May 3, 2002
Fuck this Life
I'll bet you didn't know that traits like intelligence, responsibility, and perserverance counted for absolute and total shit when you're poor. Well, they do.
I can't afford Miami's tuition. I'm having to take out a loan, a sizeable loan, as regular readers may know. The bitch with this loan program is that a cosigner is needed, as I am only nineteen and do not have enough established credit. My parents are absolutely out of the question, considering they have horrible credit.
So I call my grandmother this morning. My grandmother who has two houses and takes vacations to Rome and Hawaii. None of this, of course, is due to her own hard work. Her second husband has money coming out of his ears.
So I ask her if she can cosign on this loan. I assure her that the only way she would be obligated to pay anything is if I ended up defaulting it, which I would never in a million years do. I just have no other option, they own't allow me to take full credit of it on my own.
This is my grandmother who is supposed to love me. Don't yours?
She says no, and proceeds to explain for fifteen minutes as to why. She has fifteen grandchildren outside of me(none of whom, I can fucking assure you, will be going to college). She has never heard of this cosigning business. There are people in their thirties and forties in college because their parents couldn't afford to send them. Sometimes these decisions must be made, that we must wait until we can afford it to do it.
The last one fucking killed me. As soon as I said goodbye I started to cry, and then I called my mom at work and proceeded to cry some more. Nothing matters about my family, about me, because we are poor. Nobody cares. Nobody outside of the four of us.
She'd rather me not go to school. That way I could end up shiftless and addicted like the rest of my family. It's a surprise I graduated from fucking high school. I am the very first person on my mom's side to go to college at all, the second on my father's side. And she dropped out.
It would be so much easier for all of them to swallow if I just didn't rise above this shit. If I just stayed the way I am, so they could continue to look down their noses at me and my family. They have wondered my entire fucking life how it is I am so smart, considering my parentage. My dad never made it to high school, but he is one of the smartest people I know. Because his parents didn't care, he didn't care. And he regrets every day when he gets up at four-thirty a.m. to go slave all day. He has encouraged my brother and I our entire lives so that we may not end up the way he has.
And she, and all of them, would just continue to grind us into the dirt. It doesn't matter what I could be. Only what I am right now.
A poor girl whose ambitions are apparently fucking above her station.
astera at 12:24 p.m.