owie!

[verbminx]

I am a little ball of cramps today... have been eating chocolate and alternating my heating pad between my lower back and my abs. Watched Tenchi and Weakest Link and Daria, and talked to Autumn for a few minutes earlier. I've knit more rows onto the fuzzy black scarf I'm doing. I hadn't done any knitting during most of last week. I also made some headway in The Magic Mountain.

FINALLY received a "request for further info" response card from the MFA School in Boston, which is affiliated with Tufts and trains ppl in studio art, design, art history, and so on. I doubt that my current grades are good enough to get into Tufts, though... how much more Wrong School purgatory am I going to go through? I've been at the same 2-year school since 1994 (1992 if you count dual-enrollment classes I took in high school). Now I am finally old enough to be an independent student financially, but I've been so miserable at my current school that my grades aren't what they could be. Sigh. I guess we'll see.

I started reading my friends' entries again last night. I'm not catching up - just picking a starting point and reading from there, and backtracking on a person-by-person basis if I seem to have wandered in during the middle of some major crisis.

My uncle's fiancee... who I usually like even tho her hijinks aggravate me... has decided to "go vegan". Is forcing her already malnutrition-suffering 7-yr-old son to join her. Of course they cheat a lot on social occasions. But I'm wondering who will develop bald spots and pernicious anemia first. (I'm not saying that everyone who is vegan has these problems, just that in this situation I think there's a good likelihood, for various reasons I won't go into here.) Hopefully the cheating will stop my small cousin from developing horrible diseases.

I'm hungry... I've eaten nothing but cookies and chocolates today. I'm going to eat some nice chicken and rice soup and bed up with my books and knitting. I situated my new shelf a few hours ago and have put some books on it already, so I think I will also do a little more in that direction, and drink some tea.

Comments

[aquagirl.livejournal.com]

hope your cramps alleviate, tea always helps me!

what are you interested in studying? i attend the art institute of boston, right around the corner from mfa. it's a small, friendly school that cares much more about talent than grades, and it's less than half the cost of the mfa! you can find out more here:

aiboston.edu

feel better!
: )

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

i think i may have better grades than talent. my major right now is graphic design, but i am thinking of changing it yet again to something with art history and museum studies.

my problems are more like... i was the total brainiac of my last art history class, but i got a C because i missed the last test because of all the stuff with my stepfather dying and me getting sick. all my grades up to that last 0% were between 98%-110%. I was supposed to take the test this past fall, but I wasn't well enough. I'm really bummed because I did so well in the class otherwise, and it hurts me as a potential AH major, you know? :)

(i'm also thinking of doubling my GD major with an English major, which is a major reason I am looking at Northeastern). but definite thanks for the AI info... I will check it out.

Re:

[aquagirl.livejournal.com]

yeah, aib doesn't have much in those areas, so i guess northeastern or something would be better for you. good luck in whatever you decide on!
: )

uh, yikes.

[jet.livejournal.com]

veganism at age 7 seems like unjust punishment if you ask me. virtually anything a 7 year old would like (and need, in my opinion) will wind up containing something with an animal based product in it.

poor guy.

my son decided to be vegetarian on his own recently, and he's six. he's stuck to his guns steadfastly, but i am requiring him to eat fish a few times a week because of protein etc. plus i dont fancy eating tofu, etc. on a nightly basis.

i can't imagine trying to arrange vegan meals with variety and enough of the essential nutrients for a growing kid. that would take alot of planning and research. and the kid would invariably wind up hating it.

so i hope little cousin winds up getting the proper nutrition. can you take him healthy little protein rich treats from time to time? or maybe talk mom into lightening up the restrictions? maybe just going vegetarian or something?

there are tons of great art schools that DONT use grades as a criteria for admission. which is nice for situations like yours. i would just do some major web searching and checking admissions requirements for anywhere that sounds interesting. also try emailing (or phoning) admissions advisers to find out how much they focus on GRADES... conversely, if you have your heart set on MFA, try to go to school for a couple terms and get your grades turned around, i'm talking notable improvement, lots of schools will be sympathetic. and take all your pre-req classes that you can ahead of time...i went to an intellectually snobby little tiny school for a time and enjoyed alot of things about it. now i go to a medium sized state school with all sorts of different types of people and study something entirely different. i thought i would hate the school full of "average" people, but i really don't. surprisingly, i like it. AND tuition is about a third of what i paid at the tiny school of my dreams. i like that aspect of it alot. and its much more relaxed academically. i can breathe and eat and do stuff which is really essential to daily life.

incidently, that private school didn't consider grades for admission purposes, and didn't give grades. interesting place.

so... good luck to you. post updates on the college thing, i like to know about schools and who goes where.

Re: uh, yikes.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

my cousin lives in OH. his mother is weird and often forces a lot of her own (and my uncle's) eccentric stuff on my cousin. he's very maladjusted for his age. they're not broke, but he wears, like, thrift store clothes that are a size too small for him, and a weird hat his mom designed. before this "vegan" bit, she gave him peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for dinner every night. my mom stayed with them for a while this past fall & said that she thought he went hungry a lot.

as far as the grades... hm. my response to aquagirl above contains some of it. but in general, for me, i want my academic stuff to be looked at. basically, i was an overachiever in HS (national merit scholar, captain of county academic challenge team the year we did the best we'd ever done at state, soprano section leader in choir, gold medal on national latin exam, blue ribbons at state French, lettered in music and academics, blah blah blah), and was still ill... i had to drop out for a few months in 11th grade, even, and be home-tutored by a county appointee. i went to a public HS that is considered as good as most private schools. blah blah blah. anyway, I was really well-behaved and almost all I did was my schoolwork and my singing rehearsals and things related, like reading and being in community theater.

then when i was trying to go to colleges, because my absences had affected my grades (school system had an attendance policy) and because i spent so much time doing makeup work that i didn't really have time to write a ton of scholarship essays, and for other reasons, i didn't get a lot of scholarship money... certainly no full scholarships. i did have the Nat'l Merit, which is a variable amount of money only good for your declared first-choice school.

i was set to go to Emory, which is in Atlanta and is known as "The Harvard of the South"... and I had to report my stepfather's income to financial aid. and he just REFUSED to contribute a cent, but his income knocked me into a bracket where even if i had taken out all available personal loans and grants, there was still a $16K/yr family contribution. They were also giving me the minimum my NM scholarship would allow, because of the financial bit. i couldn't go anywhere that didn't have a $0/yr family contribution, as I was on my own, but couldn't actually be declared "independent"... so I ended up just hanging around until I turned 24 this past May. I should be in school as an indie this year, but I've been too ill.

Meanwhile... I just really, really hate my current school. You could say I haven't taken it seriously or haven't applied myself, and in some cases (esp when I went back in 96 after taking a year off to work and become a psychotic goth chick) that's true, but there have also been a lot of extenuating circumstances with home stuff, illness, blah blah blah. The best thing I can say is that I was at the Wrong School but I had nowhere else to go until I hit the "independence" age. I have had an AA for a while, but I got it when my major was English, and I've been going to school to get my graphic design prerequisites. I like my school's art department, incidentally, I just don't like the schizoid FL statewide Graphic Design transfer requirements.

so... I would kinda LIKE it if they looked at my academic stuff. I just want them to understand... I have a lot of untapped potential, I got screwed over by my parents, I've been at the wrong school, weird stuff happens to me, etc.

*sigh*
(very weird combo of bragfest and pityparty, huh?)