Finish my B.A. in Literature.

All day today, in heat Arcata residents are not accustom to, I’ve been riding my bike around town trying to make appointments to get back into the one class I need before I can get my degree: Spanish. I speak Spanish enough to get by, so I’m just going to take a Spanish 1 class and bam-o! Give the woman her must deserved degree! This entire ordeal would have been finished a long time ago (and I did the graduation ceremony two years ago!) if I had not decided to let my innate human greed get the better of me. Translation: During my last semester at a University I throw my hands up and consciously chose to live a lavish lifestyle that would make the ancient Greeks envious, and all with Uncle Sam’s money. My last semester I borrowed seven grand in student loans for school, then blew the money. Now I’m banned from attaining a degree until I give the entire lump sum of seven thousand dollars back. But there are loop holes to completing this class, such as doing it at community college instead of this University. Still, even though I finish any Spanish class with a A++ I can’t officially get my degree until I return the money. It’s frustrating to me because academics are my life. It’s were I feel most at home. I’ve been going to college since the age of 17, and moving from coast to coast in between, juggling some work with my classes all while adjusting to new towns, people, and doing it solo. At 19, while living in D.C. I would take the first of three public buses starting at 5 a.m. and dropping me off at 8 a.m. all to save the money that out of state tuition would have cost. I remember standing in ice cold weather, singing to myself to keep my mind off the frost, in the dark of an east coast dawn, just waiting for those public bus lights to beam in my direction so I could start the day. In between school I worked at a Bagel Bakery full time then. Now I’m basically 30 and I just don’t have it in me to do stuff even remotely like that anymore. Give me my degree! I carried one suitcase with me to San Francisco and lived off of ramen noodles for two years at SF State while writing paper after paper, all alone. Now I’m living with the man I will probably marry and he is insisting it all has to get taken care of right away: I must get this degree or else I will feel like a failure. That’s were I stand right now. I must come up with seven grand, and also take one class to say I’m finished. Maybe this semester it will happen. The truth is I am exhausted.