The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Every once in a while some adult in my family will tell a hilarious joke about my being able to pay my way through college. I laugh. They look confused. And I find out that it wasn’t supposed to be a joke in the first place.

As far as I can tell, paying one’s own way through college is all but impossible nowadays. Depending on which way you lean politically, this is either the inevitable result of Socialist-style financial aid distribution or a conspiracy of the wealthy establishment to remove a rung from the economic ladder by placing huge financial burdens on all students. Or maybe the cost of lumpy twin-sized mattresses is just rising. I don’t know.

Still, every little bit helps, so I set about finding some means of bringing in money over the summer.

My first plan was to start heirloom vegetables from seed and sell the seedlings. This would work out especially well for me because none of my plants ever seem to survive past the seedling stage, but I’m pretty awesome at getting them to sprout.

Then I stumbled upon another idea – cacti. Stokes Seeds sells a blend of “small-seed expensive-type cacti” for a wallet-friendly price – much more wallet-friendly than ten or twelve pouches of super-rare veggie seed. Remembering to water cacti wouldn’t be a big deal. They would sell for high prices. And my cats wouldn’t dare uproot them! I could start selling small, young cacti in the spring, then sell the larger and more valuable leftover specimens in the summer before I headed to college.

It sounded like the perfect plan – until I did some research. Cacti apparently have to be watered regularly, which I might be able to manage. They needed to be kept out of direct sun, their miniature greenhouse needed to be monitored for “excess humidity” constantly, and they could take up to a year to sprout. Not a problem, I rationalized. Stokes said that their seeds would start to sprout in 20 to 50 days, which wasn’t awful. And I could probably keep decent tabs on the humidity, too.

Then I found out that cacti only grow approximately 0.5 inches per year.

As nondescript pea-sized green things in plastic pots aren’t the most saleable commodity, I was forced to scrap this brilliant plan, cry loudly, gnash my teeth, and then attempt to form another.

I could decorate cakes for money – providing, that is, I managed to acquire a commercial kitchen, several specialized pans, dozens of professional tools, and actual skill at cake decorating.

I could get a desk job. In hopes of finding a good position, I checked the classified ads in the Union-Bulletin. Sadly, everything that doesn’t require a college degree or oodles of private experience ends in “Must be 21 or older”.

I even thought about using this column to solicit job offers, but then decided that this would be unethical, just as it would be unethical to include my phone number (509-337-5555) or my mailing address (P.O. Box 12345, Waitsburg, WA 99361) in such an egregious abuse of free access to mass media.

So it looks like I’ll be relying heavily on Socialist-style financial aid this year.