Money Management

There are two main differences between high school and college. One is that in college there is basically no graffiti carved into the desks, unlike high school where a Mormon boy could expand his sexual vocabulary by reading the comments his peers had written about the student teacher on the desk.
 
The second main difference is in college you never have any money. In high school everybody was really rich. You would buy a teddy bear and a rose just to ask a girl out on a first date. While on a date in college I stormed out of a restaurant because of the price. When my date was chewing me out in the parking lot because she got all embarrassed because "some of her friends were in there and saw that she was on a date with a guy too cheap to buy hamburgers" I was like "Hey, they expect me to pay six dollars for a combo meal! You think money just pumps out of my arms or something?" Well it does. Do to the lack of income I've been donating plasma twice a week for cash.
 
Despite my Scrooge-like thriftiness I always try to keep more money on hand than needed just in case I’m forced into a situation where I have to choose between public humiliation and spending a few extra dollars. Such an occasion occurred earlier this week when I went to the grocery store. Usually when I go to the grocery store I head straight for the Ramen Noodles, left to the cold cereal, down to the milk and then straight on till morning. All of these items are located within the same two aisles so I have a very narrow (pun?) view of what the grocery store has to offer me. But this time I decided to walk down clear to the other side of the store to see what was down there. And when I got there I found a magical garden called the “Produce Section.” It was beautiful. It was like The Garden of Eden, just without the nudes. They had every kind of fruit and vegetable you could possibly imagine, and since I haven't eaten a fruit or vegetable since July I figured I should probably buy something, but since I had never purchased something healthy ever before in my life I didn't know how to choose what to buy. But then I saw this Mexican guy looking through some fruit and I thought to myself, "I'll just buy what this guy buys, because if there's one thing Mexicans know it’s how to pick fruit."
 
So we both ended up buying a ready-made bag of eight apples. I was thinking that this would cost somewhere around 2 or 3 dollars. But when it was scanned and the price popped up it came to a total of 8 FREAKEN DOLLARS! How could apples cost a buck each? Are you kidding me? Throughout my teenage years I would go to an old farmer's house and spend an afternoon picking four or five apple trees. He would pay me 20 dollars to pick a pickup load of apples. I thought it was a good deal at the time, but had I known I could sell them for a dollar each I would’ve just driven off with them and made a fortune.

So the apples cereal and milk came to a total of 14 dollars, which was killer to my debit card which only had 22 dollars on it. And not purchasing the apples was not an option because a girl I knew from school was working the register and I didn't want to be like "Wait! I can't afford apples, put them aside!" Hopefully nothing like that happens again this week or I'll be doomed to debtor's prison.

This post was originally written October 2007