Too bad my sporty pink and blue Pumas tore up my ankles today as I trotted around at work, waiting tables and doling out large clumps of sprouts. Owie. I hadn’t worn them in a while — they aren’t really summery shoes — but I thought they’d be good for work due to their cushiness. And they were, they just have that whole high-ankle thing going on. I long for a day when shoes (sneakers, even!) won’t ruin my feet in some way or another.

Anyway, the reason why I wanted extra cushy shoes today, as opposed to all the other days I spend running around coated in a layer of soy products, is that today, I had to be at work at EIGHT IN THE MORNING. Do you know what this means? It means that I’ve added a meager $2 to my pitiful hourly wage and taken me off weekends. But, more importantly, it means that I woke up at a QUARTER TO SEVEN in the morning. An hour I hadn’t seen since high school. This is an hour I’d prefer not to see ever again (oh, the days of 10.30-5.30 dot-com leisure), but such is the life of an espresso-slinging graduate student.

That’s right: graduate student. Images of me, corduroy-clad, caffeinated and starving, come to mind. But, oh, that’s not all to different from now, is it? Next week I meet with my advisor, who just so happens to be the woman I took classes with and worked with for two years as a research assistant at Sarah Lawrence. Somebody hooked me up! After a brief stint of confidence-wavering complaints (I’ll never make it as a writer, who am I kidding? Why the hell did I ever decide to go to grad school in the first place?), I am ready to register for classes, which I will do next week. The only down side to this whole situation is financial aid, or rather, the morons that work within the financial aid office. Unfortunately, I was spoiled at Sarah Lawrence by dealing with relatively intelligent, organized and easy-to-deal with humans working in that field. City College employees seem about as disgruntled as U.S. postal system workers; every time I call the financial aid office, the woman who answers the phone heaves a sigh so great, you’d think she alone was footing the bill of every single City College student with her weekly paycheck. So far, my financial aid is nil. In the words of one kind and supportive financial aid “counselor,” I’m just not eligible. Wow, I guess those unemployent checks really did add up afterall. Here I am, thinking I’m just creeping along right above the poverty line, but hotdamn, I’ve really been raking it in!

Um, no.

But I refuse to worry about it. I will figure out a way to do this, even if it means trotting over to the financial aid office on registration day and getting bratty with whoever I find there. I won’t let a few cranky office aides stand between me and my useless degree!