As of this evening, I am officially a graduate school applicant. Well, as long as my transcripts and recommendations arrive in a timely fashion, that is.

It’s been kind of a roller coaster ride with regard to this decision. Originally, the plan was to go directly to grad school after I completed undergrad a little over five years ago. My original plan was to get a degree in religious studies. If I wasn’t going to try running the big machine with my MBA, I would be doing something where I could study and talk about religion all day long. If I had gone to grad school just after I finished undergrad I might have just now completed my PhD and entered the work force as unemployed. Who the hell wants to hire a guy to talk about religion all day long? I definitely would have missed out on the joys of work, specifically work in the IT industry. I more than likely would have also had absolutely no clue about the workings of the real world.

The decision to actually apply now has been really tough. Not everything about it has been tough, though. On a day-in, day-out basis, I knew that there would be one day soon when I couldn’t continue working in the customer service field. I spend all day talking to people who think that I’m beneath them because I REALLY DO want to help them resolve their problems. But after talking to people who have more money than common sense (or dignity and respect for others, for that matter), I know there will come a day when I won’t be able to do it anymore, but my only resort will be to take another customer service job.

And some days, even when I think about doing something else, maybe even going back and doing something in the IT industry, I have to fess up and acknowledge that my overall skill set has atrophied. The only marketable skill I think that I have is answering the phone. Answering the same damn questions everyday for the past three years until my throat is raw. I sometimes think that I want to do something visionary or great or leader-like. But I really wouldn’t even know how to anymore.

And, oh yeah, I get really fucking sick and tired of people I work with telling me that I should do more with myself than work where I do. I know already!

But if there are so many things out there that make it so easy to apply for grad school, why the hell haven’t I done it before?

Maybe the process itself is so daunting. Think about this: You have to spend all day filling out paperwork telling an unknown group of admissions experts how great you are and that your shit smells like cinnamon rolls. Here! Let me drop a couple for you right now. You have to get recommendations from people who don’t really know you. I mean, how can they know me when everyday I spend at least five minutes staring into the bathroom mirror wondering who the hell I am? I’m lucky I don’t think that I’m a burglar and start attacking myself. And also it’s a tremendous amount of money that I could use to buy my girlfriend jewelry. Speaking of her, she’s really going to appreciate me doing things like studying instead of talking to her. Graduate school — the perfect thing to screw up a relationship.

Okay, so now I’ve come full circle in my thinking. What’s the final verdict? Why did I hit that button that said “Submit Application”? Ultimately, I think it came down to two things.

First, who knows what could happen if I applied? I might get accepted; I might get denied. To put it statistically, the odds of getting accepted to graduate school are a hell of a lot better than winning the new North Carolina lottery. Even if I didn’t get accepted, that’s better than not applying and asking myself for the next forty or fifty years what could have been. Sure, getting rejected could hurt, but I’ll get over that. But I wouldn’t be able to get over missing out on the possibility of learning the most interesting thing on the planet, having a job that makes me feel alive and awake and being able to have the money to do the things that I’ve always wanted to do.

The second thing is that I believe. When I say “I believe,” I don’t mean “I have faith.” When I say “I believe,” I mean “I know.” Saying you have faith is like accepting that the odds are stacked against you, but you just might hit the jackpot still. Plenty of people wander around “having faith” in God, but functionally they are atheists. It’s like, “I know you’re not out there, G, but if you are, I’m with you.” But the difference is that I know. I know that I am the man to run the big machine. I know that I am meant to get the education, the training, the credentials to seal the deal. I have no doubt in this. Now, I may still get a rejection letter. But that doesn’t say that I’m not the man. I may already have everything I need to run the show. Or in the grand scheme of things, an alternate path may be the one that I should take. Whether it’s due to the unseen hand of some divine being or my own damned stubborness, I know.

I’m pretty sensitive about the Matrix. I mean, when I saw it, I wasn’t totally enthralled with it like everyone who was telling me that I just had to see it, but I thought it was a pretty good movie nonetheless. Only until I delved deeper into my religious studies courses at Indiana State University and my extra-curricular studies of Gnosticism did I see the Matrix for what it really was — the most profound piece of Gnostic film that may ever be created. So when people say the Matrix sucks or that they didn’t understand it, I usually have to hold back a tirade about how deep the storyline is and all of its correspondences to ancient scriptures.

But today, I read the ultimate Matrix insult. This one nearly caused me to shoot my monitor. From the ACLU’s website:

The MATRIX (Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information eXchange) surveillance system combined information about individuals from government databases and private-sector data companies. It then made those dossiers available for search by government officials and combed through the millions of files in a search for “anomalies” that may be indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity. It was terminated in April 2005, though components continued to be made available to police in individual states.

Now it would figure that the government would need to watch TV or a movie to get the name for their new piece of crap program that’s designed to turn citizens into slaves (can’t you just feel the irony???). Bureaucrats and politicians do it all the time, from cool shit like Star Wars to lame-ass slogans like “Where’s the Beef?” I’m surprised Walter Mondale isn’t embarrased to show his sorry ass in public for that one. But even when coming up with the name for this domestic spying program, they had to stretch to come up with MATRIX as their cockamamie little acronym.

But fuck that. Everyone should go to the ACLU’s site and contact their respective Congress critters and tell them what they really think of this program. Not because they’re running the Matrix’s good name through the mud, not because of how you feel about the American Civil Liberties Union, but because the United States government has made a conscious decision to fully endorse and embrace fascism. That’s right, fascism, the same failed political ideology that many Americans died trying to save the world from in World War II.

For those motivated more by entertainment than by activism, the ACLU’s site has a Flash animation that demonstrates what it would be like to order a pizza under a MATRIX-like system. I’m sure that after seeing it and chuckling for a brief moment, you’ll be in the proper mood to express some choice words to your elected representative. The first time that I saw this animation was at an advanced screening of the movie America: From Freedom to Fascism. I definitely recommend it as the must-see movie event of the upcoming summer blockbuster season. If it wasn’t such an accurate and depressing depiction of what’s really going on in America today, I might be tempted to say that it was even better than the Matrix.

After a rough night of blogging about immigration, I decided to peruse the statistics for some of the websites that I run. One of the sites that I’m currently developing is called Hire Johnny! I’m hoping to develop this site as a portfolio to showcase my previous work and to act as a stepping stone for obtaining future part-time and freelance employment. Well, when I looked through the report for this site, my jaw dropped and my eyes bulged out. Here is a portion of the screenshot from the log:

Do you see it? The fifth entry down? One of the browsers for my site was Majestic-12.

My mind raced. I thought, “Am I getting too close?” Have I slipped up and been noticed by those who are covering up the secrets behind UFOs? Have I somehow drawn the interest of a secret cabal whose sinister reach may have their hands in everything from the creation of Daylight Saving Time to the Kennedy assassination? Are they trying to influence people to not hire me and to destroy my livelihood? Do they intend to hide just outside my field of vision and drive me mad? Or do they intend for me to commit suicide in a park somewhere by accidently shooting myself in the back five times?

But then rationality returned to me. If I was being watched by a super secret organization whose existence couldn’t be definitively proven, why would it show up in my website statistics? Would they make a mistake like that? Or were they merely toying with me? I decided to google the term “Majestic 12″ and see if there could be some other explanation. I crossed my fingers, clinched my teeth and hit “Search”. Dear God, I prayed, please let it not be “THE” Majestic-12.

The second search result that came up was for a United Kingdom-based distributed search engine project called Majestic-12. The steady stream of perspiration slowed. I laughed, kicked back in my chair with my hands behind my head and smiled the biggest grin that I’ve had in a long while. Then, panic gripped me as I remembered hearing about the long history of British banks and other European interests attempting to control the US economy and bend it to their evil will.

Man, I really need to lay off the Coast-to-Coast AM for awhile. Especially after a rough night of blogging.