Mary Migley
RANT


        You know what I hate about going to college in Boston?  The prices.  The oh-my-god-this-tiny-pack-of-generic-potato-chips-costs-almost-a-dollar prices.  Back home, I could get the same pack of potato chips for a quarter!   But oh no, not in Boston.  Where I come from, you can buy a bottle of those herbal fruit juices for 89 cents.  Do you know what that means?  That means you can pay with a dollar, and still get change back.  But here, in snobby Boston, it costs $1.69.  So a snack consisting of a single bottle fruit juice and a teeny bag of potato chips costs almost as much as a McDonald's Value Meal, and yet fruit juice and potato chips aren't even as satisfying as a sandwich that has a bun twice as big as the burger.


        And of course, as soon as I move to snobby Boston, the prices for the T go up.  That figures, doesn't it?


        Boston is a college town, for crissakes!  I'm sure the people hear have heard "but I'm just a poor college student!" more times than "Can you tell me where Cheers is?"  So why are the prices more fit for upscale Hollywood?  My only salvation here are those cramped, cluttered CVS stores scattered about.  It's sad how excited I get when I can find a package of 24 cheese crackers for a dollar.


        Of course, the nearest CVS is three blocks down and then four blocks to the left.  But hey, that's nothing compared to the three trips I have to make from one end of campus to the other every day.  Each one-way trip takes fifteen minutes.  Multiply that by six, and the total comes to an hour and a half.  An hour and a half of walking every day, and that's excluding all the side trips to CVS and other various stores.  Sure, my legs have never been as fit as they are now, but I won't be proclaiming the firmness of my thighs - which, by the way, still could not be called "firm"  - come winter, when I have to walk through freezing blasts of wind and snow and keep myself from falling on patches of cold, bruising ice.


        Of course, no matter how bad the weather gets here, I'll at least know about it beforehand.  After all, I get the Weather Channel.  It's not enough that the TV Guide Channel gives you the forecast for the next three days.  The Weather Channel will tell you how hard it's raining in Austin, Texas.  I may not get all of my favorite channels, but I thank my lucky stars I know how hot it is in Portugal.  Of course, I didn't mean to imply that I'm not the least
bit upset that I'm paying $30,000 a year and don't have the channels I love most.  I'm pissed!  I can't watch my Comedy Central or Cartoon Network.  There's no MuchMusic.  Not to mention the History Channel or the Sci-Fi Network.  I'll have to spend a lot of lazy late nights watching a cold front move across the country.  Maybe that's unfair of me to say.  After all, I
could also watch one of the half-dozen religious channels or home shopping networks.


        Of course, watching a Mass on television would be cheaper than spending two dollars for T fare and easier on my feet than walking at least twenty minutes.


        You know what?  I also hate it when I've already written everything that I planned on saying, but there's enough space left to be conspicuously short of the requirement, but not enough to start a whole new idea, and I'm stuck trying to BS my way through the rest of the paper.  Maybe if there wasn't so much loud, incessant, infuriating honking right outside my window, I could actually think of something to complain about!  Even if I were writing this at
two in the morning - which I am not, for the record - there would still be an incredibly obnoxious amount of blaring horns.     Why don't they just shell out the two bucks and take the T?  Then I'd actually have a chance of finishing my paper.