Responsibility
I’ve always been profoundly lazy, but I feel as though recently I’ve been less vigilant about being lazy, and my laziness has fallen into a slump of general productivity and mild efficiency. Don’t get me wrong – I still calculate the route of every bicycle trip I make based on how best to avoid riding up hills and on two or three occasions I’ve come very close to calling my professors late at night and asking them if they could maybe bump their 9:00 AM lecture back by a couple of hours. Alas, much like Duran Duran, my best work is behind me.
If we’re going to continue with the Duran Duran metaphor (and if there’s one thing I love, it’s continuing lame metaphors), senior year at Sprague High School was my “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Not only did I not want to do any work, I was openly contemptuous of the very notion of work.* I took as many campus releases as I could, worked as a classroom aide, and shelved books in the library in lieu of actual classes like AP English or European History. What little homework I had I threw together at the last possible second.
*No matter how good I got, though, I could never outdo my classmate Ashley, who during the spring told all of her teachers she was on the tennis team (she wasn’t), so that every time the tennis team was called away on the PA system for a game during the school day, she’d get up and go home. Genius.
This laziness contributed to my somewhat lax scholarship search. Sure, I wrote a few essays and filled out a few applications, but had I applied myself with the same tenacity as some of my classmates I’m pretty sure I could have gone into my first year of college with more than $400 from the Dean’s List. I suppose my strategy at the time was to ambush the school with my academic prowess rather than making my intentions known, hoping that they would be so pleased and surprised at my good work combined with my humility in not asking for money that they would spontaneously give me $30,000 or so, no strings attached, along with a new car and maybe a lifetime supply of Hostess Fruit Pies.
Maybe you’re laughing, but it actually half worked – in the spring of my freshman year I was surprised to find that I’d been awarded a $600 Hendricks Scholarship on top of the $400 I was already receiving. What I later found out was that I got this award because I had filled out the University’s general scholarship application when I first applied, which made me eligible for a variety of different types of money the school was tossing at students. Still, even though I didn’t surprise the school into giving me money, they definitely surprised me by giving it to me – and let me tell if you, if you have to be surprised, free money is the best way for it to happen.
I took the money and didn’t ask too many questions about it, which I recently learned was a bad idea – however, if I had to learn that anywhere, I’d much rather figure it out with a college scholarship than with a loan shark.
The $600 scholarship did not come through on my bill for this term, and after talking to the somewhat testy counselor at the financial aid department I was surprised to find that the Hendricks Scholarship is one that you must reapply for every year. I had not known this – I’d figured that since I was receiving it thanks to the same application that got me the Dean’s List scholarship, which does not need to be renewed, that the school would continue to shovel money in my general direction without so much as a second thought. It is, after all, a government institution.
At first I was pissed that the school had not so much as sent me a letter to remind me that I needed to reapply for my scholarship. After all, how was I supposed to know that I needed to renew it? I could find no information anywhere on the Internet about the Hendricks Scholarship, and I hadn’t heard so much as a peep out of them after their first letter informing me that they were going to start giving me money, the bastards.
But then I realized that there had probably been something about needing to renew my scholarship in that initial letter, which has since been lost to the sands of garbage in my room. So really, the person at fault wasn’t them for not notifying me, but me for not taking the initiative to 1) Hold onto the letter and B) Remember that this was a scholarship I would need to renew.
Because, really, what’s in it for them if they remind me to keep taking their money? If I’m not with it enough to stay on top of my paperwork, maybe that in and of itself is an indication that there’s somebody far more intelligent and responsible who deserves the money more than I do. After all, what sort of organization awards a scholarship to somebody who has proven himself to be irresponsible?
Oh, right.
One of the reasons I was so lethargic and spiteful toward high school in my senior year was because I felt like I was well and truly finished with having my hand held and being told what to do. I was looking forward to the independence of college, where everybody backs off and lets you make your own mistakes. At the time, I had assumed that I would not make a mistake in the next four years – I was doing pretty well, too, but then I paid money to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That mistake, however, only cost me $8 as opposed to $600.
You win this round, University of Oregon. But I’ll remember this.
Truman Capps would like to take this opportunity to inform his father that he plans to apply for roughly $3600 worth of scholarships over the next two weeks – it’s under control.