The epitome of getting your dreams crushed.

[december_solstice]

Well sort of.

Can you believe there was a time when you could actually WORK your way through college? Now, students are spending the cost of a house in less than 4 years.

College is an investment. One that isn't easy to make if you're poor.

The worst is that overwhelming excitement you feel after finding out you got in -- then realizing you can't even afford the tuition deposit, or any other fee thrown at you that is required to even register for your classes.

My spirit? Crushed. My dreams? In ruins.

Yeah, I'll get over it, sure, eventually I will move along and carve a new path for myself.

But there is something else I've realized. It's all nonsensical. Higher education is a profitable business -- it does NOT have the student's best interest in mind.

Here is my story:

I recently completed my Bachelor's and graduated with a 3.5 GPA. This Spring, I applied for an MFA program, with the same university, and got in! This summer, I took my final 2 credits I needed to graduate and start my MFA program in the Fall.

By the time I was nearly done with my short 7 week summer course, I discovered that I would not qualify for any financial aid. For me to qualify, I would need to take 6 credits or more. Why would I take 6 credits, when I only need 2 to graduate? Why would I waste upwards 10,000 in federal grants, scholarships and student loans, that I simply do not need to spend? Why on earth would I do that? That funding could be applied to another deserving student.

This problem has only presented itself because I wanted to graduate this summer, instead of in the Fall. It was the most logical solution to complete my final credit in the summer, therefore being able to attend graduate school in the Fall. Logical. Common sense, even.

In order to start the MFA program, I needed to first fork out nearly $1500 in a matter of days. They did not offer me a payment plan even when I tried to explain to them-- Hey man, there isn't $1500 lying around under my mattress. Hey man, I'm living in it (rent). Which I can barely pay. I'm just trying to get ahead here. I am a working young person with little to no credit. I can't get a private student loan when I have no cosigner. Nor could I get a personal loan.

When I finally exhausted all of my options, I surrendered to the fate...that I kind of already saw coming.

That wasn't even the nail in the coffin, though.

Can I take a semester off to pay this off?

Admissions requires $500 for a 12 month deferment. BY MONDAY. Let me just go pick money from my money tree out back. Not only do I have to wait an entire school year, but I need to pay a tuition deposit for the f'ing tuition I am not even f'ing paying.

So tell me, does colleges have the student's best interest in mind? Because, excuse my french but, all I smell coming out of this university is bullshit.

Comments

2/3

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

If you stop eating, say, white flour and all forms of table sugar (white/brown sugar, molasses, syrup that isn't 100% just tree sap) completely for two or three weeks, you'll notice that you get very sick when you do eat it again even if it's just a super tiny bit. You'll also notice that your taste buds will have drastically changed by the end of those weeks - plain yoghurt that you found incredibly sour before, is totally edible. Suddenly you can taste the sweetness even in vegetables. This is why your grandma says "you don't need dessert, fruit is dessert enough!".

The idea is that when you eat a sugar cube, you're actually eating the same amount of sugar as you'd get from, let's pretend, 19 apples. You wouldn't normally eat that many apples in one sitting, so naturally your body can't handle that amount of sugar properly and starts working in "overdrive mode", even if you don't notice it. Due to the missing ingredients that are supposed to work together (the entire rest of the apple), the sugar can also be processed in your body in a different way than normally.

Yet when you look in your food that you've bought from the store, you'll see that there's this same added sugar in stuff like ketchup, sausages, chips, sandwich spread, bread, lunchmeat, cereal, fruit juice... When you look out for white flour, you'll see that it's in stuff like soy sauce, sometimes hotdogs... White rice flour, and they use it in gluten-free breads. And you'll be lucky if they haven't also bleached this flour (in the US, they're apparently allowed to bleach white flour with chlorine...?). If it doesn't have plain added sugar, it has aspartame (an even worse poison), or other things that are just as edited (ex. stevia that you buy at the store is apparently just as edited as normal sugar is).

And did you know, stuff like non-natural food colourings can cause things like ADD symptoms? One lady I read about in America, found food colouring even in frozen french fries.

So this "poison" is in almost literally everything you buy pre-made at the store or eat at a restaurant, and if you're unlucky you're also eating pesticides or arsenic due to how and where they grew the food. It's no wonder that people feel so lethargic and sluggish and have memory problems (or "brain-fog"), and why they get so sick, and why the rate of cancer and diabetes is clearly growing.

But, look at what they tell you. "The cancer rate isn't growing, we just have better detection methods now". "It's just hereditary". "You need this extra sugar, it's good for you, it's for energy". No, it's just what they say so they can keep selling this stuff.

Or, look at all these studies. "If you drink green tea, you have a lower rate of cancer", "If you eat rye flour, you have a lower rate of cancer". The answer is clear. If you're constantly drinking green tea, you're constantly not drinking as much soda or coffee/black tea/fruit juice (with added sugar). If you're eating rye flour, you're not eating as much white flour. They even sometimes have added sugar in empty pill capsules.

finally done >.>

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

But if you say "I don't eat sugar/white flour" people go "oh you're allergic?", you explain the problem, then they think you're crazy, or they refuse to watch the research video for no reason, etc. Despite that everyone knows that "eating chocolate makes you happy" "poor people tend to be really sick" "candy causes cavities", "alcohol/drugs dull your brain", despite that we all know that things like asbestos used to be commonplace, they don't realize that we're all still dumb enough to have the same problems but just with different subjects today... "Milk is healthy!" but 100 years ago, milk was fresh from the cow and now it's not.

Food companies aren't out there for your health. At this point, doctors and researchers aren't necessarily out there for your health either, because they've either been "bought" by companies or the research they read has been. It's the same as the education system, they're not there to educate you. And the education system makes the same excuses.

"Kids in foreign countries do better in school because they're in school for longer hours" (= Not true, Finland's the best in Europe and they're in school for many less hours). "We'd do better if we had more money" (= My wife's elementary school literally used one of those metal triangles to call in kids from recess). "Other countries can do it that way because they're smaller" (America would be smaller too if every state acted like a separate country).

What miffs me is that my parents and grandparents apparently aren't out there to help me either. They taught me nothing. Clearly they know more than me about some things, so why isn't the information being passed down?

RE: finally done >.>

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

The refusal to look at research is a huge problem here. People want to stay ignorant. It feels better. Who wants to hear this? You know what I mean? It's hard to swallow and ignorance is easier.

I'd like to think I discuss a lot of thought-provoking topics on my social media platforms. And, I'd say less than 2% of those on my friends list engage. On the other hand, my BS posts, I get a lot of engagement.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even people who claim to be health-conscious or whatever tend to not want to read about health. I'll read stuff if someone links me but I don't exactly always go look up info on my own... Sometimes when I bring up serious topics (just random stuff I read) people are like "You're talking about such weird things, I don't know how to reply".

RE: 2/3

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

I'm totally on board with you. I think the huge problem here is the capitalistic nature of the food and pharmaceutical industries. It's all about selling products and making money. Healthy isn't very profitable, I guess. Less doctor visits, less medicine to prescribe, less junk to sell. Throw in poor, biased research, and an overall shit education system...oh boy.

What are your thoughts on the organic and gmo-free movement?

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

From all that I've heard, it's good. The food might still end up getting some chemicals or something in them but it's at least going to be a lot less than otherwise, and the more people buy organic stuff the easier it is for the farmers to grow it. If you live near a farm you can even just go talk to them in person and pay them differently from what they would get paid if they delivered their stuff to the grocery store, if you have the money - from looking it up, milk is way cheaper here if you get it directly than if you buy it at the store, and there's been studies saying stuff like if a kid grows up on unprocessed milk then they have less allergies later in life... Well why not for food too?

Contrary to what some people might say, eating stuff like meat or milk from animals that were fed chemicals, the chemicals DO get into your body and in the very long run (just like with sugar etc.) they DO affect you. For example, the studies about white flour and sugar all pointed out the fact that the people who started eating them tended to get the illnesses associated with eating them, after about 20 years from first starting. But that's when they had lived their whole life not eating them. What about when your mom eats tons of it when you're already in the womb, and it's also the only food you ever have even as a baby?

Someone wrote somewhere that they looked at their friend's baby food - "ground rice" - and it had like 16 different ingredients in it. Your baby is only supposed to be eating plain ground rice, which you can very well just make yourself at home if you buy a grinder.

People just seriously have to remember that we had mercury even in stuff like kid's toys for a long time... and the generations growing up with that were seemingly healthier than our current generation.

They actually even had a commercial here where they got a family who didn't eat organic food, to get themselves tested for how many chemicals they had in their bodies, and then gave them all-organic food to eat for two weeks. By the end of the two weeks they tested them again and they had almost no chemicals, so the family was convinced and switched to eating organic.

Some food you can even just grow in a pot on your kitchen table (like leeks and onions) if you really want to. You can watch the commercial, it's pretty self-evident, they just have before/after charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnfrJLlZ5LI

The guy at the end basically says "We don't know what long-term effects eating all these chemicals will have, but we also know that you can't just look at the fact that you're eating chemicals as if it's individually. Chemicals when mixed together can be incredibly more dangerous than when taken in alone."

There's another documentary that was actually made in Sweden that I wish I could show you, but it has no English subs. This guy went to get himself tested to figure out exactly what all the chemicals and everything were in his body, to see if the hype was true. Due to the food that we eat that is being grown non-organically, and on ground that's had different pesticides and stuff in it, among other things he had chemicals in his body that have actually been illegal to use for decades and that simply can't ever leave his body.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

There was another documentary about allergies around the world, which was done partially in France and Japan. In France they eat tons of "synthetic foods" among other things (as in literally everything is fake and has sugar in it, so complains my Danish friend who lives there), and in Japan they've replaced huge amounts of traditional wooden stuff with modern western, concrete buildings.

Apparently once you replace dirt roads with concrete, the pollen can't dissolve into the ground and get diffused - so where does it go? Into your body, or just sitting there on the ground and in the air, in amounts way more than normal even if you can't see it. When you stop using traditional, wooden houses that are made for the air to pass through, you live in a house with stuffy air where all the possible chemicals/everything just get trapped. Your body can't handle this as well, so you end up with a higher population of people who have health problems, asthma, allergies. (I read that it's similar with asthma - when you live in a dusty, moldy, cramped house or whatever your kids are more likely to get it, and the longer they live there the more likely they are to be stuck with asthma all their lives).

Then there's plastic. You know how plastic melts really easily? You know how it's porous? This means it's the worst material to put food, especially warm food, into because the plastic "gets into" your food. Apparently this can happen even if the food is cold but it's increased when it's warm. So why the hell are we using it for all our food packaging and storage containers? Most fabrics have plastic in them these days too. Oh look, our toothbrushes and baby toys are made of plastic.

So, everything that I see points to that we can only deviate from nature to a certain extent and past that we're completely ruining both our health and the environment. All my common sense and knowlege of 80's and 90's scifi (; D) points to that if even mere condensing and extracting of foods is too non-natural for our bodies, then genetically modified foods are going to end up being even worse. I heard that GMO corn is much worse for you than normal corn (though I haven't gone looking it up), so why would it be any different for ex. GMO grapes or chickens?

And why genetically modify food anyway? We've existed for thousands of years on what we have. We don't actually need stuff like bananas that don't have seeds in them. We don't actually need tomatoes that don't rot for five months. We don't even need MORE food because we (apparently??) already produce more than enough food - it's just that the food we have isn't used efficiently.

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

The only reason why I support GMOs is because it grows easier/faster and lasts longer. Which can be very worthwhile for countries that suffer from food shortages. Fight global famine, sure, but we don't really need it for...convenience or aesthetic reasons (easy peel, seedless fruits), or extra bright apples. But why on earth would any organization create such a product to fight world hunger when you can instead profit greatly off of it by destroying soil and making people sick.

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

It would make sense to supply 3rd world countries with seeds. But that will never happen. You are right, we do produce enough food to feed everyone, we just throw it away. There shouldn't be a single apple wasted. They should all end up in food banks or even distributed/offered for free (ugly, bruised, produce and near expired/expired pantry items).

There is a whole community to dumpster divers that show how much food is throw out by supermarkets.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

I really don't get why we do things like export our own local food and then import food from foreign countries, huge amounts of money going to waste here...

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

There are clear pros and cons but I think it does more harm than good when lead by Monsanto. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice how corrupt of an organization they are. Just look at how many countries don't want anything to do with them. I know Neil DeGrass Tyson openly supports gmos but I haven't heard much of his argument.

I think it is impossible for the mass majority of Americans to switch completely to organic and it's silly for anyone even suggest it. (For example, I care about people's health, but I wouldn't tell anyone what to eat. Ever. I think public schools should provide healthier lunches, but I also believe there shouldn't be a ban on how much soda a person can buy -- which our Mayor is trying to do. This could be a good idea for minors though. No 2L sodas to those under 18.)

Poor people, especially those living in places where organic items are less available, don't even have access to it, even if they had an interest. I also recognize, for me, and for other low income families, every single penny matters. It's all about stretching that penny till it can't be stretched anymore. When we were REALLY struggling, my diet consists of probably 60-70% chicken, rice and beans. Because that the most bang for my buck. (At least here it is.) I could do 5lb bag of rice $3, a few packs of chicken $5-7 and a bag of dried beans $1. Maybe some plantains $1. 1-2 bags of oranges $2-3. Oats $1. Eggs $2-3 Bread $1 Half gal Milk $2 And that would be our grocery list for the week. And, it worked! We have totally lived off $20 a week and didn't kill myself with processed foods.

In some cases there is little difference between the gmo product and the organic product. According to the FDA, it is some 35-40% less gmos required to gain that organic label. Also, it's important to note that the 'organic', 'free-range' and 'GMO-free' label is becoming quite a marketing ploy. Especially now that there is so much news and controversy about the topic. The FDA is handing out certifications left and right, and everyone wants to get on board. Unless the FDA tightens the qualifications for these labels, this can do some serious farm. Not only are Americans being misguided by food corps, their "nature" of being awfully uninterested in research, complacent, and overall indifferent, will hurt them.

Like you mentioned briefly, buying directly from farms, supporting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), buying farm shares, is overall the BEST way to go. Not only are you probably getting a 'true' organic product, but you're also supporting local/small farms which are seriously hurting now. This is, more or less, the last bit of connection we have to what we eat. This is the last of bit of us knowing WHERE EXACTLY our food comes from.

I think anyone can make huge strides by just being more conscious about what they're eating and where it comes from. I eat some organic items, but only if it economically makes sense and I can fit it in my budget. It's all about balance.

A lot of people say it's too expensive, and though it is more expensive, assuming you even have the access, I usually suggest others to swap out a few items. For example, if you buy canned regular beans, I suggest buying canned organic beans because it's often not much of a difference in price. Even better, buy a bag of dried organic beans and soak them yourself. Cheaper vegetables such as carrots are not much more expensive organic. Watch for sales, do it when you can, don't beat yourself up about it.

If you put in the effort, it's possible, but it is time consuming and a commitment.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

If you buy local milk at the store here, it costs let's say, 10 crowns (that's like a dollar and a half or so) for a litre. Of this, the farmer gets maybe 4-5 crowns. If you go to the farmer directly and get milk from them, you'll most likely pay 3-5 crowns, with the possibility to pay them more, and if the farmer is willing to do things illegally then you can even buy 100% fresh milk that hasn't been edited in any way. So not only are you getting the milk cheaper and possibly healthier, but if you just went ahead and paid the normal store price directly to the farmer, you'd be paying them double.

There's a big cultural difference in what takes "time". Here, spending 20-30 minutes on a meal basically means "instant", and soaking something overnight doesn't even count as time spent. Spending an hour is normal. You can make yoghurt or soft butter overnight and depending on where you live, it saves both your health and money (apparently here it's not any cheaper to make butter at home but "it tastes heavenly". Obviously if you could buy milk/cream directly it would be cheaper).

Over time you figure out better and faster recipes, you realize that if you spend one day just making tons of dough then you can freeze it all for those times when you do want to make pizza quick, then suddenly making a nice, cheap meal that's also fast takes no time at all.

You can make flavoured drinks and candy even just from boiling certain flowers (violets, elderflowers) and likewise there's tons of edible plants that we don't eat anymore - in the old days they even made flour from tree bark. You can make normal bread at home - when lazy, just make pancake-style bread and use that for sandwiches instead. If you save the root-end of a leek or onion after cutting one up, you can regrow them and it doesn't take long at all.

If you buy full stalks of celery, you can dry the leaves (takes like 10 minutes in the oven but 3 days with pure normal air) yourself then add them to anything you want as spices. I doubt making meatballs at home is much cheaper (you "fill out" the meat with milk/cream and oats and onion and stuff) but they certainly taste better.

Making a serving of french fries takes like what, 15 minutes to chop and prepare it all, from full potatoes to in the oven? Making pasta doesn't take much time once you get used to it or once you get a machine. I mean, how much TV do people watch every day, how many blogs do they surf, how much time do they completely waste while at work? How much time does it even take to walk into that convenience store and buy that soda, or sit in that drive-through line?

And in all these cases you can make the food a lot healthier. When I make french fries I put on spinach or celery leaves, then when they dry from being baked in the oven the vegetables don't actually taste like anything - so you can put a whole bag of spinach on even if you hate spinach. When making pasta, you can put tomato paste or fish meat in or whatever and likewise, the taste isn't so strong, so you can do it even if you hate it. Instead of pasta with cheese I make pasta with egg sauce (not sure how to explain the end result but it DOESN'T taste like omlette and it's more like just having the texture of cheese).

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

But it works if you save money in other ways too. When your pillow goes flat, don't toss it, open it up and combine the insides with a second pillow and sew it back up. Buy whole kernels for popcorn instead of microwave bags, pop it on the stove in a pot. Buy plain cocoa powder and milk instead of Swiss Miss. Heat up drinks using a candle. Get rid of the electric coffee maker, use a hand-mixer (http://img.tradera.net/images/949/211033949_90141cc0-1e16-4e50-8e11-601b55ff05cf.jpg). If you own a house or a balcony, in the wintertime just put your food outside in the cold and unplug your fridge/freezer (food that shouldn't freeze goes inside the house in an icebox like a cooler, using snow or ice taken from outside for the cold).

Make potato chips at home, or use another vegetable that's not even potatoes but is cheaper. Nowadays you can even do stuff like buy phone chargers and flashlights that use "human power" instead of electricity to work, and you can make or buy "sun ovens" that don't use electricity, for the summertime.

Hmm, so maybe after that your electric bill is a little lower? Or maybe you realize that you have some habit-food (like coffee and chips) that's actually sucking away half your money, that you can stop eating or reduce costs on?

Buying tea loose-leaf in bulk is cheaper than in bags. If you learn to sew and repair or make your own clothes, so you can at least turn the old clothes into new ones when something happens to them, they'll last longer and then - Wow! You have a little more money for food sometimes too! If you're really poor, once the fabric of your shoes breaks, re-use the soles and sew new fabric on. If you buy fish that hasn't pre-gutted, you save a little more money. If you get a machine you can even make sausages at home and again you can put "filling" in that makes the meat stretch. If you realize that hearts taste just like normal stew meat after you cook them enough, if you save bones and shrimp shells and whatnot and make soup stock, there you go.

Right now I'm making leather/fabric from fish skin, and thinking about all the times I've eaten fish and didn't know that you could actually use the skin. Maybe it wont go anywhere, but people are selling these fish skins for like ten dollars each on Etsy - I could potentially fix up the skin and sell it for nearly the same cost as actually buying the fish cost in the first place.

I mean, if we were all REALLY poor, we'd be making sandles for ourselves by weaving together grass or free plastic straws we picked up at the mall, and our clothing would from melted plastic bags that we picked up off the street... We'd all have rainwater collection buckets and we'd be picking up pieces of wood out of dumpsters or from forest floors and carving our butter knives and spoons from them. We'd make oilcloth ourselves at home, no one would ever use dryers, and we'd all be turning dog hair into yarn LOL.

I also see "people should have common sense already - you should know not to drink soda with every meal" sorts of comments come up a lot. Anyone who looks around them should realize that most people do not have common sense. People are feeding soda to babies and deep-frying pasta. (If you haven't seen "Big Meets Bigger" I recommend it, it's probably on Youtube.)

I think that people should be able to poison themselves however much they want once they're an adult but there needs to be some sort of regulated system about it. You should be able to buy alcohol, but you have to use a card every time, and when the card racks up too many purchases/visits within a certain time period you then get tested to see if you're an alcoholic.

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

Your celery leaves idea is pretty neat. I'm quite a fan of celery salt.

As for time, I think most Americans would prefer not to prep cook and cook for more than...30-40 minutes total. They're all about fast and convenience, in all aspects of society, not just food. I think majority processed foods are more or less geared towards saving time. Whether it's minute rice of kitchen appliances.

The entire diet and food culture is about the quickness. I want good food without taking the time to cook it. I want to be healthy and fit without putting the time in. That is also why there are so many dangerous and ineffective weight loss gimmicks. (Late night infomercials.)

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

Yep. And yet what do they do with all this saved time? (The most common reason why people give up learning a language is also "I don't have time") And doesn't it make you more unable to handle waits and things when you're so used to fast fast now? It seems to me that rather than having tons of saved time, these people feel like they have even less time...

If it takes more time to do or make something (yourself) then you'll probably value it more, and if it takes more time to cook you'll probably eat less lol