Things fall apart

Two thin envelopes (Stanford and Dartmouth), one phone call to the admissions guy at Yale, three days, zero showers, zero changes of clothes, some hours of shoveling gravel and moving it in a wheelbarrow, many hours of Pieces and the Real Folk Blues and the like, twelve chapters of Pride and Prejudice, two episodes of Mandy Moore Scrubs, and one berry pie later I gave up my giving up. I'm just not a very good quitter. A very capricious part of me wants to tell all those affirmative action loving bastards to (family guy allusion alert!) go tuck yourselves in and then i would run to the mountains or Canada and read great literature and write music and poetry and practice trumpet for countless hours and learn to play guitar and dream and work some little job just to get by. But I won't; I'm too devoted. Or just not desperate enough. Maybe if all the medical schools rejected me I'd go hermit, but now I'm too set on doctorship or doctorhood. And if Loma Linda is the only acceptance I get, Loma Linda is where I'm going. My real struggle with the whole situation came about because I had thought that the things that had happened to me over the last year were going somewhere, were purposeful. I really that I was being set up to be a better applicant so I could get into one of those insanely competitive schools. I mean, really, a diving board accident that makes me want to take the MCAT again? And then i did well on it. And then I'm off to foreign lands to do research and humanitarian work. So I have the grades, the scores, the extracurricular activities, the philanthropic service, and I thought I had a shot. I believed that God or Providence or Whoever or Whatever was guiding all this. This is what I believed Whatever's plan to be. But then something happened. Because I'm still probably going to Loma Linda, and if I was just going to go to Loma Linda, why did Whatever take me to the edge of Canaan only to send me back to wandering the Southern California desert for 4 years. I'd have taken on those giants. I wanted to be one of those giants. But perhaps I haven't explained why this situation is so problematic for me. Allow me to do so now. See, the Whatever I believe in wouldn't tempt and tease me, wouldn't dangle my dreams just out of my reach. Especially when I thought they were within my grasp. My Whatever isn't so cruel. But the situation is cruel. The alternative I then see is that Whatever, in His or Her great benevolence, couldn't have had anything to do with the situation. But this too is unsettling. ALL things are supposed to work for good, so what happened here? "Oh, I'm sorry John, I couldn't do anything with that diving board injury. Yeah, you basically just lost a year. You do know you would have gotten into Loma Linda with your first MCAT score. So yup, sucks to be you. Also, April is a freebie; I've got no plans for you the whole month there, so enjoy. And don't say I never gave you nothing." This wouldn't have been so bad if I at least had some sort of choice and then got to figure out that I was supposed to go to Loma Linda. It's not that Loma Linda is the problem; it's how I'm getting there that bothers me. Ok, this isn't quite fair. I can't suppose to have Whatever's plan all figured out, but at what point do I get to say "Whoa whoa whoa, wait, I don't like this story, I want to change it!" I mean, if Whatever's hand is in it, shouldn't I see traces of said hand sometime? It shouldn't all just look arbitrary. I guess my beliefs lost some of its powers of nomization, because Whatever either has lost some of its goodness, which by definition it can't, or history has lost purpose and significance, which is just as dangerous because absurdity clouds in and I get stuck again in a downpour of existentialism which causes pools of doubt. Maybe it's my job to weather these storms. Maybe it's just a squall. Maybe the sun rays of legitimization are just behind the gray billows overhead. But how long do I sit in this deluge before I leave in search of the sun?