Alumni Magazine

About twice a year, I get this extraordinarily glossy magazine full of attractive teenagers cavorting around desk sets, and I take it out of the mail box and am all "Oh! The new Pottery Barn Teen has arrived!" But then I take a closer look and discover, no. It's the alumni magazine from my old school. And that's when I think to myself, "Why the crap are they sending me this?"

Now, when I say "my old school," I don't mean any of the colleges I attended, of which there are several (I had a hard time making up my mind, okay?). No, I mean, the school that my mother (Happy Birthday, Ma! By the way!) slaved for 9 long years to keep paying the tuition for. I mean the private school that kept me from having to go to a public school in one of the crappiest school systems in the state. I mean the school that is responsible for my having read Dante's Inferno (or, you know...some of it) and for having a taste for unreasonably nice things, even though I'm incapable of taking care of said nice things.... Etc.

So, as I was saying, I get this magazine from them a couple times a year, and no offense, friends from high school who like the alumni magazine, but boy is it ever a giant barf-fest. To look at the alumni magazine, you would think the place was a multi-ethnic Shangri-la where the lighting is always soft and flattering, and all the alumni are successful Thai soap opera stars and orthopedic surgeons who live in France. It's not like I hated high school (well, I sort of hated middle school, but that wasn't entirely School's fault), and maybe the place actually has become Shangri-la in the 248 years since I graduated, and maybe I'm being a bitter old hag because there was no Chinese calligraphy class when I was there, BUT...my feeling is that the alumni magazine is exaggerating a tidge.

And then I found out why they sent me this $10 magazine to sell me a school I'm not ever going to go to again: I saw the thermometer. (You know, the we're-raising-money-for-all-these-flawless-skinned-white-toothed-wealthy-people-to-make-something-of-themselves-in-the-21st-century thermometer). And I was like WHAAAAAAAAA?

Because, friends, these people want me to give them money. Serious money. They have already made 70 MILLION DOLLARS from 900 people, and they want 20 Million more dollars. For a grand total of $90 Million. Which, you guys, happens to be approximately the gross domestic product of the Falkland Islands.

The End.