Rainier National Park

Headed out to Rainier National Park yesterday to see the awesome beauty of the mountain and hike around a bit with Laura, another B.A. in the Seattle office. It was gorgeous. The air was so crisp and sweet, and the sun kept us warm as we hiked down to Forest Lake. We saw a tundra-like landscape followed by meadows and evergreen forests and it was all so, so quiet. Anyway, enough of my inadequate descriptions--I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Failure

I failed my driver's test today. Upon inching out of the DOL's parking lot, I looked left and right, was about to take a left turn when a big black SUV on the right drove past, honking its horn to keep me from continuing on. I know, it's astonishing. I failed within one minute of starting the car. My Driving Test Score Sheet, filled out by a woman named Marian, reads:

Pulled out in front of car, requiring driver to "honk" and apply their breaks.

Yes, that is exactly how it reads. And yes, it does make me feel better.

Of course, the fact that the administrator of my driving test can't spell or punctuate doesn't fully remove the sting of failure. I dread the coming week of having to explain to everyone in my life how I failed on a test that nearly every other American passes without any problem. But as May, my driving instructor, told me after the test: "If you're going to fail any test in your life, it might as well be this one." I'll try and take her words to heart and cheer up a little.

My next test is on September 20th. Wish me luck--I really do need it.

What terrorism isn't

From the Times' Op-Ed pages, an article about what terrorism isn't:

“Outside of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mueller [a political scientist at Ohio State University] says, “the number of people killed around the world since Sept. 11 by groups in sympathy with Al Qaeda is not that high. These are horrible and disgusting deaths, but they’re not a sign of a diabolically effective organization. The total is less than the number of Americans who drowned in bathtubs during this period.”

Now I think Mueller's overarching argument is an interesting one. But before I get into that--I have two problems with what he seems to be saying in the paragraph above. First, why exclude Afghanistan and Iraq? If we're talking casualties from the war on terrorism, that seems like a way to exclude a lot of deaths from the total. Second, why focus on American deaths? Are things simply peachy as long as Afghans and Iraqis are dying instead?

If we get back to the big picture, though, I think Mueller's new book Overblown is asking us to step back and asks a question we don't often think about: Is terrorism really as big a problem as we're making it out to be? That's an important query, and it's about time we started hearing another perspective: the threat terrorism poses is much smaller than our war-mongering government and lapdog media (Mueller dubs them the Terrorism Industry) are making it out to be. I'm not saying he's necessarily right, but I seem some truth in the suggestion that perhaps we've all bought into the "terrorism threatens our way of life" storyline a bit too much to allow us--as individuals and as a country--to make sound decisions.

Loan Consolidation Wars

I received a phone call from the Connecticut Student Loan Foundation last week, from a woman named Anne, telling me that my consolidation app with another company had been denied. Hmm. That's odd, I thought. Why would it be denied? As a graduate and a consumer in a capitalist market, I ought to be able to consolidate with whomever I choose, right? Not so, Anne told me, when we spoke on the phone this morning.

"What you're going to have to do is cancel your application with NextStudent [the company with which I wanted to consolidate] because of the "single-lender" rule. Once you've done that, you can consolidate with us, with last year's interest rates," she said.

She seemed nice enough. But things seemed a bit fishy--after all, I had gone into to speak with a finaid expert at school and he hadn't said anything about this single-lender rule. And NextStudent had processed my application without mentioning it. If they knew it wasn't going to fly, why would they bother with such a time-consuming process?

I called up Megan, my advisor at NextStudent, to figure out what was going on. It turns out the single-lender law is no longer in place as of June 15th, and the reason the consolidation was taking so long was because CSLF was refusing to release my loans to them! The reason? They wanted to verify the date on the application to make sure it wasn't signed before June 15th. The only thing I had to do to continue my consolidation with NextStudent was to get them to send the app with the date I had signed it (sometime in August). Because I had begun my application with them before interest rates shot up this summer, I would be able to keep last year's rates--plus the deals NextStudent was giving me--without going through an entirely new app process.

Did Anne mention to this me on the phone? No. Did she knowingly mislead me into thinking I had to cancel my app with another company so that I would consolidate with CSLF instead? Yes. Honestly. The things some companies will do for profits sickens me.

"Death of a President"

A TV movie in Britain is causing a small uproar. Shot in a documentary style, "Death of a President" begins with our current President's assassination. The publicity campaign features a photograph that "evokes the...the mortally wounded Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and also recalls John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 outside the Washington Hilton." Having produced a show all about presidential assassinations last fall, I readily admit I'm intrigued by the film and hope overzealous patriots won't hinder its release here in America. Peter Dale, the head of the British digital TV network More4 which is releasing the film, told the Times a few more details:

Mr. Dale said that the focus of the film was on the assassination’s aftermath, as the news media rush to judgment and investigators plumb America’s fear and anger, particularly in communities with most cause to be angry at Mr. Bush. Suspicion soon focuses on Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian-born man.

The movie, Mr. Dale said, is “a very powerful examination of what changes are taking place in America” as a result of its foreign policy.

“I believe that the effects of the wars that are being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “are being felt in many ways in the multiracial communities in America and Britain in the number of soldiers who don’t come home, and that people are beginning to ask: ‘When will these body bags stop coming back? Why are we there? When will it stop?’ ”