/lit/ - Literature

>>14605281
>I'd suggest an eighth first time to at least get your feet wet
the thing i shold have mentioned is that i dont want to *start* taking drugs, i just want to know what it's like to completely dissolve my cemented opinion structure and then go back to life *as it was*, if that's even possible.

>>14605287
we'll see if i even make it out of low earth orbit :,)

Life is boring on every level. Go to school, work, sleep, repeat. My apartment is cold and my feet feel like they're going to freeze off. My girlfriend wants to marry, move to a nice apartment in the suburbs, cook for me every evening, and chase the corporate dragon. I can't keep doing this. Four more years. Forty. What difference does it make? This is hell.

I've got a book of blank cheques. Not with my name, but signatures are easy to fake. In my free instances I stare at it, and fantasize about holing up in a nice hotel room in Paris for a week. Just to get away, for a little while. Part of me thinks there's a great life waiting for me, I just need to step up and seize it. Another part of me thinks that this is the best life offers, and I should just keep my head down.

Every paycheck I stick a couple hundred in a special account. It wouldn't take a lot to live a nice middle class life in Paraguay or Ethiopia for a year. I fantasize about that every day at work, eight hours a day. Working from the neck down gives me a lot of time to think. There's no way to get ahead in North America. People see right through me here. My eyes, my fake smile, my exaggerated hand gestures. They look at me and see a peasant. In Europe people would look at me and see an American. With a new suit I think that I could make the world sing and dance for me.

Sometimes I wonder if people don't invent their life for themselves. Maybe the idealists are right, and everyone is living in a private hell or heaven of their own creation. I listen to Painting By Numbers by James McMurtry on repeat, when I was a kid I never wanted to live this kind of life, I still think I'm better than this.

If I could move back home I would. All my old friends are dead or in jail. I can't find the energy to make new ones. In the night I walk the streets, looking at all the happy people. None of them know me, or who I am. If I could find the right words, I could walk right into their lives, make it mine. Somewhere my soul is roaming the mountains, it left me years ago and now I just go through the motions of being alive.

Hypothetically, how hard/easy would it be for someone to falsify documents to get into grad school?

It's for a story I'm writing. The character is a smart guy, hardworking too, but got thrown a couple curveballs in life that forced him out of school. He's in his mid-twenties and starting again, but the only places that will take him are take-anybody community colleges. When he's not studying he's working full time to pay for it, and in school he's taking watered down classes while surrounded by people nearly a decade younger than him. Every day he wakes up early, goes to class, then eats lunch of the bus to his crappy warehouse job. In the evening he comes home tired and soar, passes out in a cramped rat infested apartment, then wakes up early to do it over again. He never stopped reading, learning, thinking, and he's talked to enough people in Grad and PHD programs to realize that they're usually more rich and complacent than smart.

So he decides he's going to reinvent himself, and stop playing by the rules when the game is built to make him lose. He saves up some money and gets a plain ticket to a foreign country. He fakes having a degree from a prestigious university, and being a bookish white man, nobody questions it. He gets a job with some prestige, meets a cute girl, goes to fancy dinner parties, does a bit of self directed research, even publishes a couple papers in academic journals. And he realizes he wants more. So he applies to grad school where he can have funding to continue his research.

Realistically, what would this character have to do to fake his way in? Let's say he's already forged transcripts from his previous "university". How thoroughly do grad schools run background checks on those kinds of things? Could someone who's gone through the process help me out here?