One of the biggest challenges of living on my own for the first time is managing my finances. In high school, I always had a part-time job, and I had my financial security (cough, cough, my parents) that would help pay for things like food and gas. Now that I’m on my own, however, I’ve found my funds that I had saved up this summer have rapidly depleted. Where did the $5,000 go? Well, basically, food. And clothes. Yeah, probably not the best investments for my future. I have so many past experiences with unwise investments; you think I would have learned by now.

Back in fourth grade, I was a pretty cool kid. I vaguely remember spending my recess with my friends, pretending to be horses and tying this kid I had a crush on to a tree with a jump rope and telling the kindergarteners to throw kickballs at him. Yeah, I was pretty much a player.

But that’s beside the point.

We went on this field trip to a museum where the main event advertised was “rat basketball.” Basically, it was these nasty rats in basketball jerseys that had been trained to put basketballs through hoops in a cage. Clearly intrigued by the educational appeal of rat basketball (thinking back, we really did have weird-ass field trips at my school), I decided to invest all the money my mom gave me in a shirt that glorified the spectacle of rat basketball with pictures of rats dunking and doing layups.

After thinking I was the coolest kid ever for about half a second, I realized I had just spent 30 bucks on the ugliest effing shirt I had ever seen. Desperately, I sought to return it, but those dumb bitches at the museum gift store told me they didn’t do returns because all the money was donated to scientific research at the museum.

Psssh, whatever.

When I got home, my mom let me keep the shirt for a grand total of a week before it mysteriously disappeared to what I can only guess was a Goodwill store. One of my biggest regrets in life is not keeping that shirt because I definitely could have suckered a super hipster into buying it off of me if I told them how uncool it really was.

That same year, we went on yet another field trip — this time, to a Native American festival. There were people teaching traditional dances and chants, decked out in traditional garb and selling homemade, stereotypical traditional Native American stuff. Now, for some strange reason unbeknownst to me, a kid in our grade bought a rabbit pelt. Even more confusing, pretty much every other kid in our class followed suit. Including myself. Hey, I’m not claiming this tale of succumbing to peer pressure to be a proud one. But what’s a fourth grader to do?

As soon as I got home, though, it hit me. I had, in my hands, the skin of dead rabbit. A cute little rabbit that had once frolicked through the meadows, only to be shot down by a crazed, maniacal hunter. As I started sobbing hysterically, my mom tried to comfort me by attempting to convince me that the rabbit _probably_ just died of old age or a random heart attack or something. _Lies_, mother. Pure lies. That didn’t stop me from burying that rabbit pelt in the backyard next to my deceased pet turtle.

As you can probably see by now, my mom is the trending savior to my financial fails. Even though she may be a pro now, I have evidence that she was not always financially savvy (thoroughly proven by the fact that she actually spent money on getting a mom-fro haircut when I turned three because she claimed, “It’s what all the cool moms were doing”). Hopefully, this indicates the older I get, the wiser I will become after having many experiences of bad financial decisions.

Or I might just toss all my experiences to the wind and open my own line of rat basketball jumpsuits lined with rabbit fur.

Either way.