On Wednesday I came up to Boston for a few days to take care of everything I couldn't do from California this summer or wouldn't be able to do from Germany this fall. A lot is getting packed into these few days, and not all of it is very much fun.
Thursday I went to school to deal with lots of administrative issues. Most were tedious, but one is particularly concerning in that I don't think it will be satisfactorily resolved: (Edit 3/8/06: Actually, it was.)
I leave Boston on Tuesday. I leave the country entirely on the 29th. However, my financial aid loan disbursement - the money I really, really need to live on - won't be available until the first day of classes, or September 6. Normally what I've done in the past is, on the first day of classes, written a check for the outstanding balance owed to the school, and then they've handed over the loan check to me in its entirety so I have that money that day. But I won't be able to do that on September 6, because I will be several thousand miles away. So the financial aid office said the university can cash my loan check and then cut me one to refund the difference and then mail it to my mom, who will then be able to deposit into my account for me. That would be fine, except on Thursday I was informed that the school would probably take a week before writing it the new check, and then it would be several more days before it arrived in the mail. Meaning that I wouldn't see the money until mid- to late September.
This isn't going to work! I've been in school for two years, and any financial cushion I might have had to compensate for bad cash flow is pretty much gone. Already I've been begging and pleading with the dentists and doctors I saw this summer not to bill me until the fall, and trying to time charges to my credit card to hit the future billing cycles, but there's limits to how much I can rob Peter of to then stiff Paul on. And I think I'm going to be pushing those limits because of this delay.
What really infuriates me, however, is the complete lack of responsiveness from the school. Now, I should say that in theory BU could still come through for me. And I've talked to some helpful people in the law school (none of whom can control the situation, however). But I seem to be trapped in this nightmarish bureaucracy, where only because I'm doing this touted school program, I risk financial hardship because the university can't see clear to make whatever exceptions to its policies it needs to make in order to make sure I have the funds necessary to complete my studies in a timely way. For this I pay tens of thousands of dollars a year? Support me in doing this, dammit! Don't just throw up your institutional hands and say there's nothing you can do to make sure I can focus on my studies and not worry about bouncing checks and late fees. You can fix this, and I expect you to do so.
Anyway, with this and other stressful matters confronted on Thursday I felt like I spent the whole morning being shrill and whiny. Which may be an accurate assessment of my comportment -- not that it was unwarranted, however. It seems like ever since I decided to do this law school thing life has been non-stop nits. There's always new things to worry about, new things to do, new deadlines to meet. It's very wearing, and Thursday was a very wearing day.
Until the very end, when I went to a Huey Lewis and the News concert that night in the city, and got to watch it from the side of the stage. From a sound, and even visual, perspective it wasn't the best place to be, but it was so extraordinarily cool to be there and watch this fabulous performance be created from the inside out it hardly mattered. Plus I was so worn already it was easy to just get sucked into the moment. I was sort of at the right level of tiredness: subdued enough to not need to be scraped off the ceiling from excitement, but not so tired to be an imbecile... I stood there, in awed transfixion, loving every moment of the concert as it unfolded before by eyes.
And as the specialness of the situation dragged me away from my world of stresses and cleared my mind of all distractions a weird feeling came over me. And I recognized it as a foreign one I'd almost completely forgotten over recent years: contentedness. I was as plainly, uniformly, and undilutedly happy, just standing there, as I've ever felt in years.