(no subject)

Tonight's been so weird. I don't know how to talk about it though. *shrug*

So, the story of my loan for school. I went to New Horizons in the middle of last month to sign up for classes and a loan. I had a minor problem on my credit report, a matter of an 8 dollar hospital charge, that I took care of easily and brought the reciept in to New Horizons. Soon enough, I heard back that I'd been approved and needed to come in and sign paperwork. I made my appearance and found out that I had actually only been approved for 10,000 of the 16,500 that I needed. They didn't realize that because they'd never had a partial approval like that before and didn't notice it wasn't the full amount until looking closely at the paperwork. On checking into the matter, they found that my credit history, while not bad, is simply too short. I needed a cosigner for the full amount.

I didn't think that would be too difficult. We arranged a time for wooisme to come in with me and be a cosigner. Upon talking to her though, we realized that wouldn't work. (Something to do with the fact that her almost ex-husband has done, in short, evil things to her credit rating.) I decided I'd ask my parents instead. I got all their information from them and got it to the Tara at New Horizons so she could do credit checks. Soon enough, Tara told me that, though there were a few issues there, it would probably work out for me and she went ahead with submitting the loan with my mother as cosigner. It wasn't accepted.

By this time it was getting toward the end of the month and I was told that my account needed to get figured out soon or they would not be able to reserve my seat in the classes. I had another idea. There was enough money in the bank accounts (savings included) to just barely cover the remaining tuition. I suggested this possibility to Andrea, but she was against it, understandably. I continued to try to figure something out, all the while making frantic phone calls on a borrowed cell phone during lunch at work. (I finally got my own phone again, by the way.)

I had the idea to ask an old friend of my parents', and mine, Bob, to be the cosigner with me. He said that, though that wouldn't work out for him, he would instead simply lend me the 6,500 dollars at 3%. But, he wouldn't have it until a month or two from now when he recieves his severance check. Finally, after more conversing and phone tag between all parties involved, I went to New Horizons again today where they worked out exactly how that's going to work (I've got partial enrollment right now and they're saving seats for me until I have the rest of the money at which time I buy the rest of the classes with a discount), and I finally know for sure (or as sure as things can be) that I really will be going to school. That was all just so crazy... I'll be seeing Bob this weekend. I must thank him profusely. He's made one of my dreams possible.

*sigh* Tonight's been so crazy that, not only haven't I packed anything or gotten in any way ready to leave tomorrow morning, I haven't told anyone that the school situation has been resolved.

On the bright side, now that school is settled and I know where money is (and isn't) coming from, I ordered the parts for my new system so I'll have something to run XP on for school. And for some amount of personal use as well, admittedly. I mean, It's going to be over 4 times as fast as the system I'm typing this on. Gotta see how games run...

Sunday night (yes, that's back a way. Things have been really busy and I haven't updated), as Andrea and I sat and ate dinner, I finally felt comfortable enough to try some of the chocolate liquor that she got for me to try. I'd expressed an interest in possibly seeing what this whole 'alcohol' thing is like. (For those who don't know me, I don't drink. I have never drunk. The only two times I remember imbibing alcohol before this are the merest sip of plum wine at dinner with Andrea on the first night of Penguincon, and, before that, my first communion.) So many places that Andrea and I go, there is a large amount of social activity, not centered around alcohol, but highly involved with it. Sometimes, seeing people wandering about the floors of a con late at night, drinks in hands, happily sampling each other's beverages, I begin to feel like I'm missing out on an entire paradigm (is that a proper usage?) of social interaction.

Anyway, she bought me this little sample bottle of chocolate stuff that she thought I might like, and I tried some with dinner. It smelled good. It tasted ok, sort of like chocolate and sort of like cough syrup, or maybe it was just the burning. At first, I didn't feel like I had any sort of response to it and was vaguely disapointed. I was expecting something more. I did become slightly giggly after a bit. Oddly enough, it was a feeling I've experienced before. Sometimes, when I was in elementary school mainly and more rarely later on until dying out, I would sometimes have what I called a giggle fit. All of a sudden, something would trigger some sort of altered state in which I found everything someone said, absolutely everything, to be incredibly funny. (This has actually been duplicated to a greater extent in experiments by electrical stimulation of the brain, but for me it just happened sometimes.) For a time after dinner I felt somewhat the same way, though not to as great an extent as I remember, and I ended up giggling profusely over several livejournal entries I was reading.

Later on, as we watched the second half of Memento that we'd started the previous night, I found the slight fuzzy headedness that I still retained annoying when trying to watch the movie. As the tape played on I found myself just leaning against my sweetie and not paying attention, just being clingy. As it got to a point where I, being oddly sad and more than a little sniffly, began wishing I was a real dog so that I could lay my head in her lap and be comforted and she could pet my hair all night long, we realized that I probably wasn't going to be able to make much sense of the movie and just went to bed.

All in all, I have no real desire or intent to repeat this experience. I found the fuzzy headedness I experienced to be simply annoying when trying to think. At the same time, I find that some small part of me actually enjoyed it. This makes me just very slightly worried, because I'm used to figuring out why I feel the way I do about things, and I'm not sure I can figure that one out.

We watched the rest of Memento the next night. It's a very disturbing movie and I was fascinated, once I understood it, of the reverse chronological order of events. Also of note was the moment of recognition that came when the protagonist talked about it becoming easier and easier to fake that 'spark' of recognition when you know you aren't going to recognize the people that you should. Sounds very, very familiar.

Finally, I want to note that I read an entirely fascinating bookfrom Andrea's collection written by Raymond M. Smullyan and called The Tao is Silent. Despite whatever historical inaccuracies and circular logic that the Amazon reviews decry, I found that it is almost certainly the closest thing I have ever found to an expression of the philosophy and beliefs that I've found myself with. I have never been one to pick a philosopy/religion/belief system and follow it tenet by tenet. I have called myself an eclecticist for years. I take ideas that seem to work from anywhere I can find them and incorporate them. Actually, that's a mis-statement. When I find ideas that I have already, if unconsciously, incorporated into myself, expressed in better ways than I've been able to, I make a note of that. I don't believe in any one path to the truth. (It's just as likely to me that the truth is the path.) Though this probably deserves it's own entry (which I'm not sure I'm really up to wrting), I can say that, even in light of that, the philosophy I just read about is so close to the ideas that I have grown into over the course of my life, I am almost willing to call myself a Taoist. There are a lot of books in Smullyan's bibliography that I need to get a hold of so I can read more on this...

Happy year and a month to Andrea and I.