Oh, in other news, I got deferred from harvard. deferment is not a rejection as such, it's more like saying you're good, but they're not sure if it's good enough. that's fine. i think i've gotten over my initial feelings, which were intense disappointment and that awful sensation of being told you're not good enough. i wasn't so much upset that i wasn't definitely going to harvard, i was upset that they looked at me and didn't immediately see someone they wanted. they saw someone they might want, but they weren't sure. i'm not planning to wait around to find out if they graciously decide to accept me in april. fuck it! the guidance women told me "the next step" in this would be to send them a letter thanking them for deferring me and assuring them that i sooooo want to go to harvard. yeeeeaaaaah. i don't want to go there that much. i wanted to get in, that's what i wanted.....and that's not a good enough reason for me to suck up to their admissions people. i'd be lying if i told them that this was really something my dreams depended on. does it sound strange, that i wanted to be admitted more than i wanted to go there? i tried to explain this to someone who doesn't see academics the way that i do, and they didn't understand what the big deal was. i'm sorry....but it's the way i am, the way i was raised, the way i'll probably always be. if they never understand that, that's ok, because i'll never see things their way either. and don't get me started on those people who say that knowledge you get from a book is useless compared to knowledge you get in the "real world". name me one famous philosopher, no matter how radical, who didn't go through a classical education before they thought up their own theories and i'll eat my history book. education provides a framework and a foundation upon which rational thought and creativity are based. nietzsche was a professor of philology, whatever the hell that is. kierkegaard had a doctorate in philosophy. descartes taught geometry at the sorbonne and later to queen christina of sweden. they didn't get to high school and declare the subjects taught them mundane and unworthy of study. wisdom might be found by the experienced mind, but it's the educated mind that puts it to use. and yes, the things they are making us study, like the global economy and NAFTA and the WTO and GATT, are horribly boring and make my head hurt. but they're necessary to understand the world we live in. we can't insulate ourselves from reality.
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