Sitting and Waiting...

These are the two things I have left to do, as far as I know, until I get my letter from NOVA regarding my placement and ticket acquisition information.

Which, all things considered, is about 5,000x better than everything else up until this point.
I'm now past the point where any work of mine will contribute to the situation, there is nothing on my end holding this back. Nova has informed me that the Visa application process has started, and that once they're a little further along, they'll send me a letter with further instructions.

They actually emailed me the other day, asking me to resubmit to them an updated résumé, with my middle name, and explaining my trip to Japan for study abroad. So, I did so, and sent with them the explanation for the marks on my transcript for the program, and a scan of the certificate of completion I received from Senshu back in 2003. They haven't emailed me back yet saying I'm a retard, so as far as I know I'm good to go. But then again they only would have received it today, so, there's always room for something to go wrong.

I've learned that there's an inverse relationship between the amount of leeway allotted for catastrophe and the likelihood of it occurring. As a result I've all but given up thinking that everything has been taken care of, and certainly ever thinking that nothing could go wrong.

Having said that, it would be normal, and altogether expected for someone as concerned with smooth sailing as I am to hate the thought of it being entirely out of my hands at this point, and I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling that way, but, good God am I glad to be free of this. See, whereas most people would want to be in control, or at least have a hand in the process because they have an innate distrust of other people or a narcissistic lack of faith in the abilities of others, I, knowing myself, and the events which created this situation in the first place, even in light of my admitted narcissism, want nothing to do with this process any more than I have to.

I mean, this whole mess, despite all the crap I had to wade through to get here being other people putting up barriers and obstacles, are ones that existed as a result of me, even though unwittingly, fucking up. I dropped the class that, had I been able to tolerate the rather predatory and annoying man-haters in my Psych of Gender class winter term senior year, would have put my diploma in my lap back in summer of 2004 and I would have been in Japan long ago. And it was my fault it took me a year to get around to writing that paper...and then having to scramble and blah blah blah every other entry in this blog...so yea.

So, now all I get to do is sit around and wait. Thank God. Cross my fingers that everything gets done quickly enough to make the late October/early November departure. Now, see, here's where a little statistical analysis makes me worried. Forigve me please for abandoning you know, traditional, logical statistical analysis, suspend your disbelief and follow me for a second.

When you first start in on something, and you've got a lot to do, there are lots and lots of things going on, and you expect something to go wrong. And if it does, it's not a big deal, cause you're not that far into it, and generally speaking no single part of what you're doing is so important that its failure would comprimise the success of the greater goal. And if there were something like that, odds are you would go to great lengths to assure that one thing would be fine, even though some would say that on a quantum level paying so much attention to that one important thing would change the odds in some way of something happening. But anyway. . .

So piece by piece you take care of all these things, and options are exhausted. By the time you reach the end, say, of this application process, there are only a few things left, and each thing left is increasingly important. Vital, actually, to the success of the endeavor. Well, assuming that there's a constant rate of random events, and, over time, a stable rate of good and bad and neutral random things happening, this last part is particularly nerve wracking.

Because, as we define a good and a neutral event in this instance, we learn that we can essentially discard them as anything worth caring about. Because it's not like my application is really, really going to go through, like, excessively go through. Seeing that being accepted or denied is what's important, I can't really put 'accepted at the pay scale of someone with a teaching certificate' in the category of potential good random events, because the pay scale thing is dependent on already having been accepted. Good in this case is, say, Accepted, leaves Oct. 26. Neutral events don't really affect te decision either way, they're things like, I dunno, one copy of your résumé caught on fire, but we just printed another. Bad is delayed or denied, or, your visa got lost in the mail, so we can't send you out until it reappears.

Neutral events we don't really care about. Good events, well, they're what we want, so I have nothing to worry about if something good happens. So, in keeping with our psychological predisposition to only focus on the Bad, the chance of something going wrong is the only set of probabilities I'm concerned with.
People feel more comfortable with the odds when they're behind the wheel. Most of the time, unless they feel they're grossly underqualified for what's going on, like piloting a crashing plane. But when it comes to things like setting the table or putting that résumé together and emailing it to Nova, mose people want their hands to touch it so that they know for fact it went the way they wanted. People associate other people with random chance, or known risk. Makes sense, esepcially to narcissistic or controlling assholes like I'm sure we all know plenty of.

So, anyway, to go back to w hat I was explaining, given that I only care about the random chance that something bad will happen, which, given an even distribution would be 33.3%, I've got a 1 in 3 chance of something happening which would just completely suck. Now clearly the odds can't possibly be that likely for something to go wrong. But whatever, I like easy math, so we're gonna go with it, and really it doesn't matter anyway.
What I was saying in the paragraph before last comes into play here because when something goes wrong, you have to work fast to correct it to make sure it gets back on track. That's why people want to have their hands on it. Well, the ominousness of this situation is being exascerbated by the fact that at this point it's out of my hands, and were something to go wrong, there's essentially nothing I can do to correct it. So that 33% seems a lot more risky than it might have before.

See even if something goes wrong, you can turn that situation around with a little careful and expedient effort. Like that whole bit about sending in the wrong visa form, or finding out my religion class grade didn't even count towards my degree, because I could just turn around and resubmit the right form, or petition to the academic requirements committee, etc. So the actual overall risk of something bad happening is lessenned by one's ability to act and correct bad situations. So that 33% is really whatever percentage of that subset cannot be corrected, which generally is pretty small, maybe 10% of the time. So out of all the possible random events, only 3.33% are actually catastrophic. 3.33 in 100 things. Not bad odds, if you can cover your bases.

Ok, so, I have to try to bring this all together now.
So:
There are an incredibly small and narrow subset of things which can happen at this point in the application process, or go wrong, so each possibility's relative probability has increased. Additionally, the only bad things which could go wrong are catastrophic.

Despite my being so close to departure potentially that the rest is out of my hands, and should as such relax, if something were to go wrong there would be nothing I could do about it, destroying the saving grace of being able to reduce overall risk through corrective action.

So, in a perfect distribution of good, neutral, and bad events, I have a 33% chance of something bad happening. And given where I'm at in the process, and given that I have no corrective action available, those odds stay at 33%. I have a 1 in 3, instead of a 3 in 100 chance now of something happening which could completely ruin my efforts. That, in rather verbose terms, is why I'm still worried.

But I'm still relieved to have it out of my hands. This close to success, if there's only room for one thing to happen randomly, odds are well in my favor that it works out just fine. And if something does, I don't want that weight on my head. That's why it's so good that it's out of my hands. I couldn't possibly fuck this up. And knowing me, that's a very, very good position to be in.