Points at which my life coulda gone way, way wrong

OK, gonna put up a real post later today, but I just wanted to correct a factual error from a few posts back — I got into three of the five kolleges I applied to, not two: the third was UCLA. I had … vague ambitions of something to do with the movie industry, or something. My brain blocked out my acceptance there, maybe because I never gave Thought One to actually going there once I got the packet:

—I would be living “on campus,” however vaguely that is defined, in a dorm suite consisting of two triples connected to one bathroom.

—"Financial Aid" consisted of a bunch of loans toward the $23K/yr. cost (out of state, doncha know), plus the hyoooge National Merit Scholar award (which award, for some reason I no longer remember, stipulated I had to apply to an out-of-state college, chosen before I even knew where I would be accepted): $1,500.

—I realized I would have no car. In Los Angeles.

Anyway, it was a great mercy to me that I didn’t end up going, because as it turned out, my worst and most hated class of all four years at Columbia — including Major Topics in East Asian History (four thousand years each of the history of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, taught by the guy that literally wrote all the books on same), two classes under Annette "Behold My SEK-shoo-ality!" Insdorf, and Analysis of Film Language (Schamus was great, but I was in waaay over my head and the weekly dread of this class nearly made me sick) — was Production, the one where we had to actually make a bunch of short movies (using whatever jank-ass equipment we could scrounge from the department after the grad students had bogarted all the good stuff for themselves) and then edit them, and then SHOW THEM to the rest of the class. GOD, did I suck at that. Anyhoo …