My First Apartment - a survived summer
When the summer rolled around after my first year at college, I didn't want to go back home. It was a strange situation - but I knew that if I went back to my small hometown, and lived in my mom's house again, I wouldn't be back to college the next year.
They say college kids have a 'safety-net,' that they aren't really poor, just college poor. Well, that summer I would have loved to have had a safety-net. Instead, during the worst of it - the best I could have done was scrounge fifty-cents to call someone to take two days to drive out and pick me up. I didn't have a phone, I didn't have money in the bank, and my family was barely getting by themselves because my income was gone.
I lived in an 8' by 10' basement apartment that summer with a refrigerator, a microwave and a bathroom. There was no kitchen. I washed my dishes in the bathroom sink.
It was cheap - and it was in the same neighborhood as my college dorm. I couldn't afford summer classes, and I had to get out of the dorm. But I didn't want to go back home.
The job I had gotten in November offered me 'full-time' for the summer, at $6.00 an hour. It was a great place to work, but full-time ended up being, at the most, 22 hours a week. That added up to less than $100.00 per week, after taxes. My rent, for the shoebox apartment, was 185.00 a month, with me paying my own electricity, about 20.00 a month. That was a cheap aparment - very cheap by today's standards, but it was a hard summer.
In my way, I learned how to survive. It was quite different than the 'all together now' we had grown up with in Minnesota. I began to wonder if maybe the prospect of being stuck in a small town for the rest of my life wasn't half bad.
As I didn't have a phone in the apartment, I made short calls at the corner payphone to tell my mom I was alive. I bought stamps - and wrote longer letters. I searched in my car cushions for gas money - even returned canned food once or twice. I washed laundry in my bath-tub and hung it over the shower rod to dry. I lived on dollars stretched thin and change collected in jars. I budgeted. I made grocery lists and added up the tally before I went shopping.
My diet consisted mostly of rice, oatmeal, and whatever canned protein was cheap that week. There was a brand of beef stew (not anymore) that was 70 cents a can, and if I split in three portions it made the rice much more bearable. I drank a lot of water, worked every shift I could pick up and apologized a lot to my mom that 'I just can't drive the 400 miles home.. I don't have the gas money.' I watched Late Night with Conan O'Brien at midnight on a 13" screen my brother had given me - staticy even with the rabbit-ear antenna posed 'just right.'
One day, when it was raining hard out, I was very hungry. The rice I had eaten for breakfast just wasn't enough. I should have just taken the twelve minutes to make more (I had that microwave time down to a science by then) - but I didn't. I realized I had almost two dollars in change saved in a jar on the TV.
I was driving the four blocks up to the fast food chain when the light began to turn. My brakes didn't work well in the rain, and I slipped through just as it was turning. The young cop behind me pulled me over and gave me a ticket for running a red light - saying he saw me try to stop but it wasn't good enough. I sat there for a long time, stunned. He came back over and told me to get going or he would give me another ticket.
I didn't get the food - I drove home, still in a partial daze, and crawled under my table in the shoebox apartment. I sat there and cried myself to sleep. The ticket was 60.00 - to be paid in four days or I was to appear in court. My rent was 185.00 - and I had just enough to pay it in the bank, and just enough to pay only that.
That was the lowest point of those three months until schools started again - somehow I scrambled enough to pay the ticket on time, and my paycheck from work arrived on the last day for rent. The lady was nice and let me pay that evening instead of during the day.
I lost 20 lbs that summer ;o) not that I needed it.
I still believe if I had went back to my mom's house for the summer I would have either been convinced to stay in a low-paying job (as I've seen many of my friends and relatives do) that doesn't go anywhere (except into debt) - or been convinced to get married to some other guy - or get pregnant -- something that would anchor me to that little Minnesota town and never let me go again.
Instead I have a wonderful husband I love - who waited four and a half years for me to come back from college. Our fourth wedding anniversary is at the end of June. We are planning our first baby next year and have hopes for land and a house. We both work at a computer company in Tennessee. And - we are survivors - both of us (his childhood was more of the same above, except all of the time with four other siblings). Heck - now, with each other, we've already been through times almost as bad, and came out of them better and stronger.
I'm glad I stayed in the shoebox apartment - and even more happy that I lived through it :o)
Yes, I know there are people who live through worse - all of the time - but there are also people who don't believe even this story, that won't accept people stretch themselves even in these ways in order to make ends meet. Well, this is for them, and for all the college students from poor families who struggle on their own paycheck and scholarship to make their way.
They say college kids have a 'safety-net,' that they aren't really poor, just college poor. Well, that summer I would have loved to have had a safety-net. Instead, during the worst of it - the best I could have done was scrounge fifty-cents to call someone to take two days to drive out and pick me up. I didn't have a phone, I didn't have money in the bank, and my family was barely getting by themselves because my income was gone.
I lived in an 8' by 10' basement apartment that summer with a refrigerator, a microwave and a bathroom. There was no kitchen. I washed my dishes in the bathroom sink.
It was cheap - and it was in the same neighborhood as my college dorm. I couldn't afford summer classes, and I had to get out of the dorm. But I didn't want to go back home.
The job I had gotten in November offered me 'full-time' for the summer, at $6.00 an hour. It was a great place to work, but full-time ended up being, at the most, 22 hours a week. That added up to less than $100.00 per week, after taxes. My rent, for the shoebox apartment, was 185.00 a month, with me paying my own electricity, about 20.00 a month. That was a cheap aparment - very cheap by today's standards, but it was a hard summer.
In my way, I learned how to survive. It was quite different than the 'all together now' we had grown up with in Minnesota. I began to wonder if maybe the prospect of being stuck in a small town for the rest of my life wasn't half bad.
As I didn't have a phone in the apartment, I made short calls at the corner payphone to tell my mom I was alive. I bought stamps - and wrote longer letters. I searched in my car cushions for gas money - even returned canned food once or twice. I washed laundry in my bath-tub and hung it over the shower rod to dry. I lived on dollars stretched thin and change collected in jars. I budgeted. I made grocery lists and added up the tally before I went shopping.
My diet consisted mostly of rice, oatmeal, and whatever canned protein was cheap that week. There was a brand of beef stew (not anymore) that was 70 cents a can, and if I split in three portions it made the rice much more bearable. I drank a lot of water, worked every shift I could pick up and apologized a lot to my mom that 'I just can't drive the 400 miles home.. I don't have the gas money.' I watched Late Night with Conan O'Brien at midnight on a 13" screen my brother had given me - staticy even with the rabbit-ear antenna posed 'just right.'
One day, when it was raining hard out, I was very hungry. The rice I had eaten for breakfast just wasn't enough. I should have just taken the twelve minutes to make more (I had that microwave time down to a science by then) - but I didn't. I realized I had almost two dollars in change saved in a jar on the TV.
I was driving the four blocks up to the fast food chain when the light began to turn. My brakes didn't work well in the rain, and I slipped through just as it was turning. The young cop behind me pulled me over and gave me a ticket for running a red light - saying he saw me try to stop but it wasn't good enough. I sat there for a long time, stunned. He came back over and told me to get going or he would give me another ticket.
I didn't get the food - I drove home, still in a partial daze, and crawled under my table in the shoebox apartment. I sat there and cried myself to sleep. The ticket was 60.00 - to be paid in four days or I was to appear in court. My rent was 185.00 - and I had just enough to pay it in the bank, and just enough to pay only that.
That was the lowest point of those three months until schools started again - somehow I scrambled enough to pay the ticket on time, and my paycheck from work arrived on the last day for rent. The lady was nice and let me pay that evening instead of during the day.
I lost 20 lbs that summer ;o) not that I needed it.
I still believe if I had went back to my mom's house for the summer I would have either been convinced to stay in a low-paying job (as I've seen many of my friends and relatives do) that doesn't go anywhere (except into debt) - or been convinced to get married to some other guy - or get pregnant -- something that would anchor me to that little Minnesota town and never let me go again.
Instead I have a wonderful husband I love - who waited four and a half years for me to come back from college. Our fourth wedding anniversary is at the end of June. We are planning our first baby next year and have hopes for land and a house. We both work at a computer company in Tennessee. And - we are survivors - both of us (his childhood was more of the same above, except all of the time with four other siblings). Heck - now, with each other, we've already been through times almost as bad, and came out of them better and stronger.
I'm glad I stayed in the shoebox apartment - and even more happy that I lived through it :o)
Yes, I know there are people who live through worse - all of the time - but there are also people who don't believe even this story, that won't accept people stretch themselves even in these ways in order to make ends meet. Well, this is for them, and for all the college students from poor families who struggle on their own paycheck and scholarship to make their way.
posted by RheLynn at 4:42 PM
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