Bradley's Old Fashioned Weblog

Category: General Updates

Commentary on people, places, things, the news, current events, etc.

  • New York State VTA and Financial Aid Hell

    New York State VTA and Financial Aid Hell

    Going Back to School

    A few months ago I started thinking about how I could best go about finishing my Master’s Degree. I had this idea that I could keep working and just take classes in the evening. I had a 9 AM to 6 PM job and if I was patient, I could take one Master’s Class at a time. I would need to pick one that began at 7 PM, to hopefully give myself enough time to make it. Hopefully, I would be able to deal with work, the fatigue from work, class, classwork and the field papers (in lieu of a thesis) all at the same time. I was planning on doing that, because I’d become accustomed to having plenty of spending money available.

    The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it wasn’t going to happen for me. I did take a class after work in the Fall of last year and I got a 4.0, but it was exhausting and I was frequently late, which really bothered me. I had to apologize profusely to the professor and explain what was going on. I didn’t want to go through that again. I didn’t want to rely on having a professor that was flexible with attendance and that would only grade me based on the work I turned in. I wanted to do it right. Also, I was at a point where things were getting out of hand at work. There was a change in management and the work requirements were spiraling into a micro-managed Hell, so I decided to move on. Today is going to be my first day of classes this semester. Pacific War, 4:50 PM. I’m looking forward to it.

    The last few days have been mostly about winding down and getting ready for the semester. My last day at work was Monday. I tried to put in full effort, but by then I was more interested in forwarding emails and documents that I thought were worth keeping to a private email address. You never know when you might need copies of performance indexes and reviews after all. I did a little grocery shopping yesterday, but mostly tried to relax and decompress. Leaving that job… I felt like I’d been wearing a dirty blanket for a year and I’d finally shrugged it off my shoulders. It felt like I was actually feeling the sun for the first time in a long time, and that I was feeling life again. There was a lot of stress involved in what I was doing, but that’s a story for another time I suppose.

    Why hasn’t my VTA been applied to my CUNYFirst balance?

    This past Tuesday, I had to deal with a Financial Aid issue. I had applied for the New York State Veteran’s Tuition Assistance through the HESC website. I did it while doing the TAP application. Apparently, we made too much last year for me to qualify for FAFSA or TAP, but VTA is something I’m entitled to as a Veteran of the US Military. I kept checking my school’s student portal, CUNYFirst, but the award wasn’t applied towards the total balance due. I thought that somehow, they might have overlooked it and didn’t apply it, so I went up to City College to get in line to talk to someone in the Financial Aid office.

    I got to the administrative building at 9:45 AM and pulled a ticket for F085 at 9:50 AM. A few minutes after I sat down, F020 was called. I didn’t think I would be there that long. I figured, an hour or so tops. Two hours and twenty minutes later, I was still sitting, and the number being called was just F037. I have no clue how they were managing the queues. There was a machine that printed out a ticket with a different letter number based on what your issue is. Some queues were being called very quickly, but an “F” queue number was only called about once every 20 minutes. It was absurd. I decided to go have lunch at the Chinese place on Amsterdam Ave.

    Just by chance, I decided to eat my lunch in the Veterans’ office in Wingate Hall. While I was eating, the receptionist asked me if I needed any help. I briefly explained what was going on and she recommended I talk to Chris, the Veterans Adviser. Talking to him hadn’t crossed my mind, because I was out of Post 9/11 GI Bill funds. I had burned through them finishing a BA with a double major and most of my MA. I figured it couldn’t hurt, though. Even if he told me I just had to go wait, maybe he could pull some strings and get things done more quickly for me.

    Chris let me know that VTA isn’t like TAP and it won’t show up as an award in CUNYFirst. It is something that he should be made aware of so he can send an email to a person who handles those awards. He said that awards for VTA are usually applied about halfway through the semester and whatever the difference was, I would be responsible for. I asked him if he had any suggestions for how to handle the balance due against my account right now. He said not to worry about it. He said that because I’m a Veteran, my classes won’t be dropped during this process. He did remind me that I would be responsible for any difference between the award amount and the tuition due, and it would impact my ability to enroll in classes in future semesters, but that makes sense anyway. It was a weight off my shoulders and I can walk into this semester focused on just getting my degree done.

    Perhaps most importantly, Chris let me know that I didn’t have to go back to sitting in that ridiculously long Financial Aid queue. I could save the rest of my day and head home. I still can’t get over the queue only going up by 17 people in two and a half hours. Another reason to be thankful to the Veteran’s Administration, I suppose. I don’t have to deal with that. /salute

    The Takeaway

    If you showed up here trying to figure out what’s going on with your New York State Veteran’s Tuition Assistance, don’t go to your Financial Aid office. VTA is applied halfway through the semester but is more than likely going to require some input from your Veterans Adviser. Go directly to him or her. Otherwise, you might spend 7 hours in a Financial Aid queue just to be told to go talk to your Veterans Adviser. Check with your adviser regarding your school’s policies about carrying a tuition due balance and dropped classes in regards to Veterans and Veteran tuition awards.

  • Keeping Busy, Trying to Be Productive

    Keeping Busy, Trying to Be Productive

    So, I’m trying to figure out how to blog casually again. I’ve been so busy over the last few years. It’s odd, really. When I’m doing more and theoretically have more to talk about, I have less time to blog about it. So, things have been pretty busy. Besides that, I got so used to writing analytically that I think I almost forgot how to blog and just write my opinion on something. What I mean is, I’ve gotten so used to writing with citations and research that just throwing an opinion out there into the digital void without backing it up seems off. Well, I guess blogging isn’t really about that anyway, though I’ve been publishing a lot of my old essays and research papers here, so I’m going I’m going to try to breathe some fresh life into this website.

    Besides trying to figure out how to write a blog post again, I’ve been working full time. I also still have two MA courses left to complete for my MA in History. We also moved recently, so life has been pretty busy, especially over the last two months or so. This is a “do nothing” weekend for us so we can chill and try to recover a bit. The last few weekends we had guests up and we were putting together furniture and trying to get our new apartment organized. That’s not to say it hasn’t been fun, but I guess you have to take a break every now and then to just recuperate.

    //This post was originally typed up about 3 weeks ago, but I was having issues with an HTTP error when trying to add images, so here we are today, finally getting this up and off the ground.

    If you haven’t gone to see Wicked the Musical, it’s definitely worth the time and money if you find yourself in New York City, or another city where the show is being run. It was really interesting and was a much more complicated take on the Oz story than I was expecting.

    Things that we’re interested in doing over the next few months:

    1. Sorting out our diet and trying to eat more healthy again. We picked up a Nutribullet so we can have a quick, fun and easy way to get more fruits and vegetables into our diet.
    2. Find a way to get more exercise.
    3. Go to more Broadway shows. We want to take advantage of where we live by seeing the live shows that we keep talking about but never quite make it out to see. Shows on our list are Les Miserables, The Book of Mormon, The Lion King, and The Crucible.

    I don’t see any reason why we should wait until the New Year to try to make some new resolutions.

  • Camaraderie

    Camaraderie

    “When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.”

    — Clarence Darrow (The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow)

    Just something I found meaningful recently, while thinking about my first few months at a new job. We were getting ready to do a team shuffle, something the company does regularly. I’m not sure if shuffling teams really builds camaraderie, except in the sense that we extend our personal networks over the entire floor, rather than becoming insular as groups. Maybe that’s the point? Either way, it’s an opportunity to meet new people and hey, I have a window seat now. Granted, I’m looking back into the concrete canyons of the financial district, but at least there’s fresh air and no one on my left. It’s quiet, too. Hopefully my new team is just as great as the last.

  • Shall We Play A Game? (WarGames, 1983)

    Shall We Play A Game? (WarGames, 1983)

    I am reading a book called Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. It’s about a bleak but believable future when the Earth has nearly exhausted its natural resources. People flock to the cities to be near reliable infrastructure and mostly live in sprawling shantytown areas called “the stacks”, so-called because they are constructed of trailer homes, RVs and even shipping containers that have been mounted into steel, vertical frames. Jobs are scarce and food is rationed. There is very little hope in the average person’s life for rising above the poverty level.

    To escape this reality, people log into a 3D simulation called The OASIS. That stands for something, but I can’t remember what right now. Access requires a visor and haptic feedback gloves at a minimum, but there are higher end devices like full body suits that offer greater sensory feedback. The whole simulation is free to use and is maintained by charging real money for teleportation fees to reach other worlds and areas. The majority of commercial and leisure activity shifts to the OASIS and eventually, even school is held within the OASIS, since it eliminates travel costs and the software prevents misbehavior during class.

    The creator of the OASIS dies as the sole owner of Gregarious Simulation Systems. He has no heir and creates an elaborate contest built into and hidden within the OASIS to determine who will win everything. The prize is open to anyone, but making it through the contest requires extensive knowledge of the 1980s, a decade that the OASIS’s creator was particularly obsessed with. The book takes place in (I think) the 2040s, but the promise of hundreds of millions of dollars for completing the quest first causes the entire world to become interested in the 1980s again.

    Because the book relies so heavily on 1980s pop culture for its plot, there is a lot of name dropping. I was born in the early 80s so some of it is familiar to me. Other stuff I read about and it feels familiar, like going to the arcade and dropping quarters in a machine, or using pay phones in the street, or mentions of bands that I recognize and still remember hearing on the radio regularly in the early 90s. I wonder if this book would even be interesting to anyone who wasn’t born in or near the 80s? It’s nostalgic in a way, but I don’t know that I would care to read this book if it was based on, say, the 50s or 60s.

    In addition to reminding me of a lot of cool stuff, like Atari game cartridges, Ready Player One is also introducing me to some great stuff that I’d never seen or heard of before, like this movie called “WarGames”, produced in 1983. After noticing the movie title in the book I found it on Netflix and watched it.  It has a great Back to the Future vibe to it. There’s this shift in movie and TV now, where everything seems to be post-apocalyptic or focused on the imminent demise of the human species. In the 80s movies were about progress; now people seem to be fixated on decline, myself included. I can’t wait for the next season of The Walking Dead to start, for example.

    Anyhow, if you get a chance, both the book and the movie are worth checking out.

  • Overnight Storms in Manhattan

    I woke to the sound of rain and thunder and saw flashes of lightning. I love rain and storms in general and I especially love the cool air coming in my window right now. The heat has been wretched the last few days. I’m going to enjoy the lower temperature for the rest of the day.

  • Status Post

    Status Post

  • Our Cats Are Still Awesome

     I was looking at Dapper a few days ago and I was thinking about how she and Thumper have been with us through the years. They’re almost 7 now. We’ve been married for almost 7 years as well. They’re still constant sources of amusement and happiness.

    Cheesecake is new and a pain in the ass because he’s always sick and he over-eats constantly, but he’s very affectionate otherwise. 

  • Use it til it Breaks

    I went up to 181st Street today to drop off a return at UPS. A book I ordered from Amazon didn’t arrive in time so I had no use for it and figured I might as well get my money back. I love Amazon’s return policies. The refund was processed as soon as the item was scanned in by UPS.

    While I was walking down the street, I overheard a conversation between a girl and her mother. We were standing near each other on a corner while waiting for the light to change. The mother was telling her daughter that she was going to get her a new phone in heavily accented English. The daughter, who spoke English without an accent, told her mother that the phone she has works fine and she doesn’t need a new one. This escalated almost into an argument with the daughter telling her mother that her phone works just fine and she’s going to use it until it’s broken before she gets a new one, because she doesn’t see the point of replacing something that still works.

    I had a few thoughts about this. Was the mother a first generation immigrant and the daughter born here? Is it a conflict of identity? What I mean is, does the mother see herself as being American through participation in consumer culture while the daughter doesn’t feel the need to? Is it a result of first generation immigrants trying to accumulate material wealth as a response to a previous life of (by US standards) deprivation? Maybe the daughter is more concerned with the planet or the ecosystem and the mother doesn’t understand or care about those things. Or maybe the mother just really wanted to get something nice for the girl and doesn’t know what else to buy her.

    Anyway, I’m glad it’s getting warmer again. This winter was like a long period of hibernation. I’m looking forward to going out and exploring the city again.

  • Make the Historiography Madness Stop

    IMG_5575.JPG
    I’m so not feeling this paper anymore. It’s interesting but it’s not that interesting that I want to write about it. I guess that’s what I get for picking a topic I thought would be easy rather than fascinating. It’s about Japanese colonialism in Korea and Japanese-Korean relations.

    The notes in the picture are ones I wrote while reading Mark Caprio’s Japanese Assimilation Policies 1910-1945. So ready for it to be done.

  • It’s Science!

    It’s Science!

    The Inorganic Carbon Cycle
    The Inorganic Carbon Cycle

    And I’m just not that into it. I was having a conversation with a friend recently and we agreed that humanities are better than science any day of the week. I realize the irony of conveying that message using a device and medium created by modern science, but I suppose I’ve always enjoyed studying ideas and social constructs more than things.

    I’m studying climate change this summer in the last required “core” course for my BA. I had a few choices. I could have taken biology, chemistry or an earth science course on global warming and climate change. I wanted to take biology, but the course was too late at night. Chemistry I would have failed, I’m sure. I hated chemistry in high school. Something about memorizing the periodic table and atomic weights seemed completely pointless to me. When would one be doing science and not have a copy handy to use as a reference guide if needed, really?

    Anyway, there are things about this class that I find interesting. First of all, I agree with the basic premise that global warming is a real and happening (not in the fashion sense) thing. The planet is getting warmer. It has done this in the past, but this time it’s different because we’re converting all of the carbon that used to be underground into carbon that’s in the atmosphere, which causes the planet to retain more heat. I have a hard time understanding how people can look at the multiple data sets available for temperature change, change in carbon in the atmosphere, and see the huge spike associated with increased human activity (burning fossil fuels, creating gases) and brush it off as a joke or hoax. When Miami is underwater, I wonder if people will still be claiming it’s a conspiracy?

    Beyond that, it’s pretty cool to see how volcanoes and the El Nino weather pattern affects global temperatures. Or to examine the what-ifs of climate change. Famine, drought, flooding, shifting coastlines and floating cities. It might even be sort of cool, except for all of the people that would die along the way.

    The actual mechanics and math of climate change is tedious. It is painful to sit down and look through long charts of numbers, plugging them into formulas and whatnot to get measurements of changes in temperatures.

    Anyway, there are about two weeks left in this class. Then I’ll start getting myself together for Fall semester.