No reason to be found why reason did fail

[starlady]

Another day after an election, another day to have VNV Nation's "Honour" on repeat (I have the album cut and the Juno Reactor remix. In 2004 I had the Juno Reactor remix on repeat for, I kid you not, a week straight). Gay marriage was crushed in Maine, which is just disgusting (who else thinks that James Madison would not approve of putting the rights of the minority up for the approval of the majority at the polls? Yeah, that's right). Just enough of my fellow New Jerseyans, and people in Virginia, made the stupid, easy choice and elected Republicans (nothing wrong with them per se, but our governor-elect has absolutely no real clue how to fix what's wrong with our state. I'm not qualified to speak about Virgina). My GRE math score dropped 70 points, putting me squarely in the 50th percentile. And I really suspect that the Phillies are going to lose the World Series to the Yankees tonight. Finally, lawyers for our government and others argued before the Supreme Court today that there is no constitutional right not to be framed. Land of the free...but only until your luck holds out.

Bright spots: A Democrat was elected in the New York 23rd for the first time since the 19th century and my verbal score stayed the same (roughly 98.5 percentile). And the anti-government protests in Iran seem to be undimmed. Still, overall, blech.

Comments

[inkstone]

I live in Virginia and the only explanation I have is that our Democratic candidate ran the worst campaign ever because seriously? The Governor-elect? OMG SO MUCH FAIL.

[starlady]

I did get that impression from the coverage I heard.

Yeah, my Governor-elect is an idiot. Seems like a fine dude personally, but seriously, that doesn't matter at all. He has no actual ideas, let alone the willpower to make actual change.

[inkstone]

Oh, see, I WISH my governor-elect had no ideas because then we'd be spared such stupidity as "Let's cut taxes... and then wonder why the state has no money to do anything" or "It's totes okay to discriminate on the basis of sexual identity" and of course, "Immigrants are destroying the US."

[starlady]

Oh god. Yup, that's pretty much fail.

Mine says "no new taxes." Which means that we'll either have no services or way more debt, not that we can afford to service the debt we have now. Brilliant!

[spacevlad.livejournal.com]

I don't know why I'm so afraid of taking the GRE. I guess the biggest reason I haven't taken it yet is because I don't know what I want to do, don't know if I want to apply to schools, so taking the GRE before I decide that seems a little silly. It's basially just the SAT Part 2, right?

I loved the Jesse Ventura quote that came out a day or two after the Maine result, about putting slavery to a public vote back in the 19th century (and how many places would have never abolished it if it was up to the public vote).

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Having done only a little reading on the subject I think Ventura's way more right than we realize even now--as bad as racism and homophobia are today, feelings about slavery were just off our charts. And there's a lesson in that for multiple issues.

Having done the fucking thing twice now, I'd definitely advise holding off until you're certain that you want to apply to grad school within the next calendar year. It's not hard, really, but it is a stressor, and it's pricey, and you don't want to run into the problem I had, which is that my scores were too old for my safety school (!!!!), because my safety school is in Canada--most US institutions will take scores up to 5 years old. And I'm also going to have to resend my score reports to the schools I listed my first time around.

The math section is basically the SAT with maybe a little more actual knowledge involved. I'd say the biggest difference is that the vocabulary section does in fact test your actual vocabulary. And the analytical writing is like writing a Mess article on a really tight deadline--or at least, that's how I sold it to myself, and didn't have problems. But if/when you do decide to take it, if you buy the Princeton Review book and spend some quality time reviewing pre-algebra and geometry, I'm sure you'll do fine.