Bureau-stamp

Put in the last of the paperwork for financial aid two days ago. Now I get to wait.

It reminds me how much I hate bureaucracy, really. All of this legwork and paperwork purely to turn in a set of forms that will get a stamp.



A stamp decided upon by a group of people who have never met me, and never will. A group of people whom, for all I know, could be a giant soulless computer screen that spits out decisions at random based on the weather that day.

I don't like feeling powerless, helpless. I know that's normal, I'm aware that it is often the reality we find ourselves in...

But it's one thing to feel powerless due to acts of random chance - illness, accident, weather, etc - and quite another to give yourself to the judgment of a group of people. Guess it all comes down to the simple fact that I don't trust people.

Friends, sure, to some degree. People as a whole, people I don't know? Not for a second. I used to give the benefit of the doubt...and that died along with a lot of my other naive notions.

I say naive as if there's no reason to be optimistic anymore. I guess I'm a little jaded these days. Could be worse.

I like to be able to fight, to see an opponent or a thing that is in the way and to deal with it. That's not to say I enjoy violence (although sometimes I do), just that I don't run from problems. Complex situations and the minutiae of the issues that come from being social/human don't bother me.
I've lived through the worst day of my life, the worst week, the worst year. I've dealt with death and sickness and disability, I've dealt with statistics and 'experts' saying I am doomed to fail. I can handle that. I can take overwhelming odds, I don't care. I am better than that.

Thing is, I can't do anything here. I don't get a say, nor an action. I get a piece of paper with check-marks on it instead. Sure, I am decent at conveying myself - tone, intensity, etc - in writing...but that isn't what this is. It's a box with a mark in it, same as every other box with a mark in it. There are no reasons, no explanations, and the faceless bureaucratic machine on the other end of the desk isn't even required to give me a straight answer.

Fuck that.

- C