What a Delinquent.

After coming back to school, I've noticed I've been keeping myself on a steady (if not monstrously malnutritious) diet of milked-down coffee (loads of sugar, please!) and unparalleled stress.  And no, for those of you who may be reading this and are in my (Wellness) gym class, it's definitely not eustress.  It's not something I would advice other people to do, although I'm sure most people I know probably adopted a similar diet, perhaps replacing the coffee with tea, or soda, or whatnot.

 Anyway, this morning I was informed by a very informal notice (in small print, might I add, because I missed it at first), that if I did not pay the library the money I owed for other people's books (that they took from my house and forgot to bring back on time) and my own, I would be placed on the "delinquency list".  Now, my first thought was "Oh, no, anything but that!”  My second had less dramatics, as it was, "What is the 'delinquency list'?"  Like, am I going to be hauled off to a Saturday because I couldn't pay $2.95?  The grown-up library down the street just keeps tacking on change until my lazy self walks in one time to check out a book, and the librarian informs me I owe a hefty sum I could use to make multiple coffee runs.  (Yes, now you all know I have a habit of not returning books in a long time, so watch out.  I probably could have bought myself that new Macbook I'm salivating over sometime this year if I kept all that money--keep a tracking device on all the books you loan me!)

 But this got me thinking: Why is the school holding not giving me my report card or a detention if I don't pay back the money by tomorrow, when the first notice was given to me late last week?  And more importantly, why do people who forgot just once have to receive the same punishment as those who repeatedly “forget” (Too many liars?)?  Just because you would like to squash a largely irrelevent pest rebellion, doesn't mean all of the people who would gladly (I use the word loosely) oblige but sometimes forget have to suffer.  Really?  Really.  I know that the institution may be trying to prepare us for the "Real World", but I've been living in this World since I was born, and, yes, it's Real.  I can tell, because I not only have stress from school, I also carry on my concussion-ed head (another story) the burden of social interactions, parental interferences, overblown dreams and aspirations, and a dog who has to wee every five minutes (it's the medication).  No, I haven't learned everything, not nearly as much as I would like to, but I know I'm living in what you would call this "Real World".