I'm broke!

Christ on crutches, haven’t you trustees taken enough from me? You told me this would be the most rewarding experience of my life, so I put my whole life on hold for you, and now look at me. I’m eating Ramen noodles out of an old recycled beer-pong cup. The label is so faded that I don’t even know which pizza company delivered it. For all I know it was here when I moved in. If it weren’t my last fully intact dish I would have burned it for warmth last week.\nBut you wouldn’t have that problem, would you? You have all that cash lying around, giant green Scrooge McDuck like piles of money. My money! Don’t try to deny it, you’ve been panhandling like a fiddle-playing monkey since I got here. Tuition’s hard enough but if I don’t have my $70 activity fee or $50 transportation fee you’ll probably burn my diploma. That’s blackmail, trustee President Stephen L. Ferguson. Do you hear me? Highway robbery!\nI slave night and day until my fingertips blister and blood pools around my inner ear – for you, trustee Ferguson, for you. But you don’t want to see me pass my classes, you just want your check so you can buy some big shiny useless thing, like that new Cyber Infrastructure Facility. Every assignment I do is an uphill battle against Oncourse or E-Reserves, it would be doing the world a favor to let the servers burn down.\nAfter four years suckling this teat dry, I thought you’d move on to fatter, more lucrative students but it’s never enough, the hunger is insatiable. Fortunately, other than the required commencement apparel (basically a contract termination fee) you can’t force me to pay for anything else, but that doesn’t stop the letters or the phone calls. \nIt seems like you only need to apply to IU to be added to the IU Foundation call list. I need to add my cell phone to the National Do Not Call Registry, because the telefund calls me more often than the Red Cross asking for blood donations, but last week was the first time the quota-driven telebeggers had the nerve to ask for more than $100. Like I tell the Red Cross, I desperately want to give – I love IU – but I need that money to live. Just let me get a job, and a house, maybe a dog, and then we can talk about scholarship donations.\nAs for the Alumni Association, even in the right lighting, squinting really hard, I still can’t see why one would join. Though I’m not sure how my post-graduate life could ever be complete without a yearlong subscription to the always riveting Alumni Magazine, paying a $20 membership fee for a 10 percent discount for a $50 hoodie at the Alumni Store is an astoundingly bad deal.\nNow if you’ll have to excuse me, if the Ramen dries to the cup it won’t come off tomorrow.