Goodbye, California

Malone College never screwed me over. I have many friends who hated how the school dealt with them, but I never experienced this firsthand--the closest it came was when I had to miss out on taking Playwriting because of a scheduling conflict. I was content with Malone College, and would always recommend it to people.

Malone University has screwed me over. Despite the fact that it had been used as a Cross-Cultural credit before, despite the fact that every administrator and professor claimed to support me in going, despite the fact that classes with no actual Cross-Cultural interaction are on the official Gen Ed menu, the Gen Ed committee refused my petition to count LA toward my Cross-Cultural Gen Ed. I will not graduate late. I now have lost. I will finish out my Senior year at Malone University. I wish I could blame someone, but I can't--it's just the way things have gone.

I love all of my Malone friends--the one benefit of all of this is that I won't have to leave them. The Lord is faithful, and all will be well. I am only saddened that things have not gone as I hoped they would. Prayer for my peace of mind with this turn of events would be appreciated.

Another post that just tells you what I've been up to.

My computer is broken. Okay, so not "broken." But it no longer acknowledges that I have a CD/DVD drive. This is quite irksome to me. I only noticed it today, but it's been a couple weeks since I used it so I can't say for sure. Got any advice of how to fix it?

In other news, I got back early from this weekend's Forensics tourney a day early (sadly, because none of us made finals) and got to catch some extra Zs. I am almost 100% over my recent bout of illness, and am only slightly behind schedule academically.

I battled with the Gladiator group today, and am now conflicted in choosing between Forensics and Camp this next weekend. Camp, it's my only chance, period, before I leave for LA. Forensics, it's a big deal tournament, and I only have two more before I leave. Plus there's the whole "I'm on a scholarship" thing.

I wish this would lead to some deep insights, but I just haven't written in a while, and my journal is almost full, so I don't want to run out of space before I can get a new one.

Promise of the Future--Pictures of the Past

My close friends and regular readers will know that I'm a huge fan of the past/future dichotomy, especially in the Heritage/Destiny sense. So today was quite an enjoyable day for me. I went through some old stuff and found a bunch of notes I'd saved from high school. Most of them were from my friend Amanda, but there were one or two others as well. I decided to type them into my word processor, since the papers they were on were getting somewhat worn after years in storage. Rereading them to do so, I couldn't believe I was so dense that I didn't realize she had liked me until she admitted to it a couple years ago. Not that we would have worked out - I'm just shocked by the fact that I didn't see it.

After a little while spent in the past, I decided to transfer some of my notes from this year to my computer - this time I mean class notes, not notes from people - and have at present managed to completely record two of my classes in this way. But while I was working on this project, I swapped over to Firefox and checked my email. Sitting in my inbox was a message from LAFSC: I've been accepted.

I'm not free of any more work now. I still have a lot of work to do, getting my finances together, convincing Malone to deal with my Gen Eds the way I want them to, signing and mailing a couple forms... all sorts of formalities. But all of this work is under the promise of results, the lack of which is the reason I hate application process. And of course it isn't as if I'm just tossing Ohio a quick goodbye and never looking back. My relationship with Caroline is scarcely a week old, and we'll have about two months until I leave. But we decided when we started going out that I wouldn't bemoan my leaving for our sake.

This is not among the more reflective of my blogs, but then, they can't all be.

Rules of Dancing

I have discovered that I have certain rules for dances. I discovered that I had them some time ago, actually, but I have been refining them ever since. The rules are different depending on whether or not you have a date. If you have no date, the typical rule I have is just "Unless you have a valid reason not to dance (poor equilibrium, in pain, religious beliefs), you ought to dance with anyone who asks at least once." When you have a date, however, dancing is limited differently. My personal rules look something like this:

RULE 1: I will only dance...
1) with my date.
2) in a group.
3) by myself.

Therefore, I do not dance with anyone else, friend or otherwise, while on a date. I toyed with the idea of allowing "anyone my date tells me to dance with" on the list as well, but that has some unpleasant potential implications.

RULE 2: On any slow dance, I will make eye contact with my date, and I will never look over her shoulder at other dancers.

This is just plain rude. You're there with your date. Not the other dancers. She should have your complete focus. All the time.

RULE 3: I will not hold my date to the first two rules.

This took a lot of personal growth on my part to allow this, but I realize that other people do like to dance with friends, and it would be rather inflexible of me to insist on all of her attention for the entire night.

RULE 4: My date sets the level of intimacy for the dancing.

I never pull a date close if I don't know how comfortable she is with me. If she wants to dance close, we dance close. If she wants space, we dance with a reasonable distance between us.

These are what come to mind. It just seems like common courtesy to me. What about you, oh faithful readers?