Confirm This!

About a week ago I was taking in my paperwork for my acceptance to UNC’s grad school. The whole package was supposed to be a stipend plus tuition. But since I’d already gotten a master’s from Carolina already (an M.F.A. – don’t ask me what it stands for because you might not like the answer) I couldn’t get a tuition waiver. Apparently they only give four semesters worth of waivers for graduate level study.

So anyway, there I am handing in my papers and it suddenly dawns on me – it was like a big huge freakin’ humvee barreling down the road and slamming into me at breakneck speed – my first program was way to cheap to give me that much money. No one in our class got a waiver. I had to pay tuition (albeit in-state) all three years.

I told the administrator who organizes all of this and she promptly called over to the graduate school offices and sure enough, I never received any tuition waiver.

What this means is that my total grad school costs are only going to be about 650 dollars a semester (that’s for student fees.) Not to shabby and since we’re looking for a new house now, that’s dead freakin’ brilliant.

I heard this phrase on the radio today. I only caught the tail end of the conversation but it was “we’ll confirm the rumor later this afternoon.” At first I completely ignored it but then my head did a 180. What the hell does that mean? Confirm the rumor. That doesn’t make any sense. If they’re going to confirm it then it ain’t a rumor anymore. And if it is a rumor, how can they say they’re going to confirm it if they don’t know it’s true or false. They’re either going to say the rumor was true or it was false. Only one of those actually ‘confirms’ it, the other refutes it. So by saying we’re going to ‘confirm the rumor’ you darn well better know it’s true because you essentially just told everyone it is.

That bugged me. Don’t know why but it did. I hate media spin doctoring, drives me crazy. If you can’t tell me what it is without waffling all over yourself, shut the hell up.