"You can't dig for gold, you don't even have an axe!"

Today was "Financial Aid Award" acceptance day.  This day sounds all happy and exciting, but it most certainly is not.

My full tuition scholarship is fun to accept.  That's a REAL award.  In fact, it's so fun that the school automatically accepts it for me.

What is NOT fun is accepting the many thousands of dollars in federal student loans that are necessary to cover my living expenses while in school.  You would think that with a full scholarship I wouldn't need to take out other loans...except that my school schedule/internship makes working enough hours to cover apartment rent and food and all that good stuff difficult.  So here come the loans.

Last year, being my first year living on my own, I was very relieved to have these loans, because I was worried about living on my own and managing to pay for everything by myself.  This year, I find these loans to be horrifying...because although I realize that they are necessary, I also realize that by May I will have tripled my undergraduate debt...and that was no small figure in itself.

So I did what all mature, independent young graduate students do:  I stared at the "Accept Awards" checkbox on the computer screen for about 30 minutes, got all teary, went to Target with my family to distract myself, talked with the family about my chagrin, got all teary, sulked for an hour or so, and went to Dairy Queen.

Then I finally sucked it up and accepted the loans that I know will be necessary to get me through this year with a roof over my head, food in my stomach, gas in my car, textbooks on my shelves, etc.

Throughout the day, I thought a lot about paying these loans back, and came to the conclusion that I'm just going to have to marry rich.  The only problem is, I'm really not the gold digger type; besides the fact that my hair isn't beach blonde and my skin isn't unnaturally tan and I don't carry dogs in my purse, I also am too genuine of a person to marry for money.  As much as I'm in favor of money and would like to have some of it, I'm one of those money-can't-buy-happiness kind of people.  Darn it.

As my sister put it when my family was discussing my anti-gold-digger persona tonight: "You can't dig for gold, you don't even have an axe!"

But at this point, I'm willing to take a pickaxe and start smashing some rocks.  I'll get back to you on the results.