Fun and Frustration, but not in that order

Last night, I was really tired, so I went to bed at eleven, which is pretty early for me. I had a bunch of stuff to get done today, so I set my alarm for 8:30, figuring nine and a half hours of sleep would be more than enough. Well, 8:30 came around and I was still tired, so I set the alarm for 9:30. An hour later, the alarm went off, I hit snooze three times, then reset it for 10:30. At 10:30, I hardly even opened my eyes before turning the alarm off altogether. I woke up at one in the afternoon. :( Boo, what a waste of a day! You can say I needed the sleep all you want, but 14 hours seems a little extensive no matter how tired you are!

So, slightly disgruntled at myself for having slept so long, I got up to do the stuff I needed to get done, the first of which was filling out the FAFSA. I've never bothered applying for one before. I started to, one year, but it asked me for a bunch of information about my parents' income, which was silly since they don't pay for my college at all, and when I called and asked them for the information, they didn't have it on hand, so I just didn't bother. But this year, I decided to try and fill it out for reals.

Now, on my tax forms, I'm claiming myself independent from my parents. I've lived away from them for over four years now, paid for my own food, housing, tuition, books, car, and so on. I'm pretty well independent from them. But on the FAFSA, it didn't ask whether I was a dependent, or how I was claiming myself on my tax documents. Instead, it asked if I was over 22. Then it asked if I was going for a Master's degree. Then it asked if my parents were deceased before I was 13, or if I had been declared by a court to be an emancipated minor or an "unaccompanied homeless youth." I had to answer no, of course, so the form decided that I was a dependent and that I had to supply information about their income. Grrrrr! I am NOT a dependent!

So I called Dad and spent ages on the phone with him trying to get information from THIS year's tax form, which he hasn't done yet and which is completely irrelevant since he doesn't pay for my school. The fact that my phone decided to be stupid and lose the call every five minutes made the whole process even more annoying, coupled with the fact that Dad kept saying, "You must have filled something out wrong because this shouldn't be relevant," despite the fact that I KNOW it shouldn't be relevant, but I had double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple checked it.

After eleventy billion years, I finally got Dad's information filled in, then hung up and filled in my information, which didn't take nearly as long because I've already done my taxes, I just haven't sent them in yet. Finally finished everything, tried to send it, and guess what! It wouldn't let me submit the form without my mommy or daddy's PIN (which is the government's form of an internet signature). Bah! WHY? They have nothing to DO with how I pay for school! So I called up Mom to see if she knew her PIN off the top of her head, and she said, "I have no idea what a PIN is, but I do know that your sister applied for FAFSA and got turned down because her parents make too much money."

.....WHAT!!?!?!?! Not FAIR!!! They SERIOUSLY need a question on there asking how much you pay for your OWN schooling and how much your parents pay, and if you're paying more than 90%, they should forget the whole stupid "We need your parents' information" crap, but NOOOOO, they just ASSUME that EVERYBODY is spoiled enough that their mommies and daddies pay for their schooling because that's what happened to every stupid politician in the stupid government! Rant rant rant I HATE the government!

So yeah. I was really mad. Then I called my sister and she confirmed what Mom had said, but Dad gave me his PIN anyway and I went ahead and sent in the application. Maybe there's like a 0.1% chance that they'll take pity on me when they see the very small number of dollars I currently have in my bank account... but I'm not counting on it. More likely, they'll say, "Yeah, well, you supplied this number wrong, so we're throwing you in jail and also fining you $20,000 which we know you don't have, but we're sadistic jerks, so we're doing it anyway."

Grrrrrr!

So then I tried to fill out my dividend application, which I finished filling out, but I don't have the required documentation I need to mail in with it on hand, so I can't get that out for a little while. But I was still annoyed, so I decided to take a break from government stuff and log onto Facebook for a while. And this is where my day turned up.

My friend Quinby had written a message on my wall saying he would be home all day if I wanted to come over and borrow his bike pump. Now, to back up a bit, Quinby is a guy who was in my German class last semester, and is in my German class again this semester. From the first time I saw him, I got the feeling that he was the kind of guy who's really really awesome to hang out with once you can get him out of his Shy Shell. He's really tall and skinny, has a really long, perfectly straight black ponytail that I'm enormously jealous of (like probably every other girl he's ever met), and always wears an orange jacket thingy. I've been trying to convince him to come to juggling practice since September or October, and was finally successful this last Friday. It was a lot of fun teaching him, partly because every time he started to lose control of his balls, he would make this funny high-pitched squeaky noise. Anyway, I mentioned that I would start bringing the unicycle if I could get the flat tire pumped up and he agreed to let me use his bike pump. Hence the Facebook message today. Okay, fast-forward again.

So, needing a break from my annoying form-filling-out endeavors, I headed over to Quinby's apartment, which is actually just a few rooms down, since we live in the same apartment complex. Borrowed his bike pump, but then I wasn't sure exactly how full the tire should be. So when I brought back the pump, I went ahead and brought the unicycle too, and my first words when he opened the door were, "Okay, I probably should have just brought the unicycle over in the first place..." So he stepped outside (it was warm today--23 ABOVE zero) and we talked about unicycling for a bit, and then martial arts, and then video games, and then his roommate came out and said, "Hey, I have a better idea. How about you both come inside where it's warm and have hot cocoa?" Wait, what? Cocoa? Chocolate? I'm there!

So I spent all afternoon hanging out with boys! :D I love their apartment. It's so crammed with random stuff you can hardly move anywhere, and there's a big mess covering every surface. Also, there's tape all over the ceiling left over from their Halloween decorations. Overall, the apartment has over ten times the personality that ours does. Ours is kept pretty clean, and we have next to nothing in our living room. No drumsets or old computers running archaic video games that everyone takes turns playing or huge Wall-E eyes sitting above the refrigerator. Quinby, Robert, Adrian and Chris act more like brothers than acquaintances the way my roommates and I do (partly because Amanda can't understand sarcasm even when I explain to her that I'm being sarcastic). They mock each other left and right and play games and squish each other behind doors. I'm jealous. Also, I'm tempted to find excuses to hang out with them more. And I was totally right: Quinby's really cool when you can get him to... heh, let his hair down. (That's funny, you see, because he has such long hair, and it's always in a ponytail. Except when it's not.)

Oh! So in the video game Quinby and his roommates were playing, I noticed Quinby's character was named High Priest C'Thun. Zoh my gosh, WoW reference!!! His roommate Adrian (or maybe Robert... I keep getting the two confused) also plays WoW, so we talked about Ahn'Qhiraj a bit. Adrian (or Robert) started out on Horde, then converted to Alliance, except he became a druid. Bah, fail! (Druids are cool, except they're op and they ninja my phat rogue lewtz.)

So yeah. I had a lot of fun. Also, the unicycle is now ridable. Ohhh, AND Quinby said he'd come back to juggling practice! :D I hope he keeps coming, because he's fun! We should be friends.

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