Month: April 2006

I’m completing an application for a scholarship from the community college I am attending. It is for the Pre-Professional Medical & Health Sciences group; basically, anyone that wants to go into the medical field in one way or another. They would pay for my tuition next year if I am awarded a scholarship.

The only roadblock? I have to write an essay, maximum length 1 page, about why I want to be ___________. So for me, it is why I want to be a pharmacist.

There are a few problems with this essay. First of all, I am such a cliche Libra. I can never make up my mind. I realize that they won’t hold me to the major or degree that I write on my essay, but at the same time I worry. What if I don’t want to be a pharmacist? What if I get through a good portion of my degree and change my mind? I hate to commit to being a pharmacist if I am not sure that is what I want. Ugh! Second, why do I want to be a pharmacist? Is it just because aptitude tests say that it would be a good fit for me? Is it because my dad is a pharmacist, albeit not one on a daily basis? Is it because the starting salary for a pharmacist is so attractive, especially after being overworked and underpaid for some time in the legal field?

I realize that their point with this question is to make me think about it, but I also realize that it wouldn’t look good if I just wrote, “I want to be a pharmacist because the pay is good and I want to save lots of money up so I can travel Europe in the not too distant future. Right after I put my son through college.” See? That isn’t going to fly. Plus it isn’t anywhere close to being a page long.

Somedays I just want to toss it all aside and be a professional photographer. Now wouldn’t that be fun?!?

Which reminds me – my photography teacher informed me today that he was told that all entries into the art show were accepted, and are all up for consideration for the various scholarship prizes! The exhibit opening is tomorrow; it is going to be interesting to see my own photographs hanging up in the Fine Arts Gallery on campus. (Yes, I will take pictures and share.) I need to find out if it is too late to put prices on the prints; I learned when I turned them in that that was an option. How much should I put? I was considering $20, but that sounds high. Watch me find out that some prints were sold for $200 or something like that. I wish I knew what to do. See? Decisions? I suck at them.

Today, I did something far from brilliant in my photography class.

I rewound the film I finished shooting this morning. I took the film out of my camera. I went into the loading room, which is completely black because film is sensitive to all light, and loaded it onto a spool and put it into a developing tank. I went back out into the classroom, and I got the first chemical ready to process the film.

Considering the process is called “developing,” a normal person would use developer to develop their film.

Today, I used the stop bath.

The stop bath is a chemical that stops the developer from developing. It is not what you should use for the first step. Doh!

Fortunately, stop bath doesn’t do much of anything if it doesn’t have developer to work on. I was greatly relieved to learn that rinsing my film several times and starting over with the developer would probably work out just fine – and everything was ok in the end. I figure that there is some sort of statistic that would show that for every “x” numbers of rolls of film you develop, you are bound to do something really stupid. I’ve developed a lot of film over the years, and this is the first time for me on doing something so foolish. I guess it was bound to happen.