Taken from another blog: Not as bad as it could be....

The top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre Me and victorian novels don't get along very well
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand is a nutjob
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno Dante's Inferno....right?
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Labels: books

I love my department. Or School rather, it's a School of Music. The people are helpful, they cut through the red tape.....the problems start whenever you deal with anyone outside of the school of music.

And now for another Saga--Tales from Financial Aid (cue spooky music).

Whenever I think everything is arranged with this office, I'm usually wrong. Why? Because Financial Aid has the communication skills of an antisocial squirrel. Cue this week. Summer 1 is coming up, and because of all of the Stuff I'm doing this summer, I took out lots of money.....enough to pay for everything I have to do this Summer without worry. And then I looked at my account summary online. I have less than half of the money alloted for me. So calmly, I send an email to the financial aid office, thinking that like most things having to do with financial aid, it was just going to take a while to get through the tape. 48 hours later, two days before cancellation for non-payment I get a cheery little email from someone in their office that reads:

"We did have to make adjustments to your awards since you are only attending one summer term and you received some scholarships, we had to reduce your award. You should be able to view these awards online at www.financial aid sucks.com in a few days."

So.....the only reason that I have any inkling that I might be vastly underfunded this summer is because I sent you an email asking about it? When the f*** was someone going to tell me so that I could fix it before it became a crisis??? So, trying to rein in my fit of panic, because these people are better dealt with when you act like you've taken a few too many happy pills, I call the financial aid office/send them an email. 26 minutes later, I hang up my phone, never having actually talked to a human being, but hearing the same light jazz remix about 20 times. The email STILL hasn't been answered as of the time of this writing, so I walk to financial aid and ask my questions to a kid who looks old enough to be a Freshman......maybe. She tells me that if I register for Summer 2, my award would go back up, but it would be a HUGE hassle for them to fix the award issues. At about this point I wanted to yell: Do I really and truly look like I care how much of a hassle it is for you? Do you know how much of a hassle it'll be for me to have to cancel conference appearances, and workshops, and to bike to Mississippi because gas prices are insane?!?!?!? And again, the question comes to mind: Why didn't they tell me before it became a crisis? So fast forward to me sitting in the library, having sent about 3 different emails to different people about it, trying to figure out exactly what the rules are of this freaking game. Why? Because I don't mind playing the game.....that's half of what graduate degrees are about. Someone just has to tell me the f***ing rules so that know what to do. And now my favorite part.....I get to wait for responses......goody.

Inevitably the end of the Spring semester is followed by a day of doing anything I want to. Yesterday was full of trying to mop up the last of the grade inputs for the freshmen, helping Roomie cart home a car full of ceramics (of which I got some AWESOME stuff which I will hopefully post pictures of soon! :) ), and then pub session and home to eat junk food and watch movies. Got up late this morning and made waffles (with the egg replacer stuff, as Roomie has gone Vegan) and hashbrowns with Roomie. :) Drank coffee, watched Gilmore Girls, played tunes, and talked summer plans (both of us have applied to the same programs, and neither of us is sure what'll be up for the summer). Now I'm lounging around, reading and ordering takeout and planning to watch yet more movies as soon as the food arrives. All in all, completely unproductive, but incredibly good for my mental health.

The summer and next year are looming in the distance with worries, but I'm choosing to ignore that for today and enjoy. Also, it helps when the weather is perfect outside and you can open the windows!