Post-script

As I went to the counter to settle up, the counter guy told me shook his head when I gave him my chip card to debit my account. He wouldn't accept it.

"But you have a sign on the front door that says you accept Interac."

"Actually, I think that's just for the ATM."

"Well, THAT sucks."

Grumbling about the rip-off, I went to the ATM and paid a $1.50 fee to get $20.00 from my checking account, all because I didn't bring enough cash with me from across the street. I gave him the $20 and took my $18.50 back, and didn't give my customary thank-you after receiving the change. On my way back across the street, I thought, "Well, I suppose I could have left without paying," since he didn't have my name or anything of that sort. But it would have made no sense to bring on such bad karma, at the very least. We all pick our battles, and sometimes just knuckling under (and in this case, paying a total of $4.50, making Jen's printout ultimately cost 75 cents per page) is what life commands us to do.

After I got home, I went outside onto our balcony and looked scornfully down at the business. What did I see but a Second Harvest truck now parked out front of the 24-hour computer store, with people unloading a few overstuffed boxes of food and delivering them into that same building: a cosmic reminder that I needed to regain, quickly, the perspective that a small incident caused me to lose.

There's some recent backstory to explain my needlessly harsh reaction. Just last night, I had a conversation with a relative that I never expected to have to have, which nonetheless confirmed that financial support will be provded to keep us afloat here amidst the constant financial uncertainty. It will provide a level of certainty that we haven't known since receiving the news way back in early September about my financial aid award.

I won't soon forget waking up this morning; my brain was still confused, as though it still couldn't process the fact that the help will be provided, that the daily worries that have been at the front of my mind every single day do not have to hold such negative influence over my thoughts.  To think that I can actually concentrate on school, work my new 9.5-hour-a-week job, keep on networking in the quest to secure a paid summer internship... the degree to which that cauldron of worry/frustration/suppressed anger/fear has bubbled is surprising. We'll keep on scraping and stretching just as we have, but with this, it will make it easier to keep an extra $1.50 fee from wreaking such havoc on my mood, as though that $1.50 was the difference between staying afloat and sinking.

Barring a truly bizarre disaster, I'll never know what it's like to be truly poor. I am an extremely privileged position to simply have worries about a course exam in a competitive graduate program, and am humbled. Still, I know what it's like to struggle. And I also know the lesson that we can never truly know what others are capable of until the time comes, with another reminder having arrived just 18 hours ago.

With that, I continue.