Finally saw an advisor yesterday and got signed up for a class: College Success Studies, kind of a "welcome to PVCC" thing. Everything else has to wait while I get my financial aid straightened out. The FAFSA website, the PVCC website, and the emails I received from both of them, said I was good-to-go, but apparently I wasn't. I have been "chosen for verification," so I need to produce some recent tax records, which obviously don't exist. The IRS website has a thing called the DRT (Data Retrieval Tool), that is recommended on by various acronyms: PVCC, FAFSA, IRS, LMNOP, ETC. The DRT would supposedly be the only thing i need to clear this up, but it seems to exist in name-only. There are no links or directions or downloads for the DRT anywhere in sight, just disclaimers about how convenient and helpful the DRT is... And obviously there isn't one single human being at the IRS, or at the PVCC financial aid department, that is available to talk to me and steer me in the right direction. After 10 minutes of answering automated questions that I didn't fully understand, and 19 minutes of being on hold, during which I had to continually verify that I wanted to stay on the line and wait to talk to whatever the IRS considers a person - since they wouldn't want to answer an extension and have to hang up if nobody was there - I was told that there had "been an error," and my call was being dropped. "Please try again later." Still, it's only noonish and I've spent my mornings worse ways. During all of this, I made some kombucha with a very questionable starter, and read a little bit out of The Pale King in the hopes that it would somehow align me with the spirit of the IRS. I will dive back in shortly.
The class I did sign up for cost $340+ and it's just a 10 week thing (although once the FAFSA goes through I'm supposed to get reimbursed for it from my PELL grant). Unless I can get this verification sorted, all of the courses I'm going to take will require some financial aid if I don't want to ask Dad to shell out a little over 2k and hope it will just come out in the wash when the governmental/economic-beauracracy stars align. This all means I'll be doing some late-start classes in September. The things I want to get out of the way, math mostly, are going to be available with the late-start stuff, and my actual time spent at the college won't be as massive a commitment as I thought so I'm happy with the outcome so far.
I tested well on reading and writing. The guy at the testing center said I did as well as I was able to and won't have to take extra classes to get me up to college level in those areas. Math wasn't nearly as easy. I'll need to take some 1-credit classes to be able to test at college level, but I didn't do as terrible as I thought I would and considering I was class of 2000, the advisor assures me I didn't do bad at all. That strikes me a bit as "you're not dumb...for your age". But she meant it well and it's good news either way.
I also finally got a state ID and an eye exam.
Oh yeah, a CT scan shows there is a tumor in the sinuses on the right side of my face. The words "significant tissue and bone loss" were used when he was first reading the results - which I'd had to ask him to look up since he hadn't bothered to look at them before seeing me. But when I got curious about the tissue/bone loss comment, he didn't really feel like expanding on any of it and told me he'd refer me to an ENT ("make sure to call and ask if you haven't received an appointment time after 2-3 weeks"). However, it convinced him to finally, after a month of him knowing I've been in constant pain for at least a year, write a script for some antibiotics that might clear up whatever infection that my tumor, that he only found by accident, might be causing.
Progress.......
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