things about my winter camping days.

One of them is my Astronomy class of all things. You see, Orion has always been my favorite constilation and it is so easy to see in the winter sky that one of the activities of any winter camping trip for me was to just sit there and look at it. So, we've been talking about Orion in my class lately because it happens to be a really active part of space with lots of nebulas and cool stars and such. Everytime we talk about Orion, I always kind of remember sitting outside in the dead of winter gazing up at it and the very peaceful feeling I would always get then.

In a completely unrelated coincidence, one of my main winter camping buddies, Terry, is in town for a visit. He and his wife, Jen, are coming over this weekend. I'm all excited about that because they are awesome and they have been doing a lot of traveling so I know they'll have good stories.

And just to draw another crazy link in this mix, I will mention that one of my memories of Terry involves him dancing around singing Harry Belefonte's Day-o which was on the soundtrack of Beetle Juice which, or course, sounds just like Betelgeuse which is, of course, a star in Orion.

A Post in Which I Blame The Sun For Not Blogging

Man. This past week has been pretty nice. There has been lots of sunshine so I have been doing stuff outside. I have even already been swimming up at the lake! Yesterday was the BEST because there were no boats on the lake and I just swam all the way down the shore and then back. The water wasnt too cold although it wasnt warm either. Not bad though for a pre-memorial day swim.

The other main reason I havent been blogging is that I have been going to school full time for this short spring semester. It is intense and it has been keeping me busy. One of my classes is an online class which is nice because I have a wireless internet connection so I can sit outside and do my homework.

My other class is an Astronomy class. This class is essentially my last class at EMU. It is one of those science classes I put off because they sounded lame and hard and just not something that would be interesting. I thought I would hate it. But what do you know? I dont hate it and rather, really enjoy it! I kind of wish I had taken this class earlier because now I want to take a Physics class since the physics part of Astronomy seems the most interesting part. And of course I want to take more Astronomy classes too.



I got to look at the Sun through a telescope earlier this week in our class. That was really cool. I didnt take a picture of it myself but I found this one from about 11 years ago on the NASA web page. This is pretty much how the sun looked to me since we were using a similar filter (obviously, it is a bad idea to look at the sun through a telescope without a filter). This picture was also taken during a period of low activity on the sun. Sun activity goes in cycles of about 11 years so this picture was taken during the last low activity period. So it was very neat even though it wasnt very active. I can only imagine what it must look like when it is in an active phase!

So there you go. Instead of blogging, I have either been out playing in the sun or out learning about the sun.

sick

I have some kind of sickness. The timing is awful as I have a couple of big tests on Thursday. I am not sure I will be well by then. There are no makeups. So sick or not, I have to go. I always hate policies like that because I generally dont think people should be encouraged to go out in public when they sick. Anyways, I have had a severe cough and a fever that ranges between 100-102.

But I gotta admit that when I heard about all that business at Virginia Tech yesterday, it helped me put my misery into perspective. I am uncomfortable and will have to use some of my precious vacation time to pay for not going to work. But I am safe and all of my loved ones are safe too.

I'm a Loser, Baby!

It has been a week of failure here in my world this week.

I had a big test in my Biology class. And ok, I didnt fail it but I got a grade that is pretty...how shall we say??? Oh AVERAGE (translation: A ‘C’). I asked to see my answers on the test because I thought I would do better than that. It turned out that there were a couple of answers that I *knew* and still got wrong. Like something possessed me to mark the wrong answer down or something. It was weird and I know I had a thought that most college students would not have: Am I getting forgetful in my old age? Oh well, I am not too worried about it. I expect to pass this class with a C before the age related dementia really sets in. Maybe even before I need reading glasses

I applied for a job at work and I had my interview for it this week. Interviewing is not my strong suit and I *really* bombed this one. Then, later on I found out that this job which I had thought as being maybe one step up the ladder is actually way WAY up the food chain. It wasnt quite like the Janitor applying to be CEO but it was along those lines. In my defense though, I met all of the criteria that the HR people put in the job description except for the ‘business related degree’. I figured that I am about to have a degree in Economics so it wouldnt hurt to apply.

I just hope that no one there will hold that interview against me when I apply for some other job. And ok, I *did* apply for another job and one in a completely different department than the one I work in that happens to be the HR department.

So, cos I am such a failure...I will end this entry with a bit of a cliche. I do not really feel badly about this week. You see, there is one thing successful people almost all have in common. That one thing is FAILURE and sometimes a lot of it. Because you see, one thing you have to do to succeed is try. And the trying leads to failure a lot of the time. But I am no worse off for taking a Biology class (although I might be scarred by the fetal pig cutting up lab). I am no worse off for applying for a job that is out of my league. Well no worse off unless the HR person who interviewed me thinks I am crazy ass who wasted her time. But I probably wasnt THAT bad in the interview.

The End is in Sight

Whew. I haven’t been blogging too much because my work has gotten too busy for the most part for me to write anything while I am there. It has gotten so busy that I find myself completely vegging out when I get home. That and I am working hard with school at the same time.

The good news is that if I can get into a certain particular class for spring semester, I might have a diploma by June. Or at least I will have finished all of my classes by June. I think. It occurred to me the other day that I probably have to do something other than completing the required classes in order to graduate and get a diploma. I probably should ask someone at the school about that. Still, if I am lucky, after being in college on and off for 22 years, I might finally have a college degree by summertime.

And then I will never have to go to school again. Although I might. Folks tell me that grad school isn’t nearly as obnoxious as undergrad and that all of the things I rant about hating about school arent as common in graduate classes.

School.

Lately, I have to admit that I have been pretty cranky. Part of it is seasonal depression I am sure but I dont think that is all of it. I hate to admit it but I think that a big part of it is that I am taking classes this semester. And I just hate school.

It is funny because I dont mind learning. I think I hate all the hoops one has to jump through. The more hoops a class has, the more I hate it. I dont mind the ones where you go to lecture and then take a test. I have found that the online classes arent quite as bad although even there a lot depends on who is teaching the class.

The one good thing about it all is that when I find myself taking classes with lots of hoops, I am always reminded of why I dropped out of college in the first place. It takes a lot of energy for me to force myself to participate. I sometimes get so frustrated that I end up in tears. Not frustrated because the work is hard or because I dont understand the material but because it is just so hard for me to do yet another bullshit assignment. It reminds me that I didnt just quit before because I was lazy. I always forgive myself for dropping out at times like this while at the same time being a little angry at myself for not suffering then so I wouldnt have to suffer now ;)

Oh well. I guess I will put up with it because I want to be done and I am soooo close that I can taste it. It is just in the mean time, I am becoming a wreck. It isnt the first time either. I cant tell you how many times I have gotten completely freaked out by the end of a semester. It is like anxiety mixed with a sense of dread.

Anyways, I am feeling this way about school at the moment (except that I am enjoying my Saturday fitness class). I am feeling this way about work a little bit too and now I feel like I am spending every waking hour doing stuff I dont like. Getting up and getting out of the door in the morning has become a huge chore. Ugh. Even though I know it is a short term situation, it doesnt make me feel better now.

What is in a Name?

What some people know about me but others don’t is that Lynne is not my first name. My first name is Stephanie. People often ask me why I use Lynne and not Stephanie. That is because of my folks. My mother once said it was because she didnt think that Lynne Stephanie sounded as good as Stephanie Lynne It also had something to do with a church tradition of naming children after saints and apparently there is no Saint Lynne in the Russian Orthodox church. But whatever.

The interesting thing about using one’s middle name is that one notices how very geared our culture is towards using first names. At one point I tried to change my name with the Social Security people from Stephanie L Fremont to S. Lynne Fremont but their computer system at the time couldnt do a middle name. So what happened as far as they are concerned is that I changed my first name to just S. To them I am S L Fremont. No name, just initials. People often get confused when I sign my name S. Lynne even though my driver’s license says Stephanie Lynne. The Secretary of State doesnt allow one to use initials.

Anyways, I was thinking about this today because I had to go to class. School has me listed officially as Stephanie L since their system, like a lot of systems, is unable to handle S. Lynne And what that means is that every time I take a class, the teacher takes roll on the first day and I either have to correct them and say “No, please call me Lynne” or I just decide to be Stephanie for a while because it is easier. Anyways, this time I went with easier.

But it is weird because, of course, now everyone in the class calls me Stephanie and it is a lab class so I actually have to talk to people on a regular basis. Every time someone calls me Stephanie, it surprises me. And I also end up feeling kind of like some imposter or identity theif or something. I don’t think I am in danger of actually becoming friends with any of the folks in my class though and that is good because nothing is more awkward than telling someone, “Yeah, I know I told you my name was Stephanie but that was because I didnt think I would be around you long. You should start calling me Lynne now”

It does really get me thinking about names and the meanings and stereotypes our culture attaches to names. This is especially so since I don’t feel Stephanie particularly matches me. But for me to feel that way, it must mean that I have attached some stereotypes to the name. The truth is that I always think of Stephanies as being kind of perky and blond and maybe not too bright which isnt exactly me. It is funny because I know a few people named Stephanie who arent like that at all. I mean for heaven’s sake, *I* am named Stephanie and I am not like that. Oddly, I have no stereotypes about the name Lynne. Lynne is just my name and to me, it means ME.