This morning while I was trailing behind Joe as we walked into the church, between my wonder at the stark differences between myself and my eldest brother who was known by many of the church staff members and all the greeters even though as many as three thousand people attend services in a single weekend, and myself who with crossed arms avoided eye contact with anyone who might willfully stick their germ infested hand out towards me and force me to shake it, that a week really can change anything. More so it can change everything.
A week of waking up before the sun's premiere is a lifetime for me. Somewhere between the notes I scribbled inside my pink three subject notebook and the list which explained what color scrubs I need to buy, was the idea of security. I, of all people, should know better. Security doesn't exist in my life.
In retrospect it's my own fault. I didn't realize the nursing assistant class didn't qualify for financial aid, leaving me five quarters away from the full time status I needed to qualify for the seventeen hundred dollars I was depending on. My mother thought to comfort me by saying, "You'll get everything you want, just not necessarily in the time you want it," and then thought herself to be clever by leaving a sheet of paper by the coffee machine in the morning with
Plan B written in pencil at the top. Last time I checked Plan B is the pill women take after having unprotected sex. But in this case Plan B is the community college my mom thinks I
ought to go to, conveniently located in southern California.
I can assuredly tell you Plan B is crumpled somewhere in the backseat of my car.
What the financial office was able to do for me was to change my status to half time so that I can receive eight hundred dollars. A subsidized Stafford loan can pay the difference. My mom wasn't exactly doing cartwheels when I gave her the happy news.
Instead she's began a campaign against my boyfriend, and become completely apathetic to my struggles in securing the loan and continuing to sort out the mess I'm in at this late hour. Not that I'm the only child to be neglected by our dear maternal figure at this moment, she spent the entire time we were shoe shopping on her cell phone. Thomas only has shoes because I found pairs in the right size and sat with him while he tried them on. The cell phone call extended to the trip to Target where I eventually grabbed on to Sarah's hand as she was starting to wail and answered all four hundred of her questions as we walked to the check stand.
My mother is currently doing a great job of crushing any desire I have to eventually migrate south.
Thus I will continue to live my life day by day. Planning for the future is to difficult.
