Apparently since wpa_supplicant is so helplessly broken under ubilinux, the solution is to write a script that greps for my desired SSID from `iwlist` output, then update the /etc/network/interfaces file accordingly, and then fire off an `ifconfig --force wlan0`... and then put that script in a cronjob that runs every minute.
Such a horrible way to manage wireless. I would have thought that debian would have been somewhat "with the program" by now.