A Penny Saved

So, my roommate’s tribal membership (he’s half Chippewa) finally came through. He applied over seven years ago, but there was a backlog, and so it is now, when he is almost finished with his master’s degree, that he has finally received the tribal membership that would’ve paid for his entire college education. Instead, he has many loans. Sometimes schools apply the credit retroactively, so he’s looking into that. But still, that sucks. Maybe paying back loans will help to make him “more responsible,” but he’s already the most responsible person I know of any age, so not having to pay for college expenses would definitely not “handicap” him in the responsibility department - he’s already got an edge! The boy’s just got his shit together, and will soon have a degree from the most prestigious school in his field and go into a highly-paid career doing work at which he is extremely competent. I’m sure the loans will be no trouble… but man, I would be so pissed if it were me!

It’s easy to say, “Oh, they should’ve gotten their paperwork in earlier,” but their family was living in another state when the rules about tribal membership in our state changed in the mid-nineties, and really, since then, it’s all been a huge mess for them. Some other paperwork got misfiled (due to no error on their part), and his dad was accused of evading child support and is now having to “pay it back,” even though he did pay it in the first place and the child in question is now 28, has three children of his own, and, of course, doesn’t see any of the money. It would be easy enough for his ex-wife to just give the money back, once paid, but apparently she’s kind of a lying bitch, which explains why they got divorced in the first place. There have been all kinds of legal expenses in fighting this, so my roommate has taken out extra loans in order to support his parents.

The thing is, sometimes life sucks. My roommate grew up poor, and his family is poor still today. He almost couldn’t return to school junior year because the school needed money from them upfront and wouldn’t let them take out a loan due to his parents’ bad credit. So he worked with dad, buying and selling cars so he could return to school. He is one of my role-models: yes, weird and bad things have happened to him, but he’s still very successful in spite of, or maybe because of, his hardships. He looks at life as a challenge: instead of necessarily looking for the easy way out, he looks for the way that will be the most rewarding in the long term. He’s very intelligent and hard-working, so I can’t wait to see what he makes of his life.