This Isn't the Way I Thought it Worked

I have frequently complained about how the world works but truthfully I have a very good life. My whining is warranted in my mind but when compared with people who are living genuinely crummy lives I should just shut up. Will I? Nope.
This is my current rant: The people who do everything “right” do not get the occasional leg up that living right is supposed to afford them.

Here is my personal case in point. My daughter is getting ready to go to college so we have been jumping through more hoops than a trained poodle working for Barnum and Bailey. The main goal is to figure out a way she can go to school without setting up a standing weekly appointment for the whole family to sell our plasma. Higher education is expensive. I’m starting to think it might be cheaper to build a college and hire a bunch of professors.

This is what I thought I was supposed to do. Go to college. (Check) Get a job. (Check) Get married. (Check) Return to college to improve our lives together. (Check) Get a better job. (Check) Have children. (Check) Raise them to be individuals who value kindness, posses a strong work ethic, spread humor and stuff like that. (Check) Get a graduate level degree in order to improve all of our lives. (Check) Not get divorced. (Check) Avoid going into irretrievable levels of debt (Check, but that was a close one) Send my children to college so they can start their own adventure through the circle of life. (Not so fast my friend)

Because I swallowed the American dream hook, line and sinker my kids (and I) will now borrow something equivalent to the budget deficit of Texas to facilitate getting my children the college education which was always peddled to me as an integral component of success. This is proof that my own education was not complete. I never learned to use my own personal empirical evidence to the contrary as a method of contradicting the aforementioned reverie of the United States. I did learn to use big words and stuff.

Here is my empirical evidence. My first college degree was in Film Studies. This meant I was eminently qualified to work at a video rental store, which I did for the first few years out of college which was also what I did while I was in college. See the degree made all the difference in the world. I made more money after college because I had more time to devote to my minimum wage job. My second degree was in elementary education. This meant I no longer worked for an hourly wage. It also meant I got to re-live my college years because every other meal consisted of Ramen Noodles and my furniture came from stores which also sold tires, milk and shaving cream. My graduate degree was in Education Administration. I was now able to earn the money which made it possible to buy a house and go to an honest to goodness couch store but not to properly maintain college funds for the kiddos.

So even though all that book learning did not lead to financial gains and the posh life I still value the education I received because I firmly believe it made me a more fully rounded, intelligent, caring human being which is really what I was after. I hope my children can get that out of their schooling as well.

Now back to the point of my rant. So my wife and I both went to college and then proceeded to get advanced degrees. We worked hard, not coal miner hard or Afghanistan soldier hard or Goldman Sachs CEO hard (it takes a lot of effort to beat down basic human compassion to that level) but our noses have grindstone scars. We made sacrifices in order to give our children what we thought was most important for them (love, attention, solid nutrition, frequent hugs, giggles and belly laughs, bedtime stories and all that Ozzie and Harriet stuff). But now when we look for scholarships and the like we find the grand majority of those are designed for very distinct demographics described by characteristics we do not possess.

It turns out I should have dropped out of high school, divorced their mother, possibly even arranged to have my permanent mailing address be 25-2-Life Penitentiary Avenue if I wanted my 3.98 GPA oldest daughter to receive some federal aid to go to university.