Very, very bad $ news
Ok so today I got the letter from the school saying that my residency petition had been denied. This means that in the fall I will still have to pay out of state tuition*. That's around $7,500. My financial aid total (pell grant + subsidized + unsubsidized loans) is $7,616. Then I got the merit scholarship, half of which applies to fall semester. That brings tuition down to just over $5,560, which gives me about $2,000 left over to use for rent, bills, gas, food, and all expenses for me Dominic, until JANUARY.

My first reaction was "shit! I have to drop out of school!" but Dan says I shouldn't do that. If I drop out, I forfeit my scholarship, which would suck. Also it would push back my graduation date past Dan's, which means that if his residency is somewhere other than Cleveland, we'd be moving before I could finish school. Which pretty much means that if I don't go to school in the fall, there is no point in me going back to school at the very least until Dan gets his residency, since no college will give you a degree unless you've taken X number of your credits at their school. Then it would depend on where his residency was and if there was a school with a decent art department near there. We both agreed that the chances that I'd end up never going back are pretty high. Well, maybe I'd go back years from now when I'm 60 years old or something.

There was a fairly long, hard cry over this (on my part, obviously).

My mom was able to borrow the money to pay for my spring tuition (the only reason I was able to go), but after the roof blew off of her summer house (yes, literally) and after talking to her on the phone it's pretty obvious that she isn't going to be able to pay for fall. If I'd have stayed in Georgia I'd have my tuition for free, still, because of the HOPE scholarship. However, I'd have lost Dan if I did that, and in the long run guess what's more important? Dan.

So we're grasping around trying to figure out how to pay for me to go to school in the fall. The first and most obvious stuff is that all of our summer plans are canceled. I'm not driving to the juggling festival in July, I'm not going to New Hampshire in August, etc. Unfortunately that also means that Dominic can't go to NH or to summer camp, because my mom's business trips are in the middle of the time he'd be there and he obviously can't be there by himself. Once I find someone to buy my laptop that will help as well. I am going to try to find some way to make money off of some of my artwork over the summer (yeah right, that's likely to happen).

Pretty much what this means is that my life is shutting down as of now, and I'm not going to see the light of day until at least December. Joy. Fuck. Gosh, normally "joy" and "fuck" go together in a much better way.

So pretty much...uh...depressed as hell and shit right now. Hey, at least I've got my health. Except for my teeth. And my mental illness. But other than that, my health.





* even though I will have lived in Ohio for over 12 months, the fact that I took classes (online) from and got financial aid from a Georgia college last fall disqualifies me for Ohio residency.