After nearly flunking out my freshman year of college and having to transfer to another school, knocking up my girlfriend, blowing nearly all of my savings, and moving into my grandparent’s basement, I found myself in a bit of a slump. I had received a football scholarship to Tusculum College in Greenville when I was 18. I had my own dorm room which I shared with my best friend at the time, Jeremy, and we did everything typical college students do minus the actual school work part of it. We spent the majority of our days and nights ignoring our responsibilities and paying a lot of attention to beer and PlayStation. Needless to say those priorities led to our eventual failure and need to go to another school to avoid any monetary penalties that were accrued due to the lack of academic success.
When I shamefully went and registered at Northeast State the next year I wanted to pick some basic classes and kind of get myself set straight. I picked English I, American History I, Computer Concepts, and Public Speaking. The first three classes I felt confident in. I was well read, I was able to write very efficiently, I knew how to turn on a computer, and I was interested in history but the one that scared me was Public Speaking. I actually picked it on accident, I meant to pick creative writing but I put down the wrong course number. At the time I was absolutely terrified about speaking in front of more than 3 or 4 people at a time. I could riff off all I wanted to when I was hanging with my friends but put me up in front of a class or a group and I felt like shitting in my pants.
The first couple of classes in Public Speaking went alright because we were just getting instructions on the “art” of speaking in front of others and how to construct a decent speech. But on our fourth class, we were expected to give our first speech and it was to be a persuasive speech. I was terrified and conveniently fell ill and missed that class. My teacher kept me after class on the next meeting and explained that if I didn’t do the next speech that I would fail the course without question. I explained my fear and he told me the next speech would be a “how-to” speech and that I should just explain something that I knew and I would be fine. I was 19 years old, broke, and had no real great skills other than writing and occasionally being funny. I started looking at things in my life that I knew how to do but that I could also make funny. Making sandwiches wasn’t funny, driving wasn’t funny, and I couldn’t build anything because I am mechanically retarded. So in an attempt to be a smartass, I decided to do a speech on something that I had excelled at the year before: How to be poor and fail miserably. I ran the idea by my teacher and he thought it to be odd and didn’t think it would work, but since I didn’t really listen to any authority figures I did it anyway.
Giving that speech and getting the reaction out of the class and the teacher is what finally gave me some confidence. I gave it and it killed. Everyone was laughing and once I saw the reaction I kind of went off script and started riffing and walking around like a comic on stage. I recently found that speech that I wrote 10 years ago and thought I would put it up and see if it’s still funny (and just for the hell of it). Hope you enjoy.
How to be Poor and Fail Miserably
 |
| This is probably the quickest way |
Do you have extra money lying around? Are you looking for a way to blow it and have nothing to show for it? Does success scare you? Well if so, I am here to explain to you how you can screw up so bad that rock bottom looks like a wet dream. I am an experienced expert in the field and I’d like to share with you how to lose everything and get in so much debt you will literally feel like you are choking on the very air that you breathe.
 |
| You'll never lose enough money drinking this crap. |
Now, first off you are all in college which many misconstrue to be an institute for learning but I know better. College is for drinking, smoking pot, and having promiscuous sex with people you don’t love or ever want to see again. Many people with money, power, and success made the mistake of going to college to learn and better themselves. Now look at them, they are all happy with their big houses, nice cars, and loving families. You don’t want that do you? No, because you are listening to me. So my first step on the way to complete, bone crushing, depressing failure is to buy copious amounts of alcohol with all of that graduation money that you received. That’s if you still have any left over after Senior Beach Week and didn’t blow it on alcohol and strip clubs. Some make the mistake of buying cheap beer and bottom shelf liquor. No, this is wrong. If you want to get rid of all that money you have, you can’t skimp out and buy Milwaukee’s Best or Barton’s Vodka. You have to go all out and buy top shelf liquors that you can’t feasibly afford. Want vodka? Buy some Grey Goose or Absolut. Want beer? Get Heineken or New Castle. That crap is ridiculously expensive and yet tastes just like the cheap crap. Don’t just buy a bottle at a time or just enough for yourself, you’ve got money to burn and brain cells to kill. Go out and buy enough for the whole dormitory floor. Get hammered every chance that you get, not only will this help drain your meager bank account it will lead to many of the next steps.
 |
| Does this look like a man that can go to class? |
If you are hungover all of the time, it makes it very difficult to bother with going to class. The sun hurts your eyes, noise makes your brain hurt, and you have so much throwing up to do that it’s impossible to actually make it the 100 yards you have to walk to class. Now this is part of the long-term plan of being poor and failing miserably. Think of it as an anti-investment. You are not technically losing any money by not attending class but I promise it will catch up with you in the long run. By not attending class, you can guarantee that you will either not graduate on time or not at all, thus making it nearly impossible to get a decent job and make any money. It takes dedication but you have to muscle through it if you truly want to fail at life.
While you are drunk, you tend to make impulsive decisions that you normally would never make. A favorite of mine was drinking a 12 pack of Corona and driving over to the local Wal-Mart. How can this make you poor? You might be asking. Well, with your decision making capabilities deteriorated to the level of a 4 year old, you tend to buy stuff that has no value or need in your life. Big ticket items or mass quantities of crap that you don’t need are the way to go. I loved to buy movies, CDs, junk food, stereo equipment, and tobacco products. If you buy enough of this useless junk, it can really rack up the dollars wasted. The next day you see all of the crap that you bought but there’s nothing you can do about it because you were so wasted that you set the receipt on fire. It’s literally like taking your money, dousing it with gasoline, and throwing a Zippo at it. You do this, and you’ll be on the fast track to poverty.
 |
| If the place that you eat looks like this, I promise that you are wasting money |
Now obviously drinking away all of your money, hopes, and dreams isn’t the only way to do it. It can get boring, so you have to spice it up. If you are on scholarship, your meals are provided for you as part of the cost. You can literally go to the cafeteria for all three meals and save a bunch of money, but that’s not the goal is it? You should go out to eat as often as possible, order steaks, lobster, heck buy your buddies dinner too. Eating out all of the time is a sure fire way of pissing away all of that cash. And no, you can’t burn through that money going to McDonalds all the time. You have to go to Red Lobster or any other place that charges more than $14 per meal. McDonalds is for later in life when you are so destitute that you are counting pennies out of a change jar and tearing apart your sofa looking for a dollar.
 |
| Mmmm...tastes like everlasting debt |
Now some of you might be saying, “Well Mr. Elliott, I don’t really have any cash to begin with. I’m living off of scholarship money and a minimum wage job, I’m already poor.” Have no fear; you can fall farther down the spiral. Credit card companies love to issue cards to new adults under the guise of “helping young adults establish credit and learn responsibility.” All of that is just a nice way of saying that they want to put you on the hook for $1,000 at 23% interest for the next 10 years. Generally speaking, you can apply for all four major credit cards and most likely they will all be stupid enough to give you one. So now you’re looking at least $4,000 worth of plastic that you can blow irresponsibly at your discretion. This $4,000 after all the interest hits can easily turn into $30,000 that you will spend half your life paying off. Isn’t that fantastic? You don’t lose any money up front but you can be guaranteed to be chained to Visa for most of your adult life. So spend away, just make sure you have nothing to show for it.
All of these are guaranteed methods of becoming a worthless member of society as an adult. But don’t think that these are the only ways to do it. There are thousands of creative activities that can be sure to vacuum out all of the money from your wallet such as; have unprotected sex with an unclean yet fertile woman or vice versa for a man, don’t become employed, collect Beanie Babies, or get addicted to heroin. The possibilities are endless and you just have to focus all of that energy that you would normally be using to make money into ways of wasting it.
No comments:
Post a Comment