Wednesday, January 26, 2011

I want to look back at this.


Consider this an experiment in causality of sorts. I'm going to type out what happened today and then come back and read this long after the events of this day have long become the past.

Today, everything went wrong as far as I can see. My financial aid was supposed to come in today, and I was informed that instead of being $300.00 or something similar, it was instead $60.00. The dilemma is not that I could not buy the little unimportant things that caught my eye, but that I was unable to afford the tools needed to further my education--my books. It is my understanding that most schools would have provided the financial aid before everyone was three weeks into the semester, but this is Northern Kentucky University, and to my knowledge, most schools do not behave this way.

I might have been okay with making due with what I had, if I in fact had it. I then found out that NKU had not only raised the rates, but that they had also not put the money into my account yet. To make things worse, I had a test in my online class and I needed that money in my account in order to buy the $99.00 user ID and password in order to take the test and interact with any aspects of the class.

Afterward, my father was called by my mother, and he was willing to put enough money into my account in order to buy the books that I needed, but the man isn't made of money, and quite frankly, I've already asked so much from him. It really isn't fair for me to ask this much. I could blame a lot of things. I could blame previous administrations, I could blame the school that I go to, I could blame something as broad as greedy dishonest organizations... but I'm done with blaming people. My hands are full and tied; and right now I feel like a candle in a hurricane--and as much as it destroys me to say, unable to affect the goings on around me this time. All I can do is watch and hope. I've been doing a lot of that lately. Watching and hoping. All I really want to do is help the world, but how can I do that when I'm having trouble helping myself? I'm in a very bad place right now, but this isn't the first time and it won't be the last time. So I will make the choices available to me right now to the best I am able and fight as hard as I can can to do what I need to until the day comes that I look back at all of this difficulty and see a pattern and laugh. Until then, I will watch when it's easier to just look away, I will fight even when it looks as if I may lose, and I will hope even when the world says that there is none. That, I've discovered, is what it means to live.