The Rice And Wrongs: Still A Prosperous Time To Be College Student, Despite The Down Economy

Story by Dan Nguyen 

| Published Oct 14, 2008

Last week, I found myself stealing a roll of toilet paper from the College of Business Administration.

Don’t judge me, please. I only did this to avoid the recurring act of sitting at home on my own toilet T.P.-less.

I’m sure any self-respecting person at the conclusion of a bowel movement would like to have wiping options that don’t exclude toilet paper. Yes, it’s a poor time to be a college student
-- literally.

The economy is bad, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear me bitch about something we’ve been hearing about on television and reading in the newspapers for quite some time.

But, like Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon, I am finding myself in rare predicaments that vaguely connect to the unhealthy economy.

Walking back from the bars last weekend, I followed my routine path across the 10th street bridge. Who should I see but two of my friends who happened to be walking home from having a few with my housemates.

In their hands were a couple of microwaveable frozen dinners stolen from my house--the cheap-ones you get at Wal-Mart for 98 cents.

My friends, in their drunken money-saving state, opted out of the price-gouging available to them at Amigos for my tall and skinny housemate’s frozen fried rice and enchiladas.

As I tried to register what my friends were doing with our groceries and why my housemate would buy such a weird combination of frozen dinners (probably an impulse buy due to a bad case of the munchies), a random college kid with the same drunken money-saving mentality as my friends walked by, grabbed a frozen fried rice from their hands and ran frantically away to who knows where.

In all honesty, I am not mad at my friends or even the random fellow who got to enjoy the delicacy of stolen microwaveable fried rice. No, the thing that nags at my insides is the frustration that my housemates and I were unable to effectively use $2.

When you can’t put money down for something worthwhile in today’s economy, you’re bound to hurt later on.

I’m not talking about the metaphorical way either; you will literally feel excruciating pain.

The next day, we came up with an ingenious game plan to get ourselves out of our $2 misfortune. We were to sell parking spaces for the football game in our backyard for $10 a spot! We should have known the hurt was on the way.

To make more money, we decided to squeeze our own cars in the backyard as close together as possible, leaving a plethora of space for the maximum amount of ensuing customers.

We elected our level-headed housemate to park us into close quarters.

So, with a freshly opened game-day beer in one hand and the other directing our cars into place, my housemate executed a near-perfect parking job.

That was until a foot accidentally slipped onto a gas pedal, pinning our conductor between a bumper and the back of our house. Our housemate, in unfathomable pain, was unable to scream, leaving him the only option of releasing his torment by pouring his beer on top of himself.

Two dollars down from stolen groceries, we now had a bruised-up body and a spilled beer to add to the list.

Whoever said the economy will be tough on us when we enter the job market was lying; it’s brutal to us as college kids now.

Yet, as my housemates sit on our couch watching the game on television, unable to afford an over-face- value student ticket; even as my wounded traffic-conducting housemate iced his injuries, I couldn’t help but think that we are extremely fortunate.

As college students, we are in a smaller percentage of a country that makes up 5 percent of the world’s population.

That makes us, the American college student, a very rare species. We stand in our lives before the greatest amount of potential and knowledge we are ever to have.

So even if we think it’s a poor time to be a college student, in actuality, we’ve never been richer.