Grad School App:DMV as GRE:____________

Don’t worry, I am alive! I’ve been really busy studying for the GRE and other activities this summer. But, over the next few weeks I think I will be able to catch you up on past and current events. I will start with the most current and work my way backwards to where I left off.
It’s incredibly relieving to have finished the GRE; I feel like 100 kilograms have been lifted off of my shoulders. I feel human again! Jim, Justin, Kelly (my three friends and fellow PCV’s who I took the GRE with), and I went to a celebratory shashleek party in our friend Curtis’s village near Ternopil. I found myself somewhat socially awkward and tongue tied most of the weekend. I couldn’t tell if it was from locking myself in my apartment for months on end to study or my normal disposition but regardless, it felt really good to talk to human beings again and interact with the real world. Most of us kept using GRE vocabulary that one would not normally use in common conversation. Finding the appropriate small word synonyms is really difficult after you’ve forced your mind to memorize 3,000 ten lettered words and their definitions. (For those of you studying for the GRE, feel relieved that 1,000 of those words mean “to excoriate, disavow, or slanderous.) I also came back to site and immediately began to re-assimilate. I went to work and started work on the final conference for my tourism development project along side my counterpart who I hadn’t seen in weeks. Some of my friends who didn’t know what the GRE was thought I had gone back to America and in consequence, instigated the question if I was staying in Ukraine forever either for a job or a Ukrainian wife. I even cooked a Ukrainian dinner of palmeni, cutlet, rice, and kampyt then the next day started studying language again. Today I went for a walk through the bazaar just for cultural fun and then my English club had a jazz band play in contribution to October’s theme – “Music from America”. The students from the local music university not only rocked out jazz and blues standards but gave lengthy reports on the history of jazz and blues in America. It was a good way to return back home victorious over the evil GRE. But, while that battle has been won and all is well on the home front, another war is looming in the fatherland. Since I finally took the GRE last week and did well enough, I started the application process for graduate schools.
Trying to get all of the proper documents for graduate school admissions while living in Ukraine is like going to the DMV during rush hour. Even after years of checking your work and garnering the paper work you will always undoubtedly get to the front of the line and a snarky employee behind the desk will caustically tell you that you’re missing an obscure form that has at ONLY two letters and a six digit code. (Then you normally get tossed out of line like a rag doll by the people behind you who always seem to have the same problem. Seriously, with the plethora of technology now there has to be some way to streamline the process.) This lengthy process endured is hardly short of exhausting; its absolute mental and physical abuse. (I add physical because I received an intense paper cut on some obscure document that sounded like “SA-666666” today) Fortunately, my time in Ukraine has increased my stamina and endurance to this kind of abuse to above super human level. Graduate school admissions/the DMV have no idea who their messing with. So Let the games begin!