College Bound

In an effort to depress myself I just googled tuition at random colleges. I was trying to get an idea of how much my rates should be when I prostitute myself to send my daughter to college. It depressed me, but for the wrong reasons. I was looking at the dorm rooms and the meal plans and I really wished I could drop out of this adult thing for a bit and go back to school.

I don't mean to finish my degree. I mean go back just to live there. I went to a small underfunded HBCU and my college experience sucked. I moved off campus my junior year, not because I wanted to join the exciting and fast growing field of paying bills, but because I got fed up with campus life. The funny thing is that my school wasn't bad per se, but I just had a string of bad luck that went on and on and on.

I have college stories that still give me night terrors. I could talk about the time someone went around peeing in the dryers or the time I got burned because the plumbing got screwed up and boiling hot water was flowing to the toilets. I could talk about how I had a crazy roommate who was borderline narcoleptic and used to fall asleep mid-sentence, drool like a heroine addict for twenty minutes and then wake up and keep talking. The next year I thought I'd do better and ended up with a roommate who used to get up at 5 in the morning, screw a red light bulb into his lamp and then start chanting and convulsing at his desk with a cross in his hand.

Those are the light stories, the ones that aren't worthy of a full blog post. I've seen some things man. I just wonder what it'd be like to go back to college now with the wisdom and pain that comes from paying bills for the last ten years. Also, I'd know not to pick a dorm on Skid Row. It's too late for me. My daughter is up to bat and while I want to be happy knowing that she'll get to have a better college experience than I did because she'll have two parents who actually went to college, I also remember some other things that happened in those dorm rooms. She may just be living at home...forever.