Marquette Bastards

My sister is heading off to Perdue University this fall. I tried to get her to go to a nice affordable college like UW-Milwaukee (who made it to the Sweet Sixteen in 2005!) but she wouldn’t have any of that. I think her main goal is to get out of the house where mom is turning psychotic and my parents speak to each other through post-it notes. I can’t blame her for that. But $25k a year? I don’t know if the parents are paying for it or if she’s taking out loans, but that’s a lot of cash (money hoes).

Today I emailed dad and told him that my Roth IRA made $800 yesterday. He emailed back saying that if it did that every day I could retire early and to let the FA know that he has to get on that. So I sent an email off to the FA who replied that my father should jump on the money train while it’s hot. Dad replied that he won’t have anything left after Butthead’s done with college (yes, even my dad calls her Butthead). I tried to make my point that Marquette wasn’t that expensive once you took my $5k scholarship into account ($15k - $5k = $10k). The scholarship was available as long as I got a 3.5 gpa. Yeah, well, after the first year I had a 3.49. Back then and to this day I thought my parents had called and made arrangements to keep the scholarship intact. So I got this email from dad today:

Oh, they took it away. I tried to argue that the 3.49 was close enough and they said no. If you got it above the 3.5 they would reinstate it. Bastards. I think the whole thing was just a setup. They can certainly manipulate the gpa so that it ends up below a certain point.

I’m not a big conspiracy theory kind of guy, but if you think about it, bumping some poor schmuck down from a 3.5 to a 3.49 to get another $5k out of him isn’t that far fetched. My academic friend Swandad might have more insight (feel free to comment), but in the dark dungy basement of some bunker located under the university chapel (what better place?), there could be a bunch of hump-backed old men calculating gpa’s to the fifth decimal point trying to screw young men out of their scholarships (they are Catholic after all and back then I was young and kinda cute). I’m sure they figured that after you’ve spent one whole year there you will just stick it out for three more years and fork over the additional money to say that you actually graduated from Marquette University. That was their plan. But it didn’t work on me. Well, it might have worked on me if it wasn’t for something called Calculus 3. Back in high school I was damn good at math. Damn good as in I took the SAT, which you could use a calculator on, without a calculator and got a 97% (but I sure as hell felt pretty dumb when everyone else pulled their calculators out for the math section and I didn’t have one). Calculus 1 and 2 weren’t that bad, but I had to take Calculus 3 twice in order to get a D. And that was only because I bought a TI-1000 something that solved all the problems for me. The fucker had a full keyboard and a six inch screen that plotted whatever equation you typed in. My last two test scores were 95 and 93 and I still got a D. If only I had gotten that calculator at the beginning of the class. By then I was a semester behind every engineering student and still had to take Differential Equations so I threw in the towel. I checked out UW-Milwaukee and their accounting program, found out I was overqualified in math (because every numb nut can add and subtract), and I signed on the dotted line. UW-Milwaukee’s tuition was equivalent to my private high school tuition, although instead of getting free books I had to fork out $100 for every class.

(That TI-1000 something with the full keyboard and monstrous screen also “paid off” in several accounting courses.)

So the Marquette bastards evidently took away my scholarship and made my parents carry the full load. You may or may not know this already, but I have a thing for steaks. Steaks are good, especially with my Spicy Montreal Steak Seasoning that I sprinkle on (seriously, try the stuff). The Renter and I will go to Pick ‘N Save and get two plate steaks (steaks as big as your plate) for $10, or $5 a piece. This isn’t a bad deal in my mind. A five dollar plate steak with nothing else will fill me up. Well, back when I was in college my family only had steak on rare occasions. I remember mom coming home from the grocery store and loudly proclaiming that she had bought steaks. Dad would run outside and start the grill up and my whole family would stand by the grill drooling as we waited for the steaks to be done. And now that I know that the Marquette bastards took away my scholarship because of a 3.49 and prohibited me from having steak for dinner every night I am royally pissed. Fucking Roman Catholic Jesuit 12 year-old alter boy fucker fuckers.