Fifteen sheets of high quality paper. One manila envelope. A single paperclip. That was my shopping list for OfficeMax today. You see, I'm finally sending one of my short stories to a publisher, so I needed some essentials. Anyway, how much could all that cost, 5 bucks?

Let me explain. Until the last year, I lived in a town of about 2000 people. Pretty small. If I wanted to go to an office supply store, I'd have to drive about a half hour to the closest "big" city. So all in all, it was about the third time I've ever been in the store.

So where to start. Fifteen pages of high quality paper. Can't be too hard to find, right? Wrong. Ten thousand. That's how many different kinds of paper they had, I swear. Holy shit. Some was made out of linen, some was parchment, and some, I shit you not (sorta), were fucking papyrus.

Oh yea, and the smallest pack they came in was a hundred sheets. For some high quality paper, I paid a whopping 17 bucks. What the hell.

Manila envelopes: I need one. Just one. Can't be that hard, right? 99 cents? Nope. Again, dammit, the smallest pack was 10. 6 fuckin' bucks.

Let me explain again. I'm a college kid. I pay for my own tuition, my own housing, everything. Money's tighter than hell right now. And even if this does get published, its gonna net me a maximum of $29.70. Yup. 29 damn dollars. And 70 fucking cents.

Paperclips. Yea, I figured they wouldn't sell one paperclip at a time. And they did have a pack of a reasonable number: 50. Unfortunately, they were gold colored, and looked like shit. How proffesional, right? So I bought the next most expensive: 500. Yea. 500 paperclips.

So my grand total? 28 bucks. For a bunch of shit I barely need. Oh yea, and the paperclips are too small. So now, instead of having 499 spare clips, I have 500. Super.

It wasn't til later that someone suggested I should've gone to another store. Oh. Didn't think about that.

Man, it's gonna be a long 8 weeks before I find out if made 29 dollars or not.