And Maybe Next Year I'll Have To Move Again...

As difficult and unsettling and disorienting as this whole move was, there's a part of me that is a bit excited. A very small part. Finally, something new and better has happened in my life. I'll save money, I'm in an apartment that is actually taken care of, there's a chance here to start life over.
And it may happen all over again next year.
After the debacle with getting rejected for grad school by CSU, I went online and started looking at other schools because at that point, what the fuck else am I gonna do? The day after I got the rejection letter, I found an American school with a campus in London that offers a MBA in International Management. I started the application online and started speaking regularly with an admissions advisor, but I almost wasn't serious about it at first. I didn't expect they would actually be interested in having me attend school there, but the further I got into it, the more hopeful it seemed. This all happened almost too easily. I completed the application, and sent in my transcripts and the $50 application fee. I struggled with the letter of intent, but got it completed in a week and sent that over with my resume. We scheduled a phone interview, the last step of the application process. Before we ever got to the interview, they sent me the financial aid application information.
By this time it was the end of the month and I knew I was going to be moving, so I did my best to try and keep up with school stuff at the same time. My brain was constantly switching gears between work, scheduling appointments and meeting with potential roommates, and dealing with the details of enrolling to this school.
I got a phone call last Tuesday at work from someone with an English accent. They wanted to do the phone interview right then. It caught me a bit off guard, I thought they would at least call to schedule something first. He told me the interview would only take about ten minutes. In the back of my head I'm thinking, you can't even get a job at McDonald's with a ten-minute interview, but okay. I explained I was at work and would need to schedule a time, so we scheduled it for the following Thursday. No one called, so I called the admissions advisor and explained there must be some miscommunication going on. We scheduled the next phone interview for Friday, because I had the day off.
As it turned out, I signed the lease to the new place, got the keys and ten minutes later, the phone call comes. I'm walking back to my old place after just signing on to the new one, it's 80 degrees outside and I'm trying to talk my way off-the-cuff through what may be one of the most important interviews of my life, regardless of how nonchalant they happened to be about the whole thing.
I get the impression that these folks get a lot of kids coming to their school. Kids who want to come to London to party their assess off and get a degree in the meantime. They asked me questions they would ask of any 18-year-old kid, some of them weren't even relevant to me. I answered them pretty blatantly too.
"How does your family feel about you coming here for school? Is there any chance anyone would be opposed to it?"
"Um, I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"
"Your family, is your family okay with you coming to school here?"
"Well, um...I'm 36 years old. I'm single, I have no children, my parents are both deceased and even if they weren't, it wouldn't matter. The family I have now can be opposed to it all they want, but they don't have any influence on my decisions. At 36, I tell them what I'm going to do and that's just it."
"Is there anything that would prevent you from coming to London?"
"I'm sorry, what do you mean?"
"Are there any reasons you would change your mind?"
"Well, um....I'm 36 years old, so I'm not really in a place in my life where floundering on decisions is something I can still do. If I make a commitment to do something I'm going to do it. I understand consequences, I can't afford to be afraid or back away from difficult decisions, that's just a part of life when a person is my age."

Before we hung up, the guy with the English accent on the end of the line said, "We look forward to seeing you in London next year". I said "Thank you". And that was it. By then I already had the financial aid application. I want to say it's a done deal, but because I'm the kind of person bad shit just happens to, I don't think I'll really believe it until I'm unpacking my things in my new dorm room. Even then it might feel so surreal that I still may not believe it.

And then there's the issue of the financial aid. Before I applied with CSU I called FAFSA to check on my records and was told everything was okay. I graduated in 1998 and haven't paid back a dime of my loans because I've never made enough money to. I've been on forbearance or economic hardship ever since. But when I spoke to FAFSA they said I was in good standing and they couldn't see any reason from my past loan record that I wouldn't be approved. I didn't believe them, so I went to financial aid officers at CSU and spoke directly to them and they also told me not to worry. I applied for the graduate loans, but the results aren't released if you're not accepted to the school, so I have no idea if I was actually approved or not since CSU rejected me.
And because I have the kind of luck I have, I am calling FAFSA again tomorrow to find out if I'm really okay to apply for graduate loans. And I still won't believe them....