School's In!

Parents!!!!!, it's time to buy pencils, pens, markers, crayons, folders with pictures of Jack Sparrow, overpriced binders made out of cheap plastic with deformed zippers and non-binderly innards such as pouches, hole punchers, scissors, and iPods. Papermate or Bic, Crayola or Roseart, Shrek 2 or Cars, Paper or Plastic, so many decisions. Of course, since your child would be embarrased to shop with you, you just have to make logical guesses, which will be wrong no matter what. "No, Mom, I didn't want black ink OR blue ink, I wanted an XBOX."

These problems are not mine, for I am a child myself. Well, I was. Now I'm going into college, and I have to become an adult all of a sudden. I moved into a dorm room with a complete stranger, with no parents to give me beneficial advice such as "You need vegetables with dinner", "You need to cook them first", and "Chocoate isn't a vegetable". I was stranded on an island of by-my-self-ness, surrounded by an ocean of fall-orientation-ness. To make things worse, everything on the campus is poorly labeled, so by the time I actually found a place to eat that would accept my campus dining card, they were closing up. Fortunately, they were kind enough to point me to another place that was a 15 minute walk away and had actually closed even sooner. I made the mistake of telling my parents about the fiasco, so they went behind my back and ordered me a pizza and some root beer.

The moral of the story is that if you act helpless people will give you stuff you can't afford.