russian classes are postponed YET AGAIN! grr!
well, i've been neglecting this site a bit lately, but i have just cause- that is, college applications. i should give due warning, though, that i'll be preoccupied with that same cause for a while to come yet. it's the same frustrating, shoot-me-now story as last year- despite my academic performance in australia and california (leader of the junior school, debate colours, literature colours, mistress of the orchestra, co-editor of the newspaper, golden state exam honors, honor roll, best speaker awards, etc), despite showing that i could match most american high school graduates from my SAT I score, and most recently that i'm not an illiterate numbskull from my SAT II scores (although i'm personally pissed off with my math score, more than i want to say right now), DESPITE home schooling myself for five years, living overseas and learning what it takes to be a good student and accomplished human being (and knowing that although i strive to be both, i fall short of the second far more than i should), not to mention my other pretty extracurriculars (teacher's aid at the orphanage in china, being published in the shenzhen daily newspaper, badminton and so on) and the fact that I AM ACTUALLY HUNGRY FOR AN EDUCATION...despite the fact that i KNOW what i am capable of, the plain fact of the matter is that i don't fit into the Bureaucracy's Idea of What a Student Should Look Like. i don't have teacher recommendations because i haven't had a teacher for five years. i don't have an official transcript dating beyond 1999 because i've schooled myself at home since then. i don't even have an official school year, because i usually spend a good three or four scattered months out of every year, if not more, traveling. and i don't have a high school counselor, i've never been a member of an official american high school sports team, and by doggies i never went to a prom either (although i doubt the last is required by admissions officers...or is it?).

i know that i'm a risk for any university to take. for all they know, i've been sipping from an umbrella-decorated coconut shell filled with tequila, triple sec and lime for the past few years. i may not have as strong a footing in science or math that some university applicants might, but my SAT scores show that i'm not that far behind, if at all, besides which....well, i'd work twice as hard to make up any disparity, and then some, than any university applicant who's blase about their record. all they do is slam the door, over and over, in my face and i'm about ready to take out a whacking big bush knife for the purpose of hacking down said door. but beyond all the bullshit, i know that i'm what they're looking for. it comes down to this: i am a good, ambitious, eager student with a history to prove that, and a small unquenchable part of me still wants to believe that i can make my voice heard in this world.

dealing with my family and friends, people who know me and know what i want in life, is just impossible because they have no idea what these universities are asking for, and that (because of my extremely unusual history, which even given all of this, i still wouldn't trade for all the world) i can't provide the official niceties that admissions bureaucracies thrive on. those niceties COUNT. they're what ensure that an application actually gets perused, not tossed in the trash at first glance. i feel trapped in the middle of that stress, and then i turn around and nobody believes that things could be so difficult. they blow it off, with a 'pish-tosh, life's never been hard for you' (i'd like them to live overseas for five years, utterly alone, and repeat that while looking me in the eye). like dad, last year, who was so certain that i'd be accepted into the university of chicago that he almost refused to let me apply anywhere else, and then he agreed, grudgingly, to two (one of which DID toss my application in the trash on account of a bureaucratic issue (my high school (WHAT high school?) hadn't sent them copies of my transcripts...do i need to say anything else on the stupidity of bureaucracies?)).

anyway, i don't know what to do. i'm going to try handling these applications, and get those in ASAP. after that, i may need to 1) take a third SAT II and 2) do some university interviews. the second is pretty much set in stone (at this point, i need everything that might sway admissions officers in my favor), and i don't know about the first yet, or the order in which the two will happen. the only break i've had is that there's a small chance i might be able to take the third SAT II, if i decide to do so, here in atyrau instead of having to take three connecting flights to london again. the only thing i really want to concentrate on at the moment is wading through this endless paperwork.

book update: i've finished off bastiat, and started up brink lindsey's 'against the dead hand'. it's been really interesting so far, and although i disagree with a couple of his fundamentals, he seems to drive in the same direction that i do. i haven't really reached the meat of his arguments yet, though, so i don't want to say much except that he's made me rethink the intellectual roles of america and germany during the industrial revolution.

on an utter side note, seeing those naturally beautiful women with their long, skinny legs and perfect figures makes me want to kick them in the metaphorical nuts. (i'm always extremely depressed in that regard when i don't get my dose of gymming. sigh.)

i'm home again, and tomorrow i have to start work on college apps. jen emailed me today with a bunch of information for the site, so i spent the afternoon setting up the basics for her page. i'll have to flesh out the details with her later, when i have a better idea what kind of design she wants to follow.

so it's back to the routine for me. i stopped reading a week or so before we left, since i was studying so much and generally too stressed to focus even on bastiat's clever analogies. so here's my current reading list: human action, the foundation of morality, economic sophisms and a borges collection of fiction before bed. that's pretty much it, at any rate.

i've just been told off for having peanut butter and crackers upstairs. time for me to shower and dump said peanut butter over my head.

a tribe called quest
i've just started reading bastiat's 'economic sophisms', and i can really see where the foundation of several of hazlitt's ideas comes from. it's quite exciting, reading the original book that influenced hazlitt himself- besides which, bastiat is plain fun to read. he has this way of reducing complex problems to very simple explanations, and he's extremely witty.

i finished tuchman, just yesterday, and now i'm extremely eager to learn more about the first world war beyond the month of august and all that led up to the marne. i've found a couple of fantastic websites, and i'm slowly making my way through them. i wish there were more hours in a day.

in other news, schwarzy has, apparently, won the californian election. i couldn't be happier about that, although, judging from bustamante's concession speech, i kind of wonder whether he got the memo.

yay for being cold
i've discovered the wonder that is henry hazlitt, and i'm just about to embark on a bastiat reading experience. you know, after studying economics, reading certain eye-opening books and then applying that knowledge in order to analyze the situation for myself, it truly never ceases to amaze me that so many others are buying into economic fallacies that are so very easily discredited. hazlitt says the reason for this is that the discrediting process often requires an actual attention span from the public, not to mention a mere quarter of a brain (all right, so he was much kinder about it, but there's how i see it). seriously, people, how hard can it possibly be to see the repeatedly nasty effects of rent control, tariffs, price parity, minimum wage laws and all that other shit? it's a very simple exercise in logic combined with a basic grasp of economics, but people prefer to make themselves susceptible to the emotional exhortations of liberal politicians. here's the very first principle of economics: to consider all groups affected by any one incident, and to consider all trade-offs involved by any one decision. how difficult can that possibly be? even so-called economists often betray that one fundamental princple- hence keynes, for example. it's not higher math or rocket science, it is simply the ability to see things from an objective, logical perspective. pressure groups, though, are gravity wells of power and attention, so the typical story is that visible group A sways economic policy to the severe disadvantage of invisible group B...and people are left, standing around going 'duh?', wildly back-pedaling or deceitfully claiming that 'it's all capitalism's fault' when it was precisely the intervention in capitalism that landed them in such unexpected predicaments...although they SHOULD have been expected by anyone who understood the patterns of reality. claiming that minimum wage laws protect the innocent from exploitation and save jobs doesn't make it so (although it's very good in the Emotional Exhortation area with those who are easily deceived), especially in light of so much overwhelming, hard evidence to the contrary that certain people would rather bury in order to keep pursuing their personal agendas of attaining power. gah, people, read a book and use your brains.

something wicked this way comes...
...and his name is the taxman. or, if you prefer, hillary clinton, al gore, dick gephardt, tom daschle, etc. it never fails to amaze me...despite all evidence in decided favor of the tax policies of, for example, reagan (that is, tax-cutting and moving down the laffer curve), liberals (who had to steal that name from the british liberal party in order to smudge the true definition of the term 'liberal') are still able to convince the Blind Faith Anointed that tax increases are the way to go.