My Bucket of Parts: School supplies more expensive than useful

It's October, and you know what that means - it's a good time to buy school supplies and books, since we failed that first test.

Then again, maybe our lives are at fault because of these modern school supplies - mostly consisting of technology.

School supplies these days aren't like our grandparents school supplies.

"Back in the day when I walked uphill both ways to school in 100 inches of snow with rabid wildebeasts chasing me, all I needed for school was my slate and chalk, one pencil that I used until it was a nub and a single sheet of paper."

Pencil nubs and paper just don't cut it anymore for Generation X and Y. Turbulent minds are pounding out new technology daily for consumers to devour, and while the cost of college continues to rise (making it available for only Prince William), school stays expensive because of the "new" list of school supplies.

Stab vampires with your pencils, use your notebooks as toilet paper and grind up all your chalk and sell it on the drug market. You're going to need the money.

These days, before we start school, we need to get our lives prioritized. We just have to have an iBook or call the guy with crooked teeth and a funny hairline that says, "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell."

Modern students must e-mail their papers to their professors because paper is so yesterday. Modern students need DVD players, mp3 players and WarCraft 3 to help them procrastinate; also, a student of psychology needs to counsel their friends by talking online. Modern students need Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Students need to purchase books for studies, and recent books come with CDs that have most of the information on them - since the publishers know we don't read. Soon, the book "Everybody Poops" will come handy with it's own CD to plug in and play.

And although book publishers print out handy books to write our assignments down - nobody uses them, because we're all smart enough to recite the alphabet, feed and dress ourselves and of course, remember all our assignments without writing them down.

That's probably why we're failing every class.

We can't live in this world without a pocket PC or a personal organizer (digital of course) because our memories don't function without the Pentium 4 chip.

And guess what? All of these handy new devices come with instruction epics written in fifteen languages because of the phenomenon of Global Community Virtual Media Integration - or something like that.

So, again, is this why we're failing our classes? We push aside all of our studies to learn how to work our gadgets. Who cares how to organize our files alphabetically? We want to know how Pong and Tetris work on our personal pocket gizmos.

Oh well, we may be failing our classes with all these things that are supposed to "help" us, but at least we're keeping our parents and Oompa Loompas with jobs. We can't sacrifice our stumbling economy to the evils of being frugal.

Plus, who's going to pay for all of this junk? We need our parents.

Remember, as college students, we've maxed out about three credit cards by now.

You Discover-ed MasterCard and Visa - which helped you buy your school supplies, which should help with studying, but they don't, which allows the Oompa Loompas to create new products that we must buy, which allows us to sign up for an American Express card to buy all this junk, which evade us again from our studies.