{"id":1017,"date":"2005-08-24T20:42:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-25T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/1017"},"modified":"2005-08-24T20:42:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-25T00:42:00","slug":"thoughts-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/1017","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been mighty pensive today. Maybe it’s being alone in the house that’s doing it, but I was pensive all the way home from work, too. <\/p>\n

Still no stinking word from U of T re: my graduation. I’ve checked my Academic History on ROSI about 12 times over the past week and nothing. Left messages with my grad counsellor and my prof. Zip. Why must they torture me so?<\/p>\n

Speaking of school: a long while ago, and I had a joking discussion about one day being very wealthy and giving back to our alma mater by starting up a scholarship in our own names, to people whose scholarly achievements were as piss-poor as our own in first year. The “Pipesdreams\/Cranly Scholarship for Lacklustre Undergraduates”, if you will. We were going to develop absurd rules and regulations for the awarding of the money, and the final arbiters of the deserving candidates would be, naturally, ourselves. <\/p>\n

Cranly’s plan was to have a very small fund of $100 that would be awarded to the biggest slacker in their freshman year. There would be an essay, 500 words, titled “Why I Am the Biggest Slacker”: the trick to being the winning applicant would be a combination of whose work was the shoddiest and the furthest past the deadline, with extra points for lame excuses or plagiarism. <\/p>\n

After much sober consideration, I’ve decided that that particular prize (while it may be something that Cranly should pursue himself one day) is not the lasting impression I want to leave for future generations of University of Toronto students to marvel at. However, the idea of an amusing legacy does have some appeal. As a recipient of scholarships myself in the past, I know how encouraging they can be, and what a relief it is to have even the slightest reprieve from money woes when you’re in school.<\/p>\n

I’m not “wealthy”, as per the Rockerfellas, Kennedys, etcetera, but I think that in the next two years I will have achieved sufficient financial security to have a little wriggle room to help others up the ladder. I don’t buy lottery tickets, or do much that’s crazy with my money (impulsive real estate purchases aside), so this will be what my mother calls “mad money”. As such, I do believe that I’ve made the promise to myself, today, that on the occasion of my thirtieth birthday, as a present from me to me, I will bequeath a modest $500 to a deserving undergraduate at my old college, with the requisite absurd qualifications on who gets it to keep it fun and interesting. <\/p>\n

I know I’m no Osceola McCarty<\/a>, but I think that it is a nice gesture of my solidarity to my school, an assertion of my belief in the value of education, and the satisfying fulfillment of a promise made by my younger self. And I figured that, by writing it down here, in my diary, I’ll be held to my good intentions when 2007 rolls around. Just to be safe, I’d like to state for the record that if I accidentally get knocked up before that time, my good intentions are null and void.<\/i><\/p>\n

Now I just have to dream up the ridiculous qualifiers… (have them write haiku? limericks? sew quilt squares? bake me a pie? what?!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been mighty pensive today. Maybe it’s being alone in the house that’s doing it, but I was pensive all the way home from work, too. Still no stinking word from U of T re: my graduation. I’ve checked my Academic History on ROSI about 12 times over the past week and nothing. Left messages […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}