ok. and furthermore. while I'm on the subject. most of the places I applied to had nice, intelligible instructions on how to do it. like: "send us your portfolio. it has to be 30 slides". or: "send us your portfolio. it can't be bigger than a breadbox (or thereabouts)." fine. FINE. but one university, that I'll decline to name, had pages and pages of instructions on what I had to go through to earn the honor of being considered. I had to buy, specifically, a Kodak Transvue 80 slide tray. I had to load it with 20 slides (no more, no less) and GOD HELP YOU if any of them were incorrectly aligned or whatever. then (then!) came endless descriptions of how you had to wrap the slide tray in its original box and then label it, yadda yadda. I swear there were about 3 PAGES of this shit.

so fine, I'm always up for a challenge, but at 3:00am the morning before I had to bung it all in the post, I found that their directions DID NOT MATCH THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF THE SLIDE TRAY BOX. I had a box that opened up like a cereal box, right, like from one end, but they envisioned a sort of box that had a lid and a base, much like the boxes that contain popular board games such as "monopoly" or "candy land".

I found this to be both galling and frightening. frightening, as I had only a few precious hours to sort it all out, and galling, cuz they peppered their perversely baroque litany of imbecilic tasks with many declarations of how imperfections in your application would reflect on you, the applicant. BLEAH, I say! I had to cope with it as best I could, and I included little vector diagrams of the actual box vs. the theorized box they described in my cover letter.

BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!!!!! that's what I say to that. now I have to extract financial aid information from my parents. I love how they're all "yes, we support you, go to graduate school" but then as soon as I have to get a bit of somewhat sensitive information out of them to facilitate the process, they go all bananas on me and act defensive. I'm just trying to FILL OUT THE FORM. I'm sure there are many people out there whose parents just do this shit for them and that's that. not that I want that, no, I don't, I'd rather do in myself, but the level of uncooperative, shady crap I have to put up with doesn't in any way fit the situation.

total bullshit. at least I got GRASS GIS to compile on OSX through total geek hackery. not like you care but I thought I'd throw that one in there cuz who else am I going to share such accomplishments with? don't say "slashdot" or I keeya.

ok bye.

-fish