In the spring of 2014 I couldn’t afford my Marx books. I also couldn’t afford groceries but it was the Marx books that really got to me. Because it seems to me that encompasses the absolute absurdity of going to a richkid school when you’re not rich. There I was, knowing people who called themselves ‘Marxists’ who were working jobs in finance, knowing people who called themselves ‘Marxists’ with enough money to buy the books and not even read them, knowing people who called themselves ‘Marxists’ who had money not just for food but drugs. And I realized that University of Chicago was not a school but a country club, and I had somehow snuck in.
Now it is 2015 and I owe 2,300 dollars and if I don’t get it in by Tuesday I won’t be able to graduate. 375 of that is (to quote the Dean) a ‘small administrative fee’ for being on ‘extended graduation’ (aka not going to school in the spring because I couldn’t afford it and didn’t need the credits) and 315 of that is the ‘Student Life Fee’ (to use the library) and 100 dollars is a ‘Late Registration Fee’ and the rest is straight-up tuition because I got them to waive the ‘Student Health Fee: 1K’ that either I or my mother forgot to opt out of.
In India they’d call that bargaining, when you cry to a cold-eyed bureaucrat to lower the price they demand. In America, we call that ‘Financial Aid.’
I came here because I believed in the ‘Life of the Mind,’ because I believed in books and philosophy. I also came here because the tuition was 12,000 bucks for me because my mother was a realtor during the housing market crisis and business never really quite picked up. The irony is that the fact that this is a richkid school has made me able to afford it, because now the tuition is lower than even my state school, even my local public school in Philadelphia.
And I made my decision with open eyes, but the fact is it’s been hard. It’s hard to concentrate on your Sosc reading when you are worried you’re going to loose your house. It’s hard to read a philosophy book when you’re hungry and afraid you can’t pay the rent. And it’s hard (for me) working even a part-time job when your classes already take such energy.
And you can’t help but resent when you see people at parties using their money for cocaine. You can’t help resent how people pass by the beggars as if they’re nothing but trashcans, how people go out to eat as if it’s nothing, and go out to drink at the Northside bars.
Because even if I had the money I wouldn’t do those things, because the guilt of taking the money my parents have scraped for is enough to keep me in an ascetic lifestyle. My largest expense (besides groceries: 12-25 bucks) is coffee, five bucks a week (one dollar a day if you bring your own mug), extremely essential when you eat two meals a day. I’ve made sure to live in the cheapest room I can find (originally 325 a month, now 380) but when disasters happen it ends up being more. I found my furniture in dumpsters mostly, and once I got sick for three weeks because I’d become so crazy about money that I was only eating rice and potatoes and soy sauce, with protein (tofu: 1.75+ tax) once a week.
And it’s hard to relax when you do have money, because when you’re out of money and out of groceries your mind goes back. To the meal you treated yourself to two weeks ago (7 dollars) or to the avocados you bought for a meal you made for your friends. And in class people are using words like “ontology,” and you think it’s all nothing but a farce.
And you learn that people name-drop philosophers in the same way they carry designer purses: because people know how much that cost, and now know how much you’re worth.
And you start to see the University of Chicago as the castle it so resembles, a fortress made to keep poor kids out.
All the past times in classes when my mind was racing and connecting things, they seem so naive and false right now. They suggest that I fell for it, that I bit the fisherman’s hook. That I went along with a system in which you work in a school you cannot pay for, and work your youth to pay for what you couldn’t afford.
I offered over and over to my parents, to just stay here and drop out and take the classes for free. Because all that is here is free to us, as long as you forgo the official stamp. But it was only the stamp that my mother wanted, much more than the education it’d bring. It was the people I would meet who would bring me to the top. And I did it for her, and for my dad, and now I’m worried I won’t get the degree. I’ve got four days to raise $2,300, and 800 in my bank account. Some people would think this would ruin their final days, but I can’t help see it as fitting.
Because I never wanted to be a part of the richkid game, but I decided to go ahead and sneak in. I figured it was my one chance, because I’m not interested in making much money, and I’d never get a chance again to see people with power and pretend to be just like them. So I did it and don’t regret it, because I can’t regret meeting the people I’ve met.
But I’m tired, very tired. And guess what I’m hungry too.
this is real this is fiction 