Thursday, October 7, 2010

What money?

Dear David Casner, VP, UChicago Alumni Board of Govenors,

I don't have a penny to spare to donate to your fund. Not for your university, not for pumping up prestige, not for helping to create unquantifiable numbers to go in brochures, not show other people how much your institution is loooooved by its young alums, not to support a place that shuffles along and pokes and prods the kids who don't want to learn your way, not to put extra shine on the windows of your new arts center, not to attach my name ever more to place that does not represent who I am in totality.

In short, I am other things before I am a UofC graduate. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out what those things are, but this week I am a reader of Nabokov (Transparent Things, Lolita, whatever's in the house) and swimmer without goggles because I like the sting of chlorine in my eyes. This week I am busy shaking of a creepy cab driver on a drenched Saturday night who insists that I sit up front with him, have a cigarette with him before I head home, who grabs my hand and makes me employ not my social graces but my ability to tell someone to fuck off. I am busy shaking off bullshit and buying curtains.

So, it's awful presumptuous of you to ask me for money. If you think you know where my loyalties lie because you gave me an embossed piece of paper in maroon envelope, you, sir, are sorely mistaken.

T'mo

2 comments:

  1. oh, hear hear. i've been reporting uc emails as spam for a while now. good luck buying those curtains! a much better use of money and uofc aesthetic skills (although if you find yourself compelled toward maroon, have a second thought.)

    would love to talk to you soon...today perhaps?

    and that cab driver sounds like an awful creeper. i got stuck in a bad cab situation back in vancouver, think i posted about it...and was pretty dependent on him (the only cab driver awake in this tinyass town?) to get home so it was a fucked up captive situation. sorry to hear it; that's totally shake-up-ing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. yeah i've just been ignoring senor casner, but i like your way better.

    ReplyDelete