The Campus Convenience cashier seemed worried: His eyebrows knitted, his mouth assumed a curious shape resembling a scalene right triangle and his fingers rapped the countertop. He looked up at me across the counter, slipped my card over to me while shaking his head and said something like, “I’m sorry. Nothing left on here.” There was a downward slant to every one of his words. It was pity, and I deserved it, for I was now at such an extreme point of brokenness that I couldn’t even afford to buy a jar of queso and complementary chips. In my wallet, three greasy dollar bills lay comatose. It was not enough.

During the long, lonely walk home, I thought about how I got to this point. I considered the burgeoning pile of receipts I had accumulated over the year, the countless dollar bills I had carelessly handed out to homeless people and the stacks of clothes in my closet, some of it still tagged. I pictured my entire life’s expenditure as one of those obnoxious Time magazine pie charts: Where Does Lauren Rodrigue’s Money Go?

Seventy-eight percent: various Newbury Street merchants; 16 percent: Starbucks; 8 percent: the Tostitos corporation; 12 percent: Conde Nast Publications. What is that, 114 percent? That explains a lot.

What these pie charts never account for is the money you spend beyond the money you have. You can’t build 114 percent into a pie chart, so you round down. But in that 14 percent lie big, glaring errors in economic judgment — the bane of everyone’s existence. As I walked I considered what I was holding: an iPod with new headphones because the old ones were in pieces somewhere on Beacon, a new bag from the Garment District that I begged my friends to let me buy after explicitly begging them to not let me buy anything, seven different kinds of lip balms, glosses and sticks that I always forgot I had.

Then there was my Terrier Card, which had been loaded with “points” two weeks prior and was now empty and useless, a relic of a more prosperous time. It wasn’t even real money, and I’d managed to squander it all on banal junk and liquid cheese. It was hard to find the glamour in the situation, when I realized that everything I thought I really needed provided me with nothing more than a heavy bag and an aching shoulder.

For me, spending isn’t out of desire; it’s out of necessity — or so I’ve fooled myself into thinking. This is especially true during midterm season, when every ounce of my body spills across the tables at Mugar for hours on end, desperate for any kind of material rectification, whether it comes in the shape of a latte, a new sweater or a Panda Bowl. Last semester, I forced myself into believing that an all-night paper-writing marathon justified a pair of new Cheap Monday jeans the following day. Three days ago, after a bio midterm, I found myself in H’M, combing racks and trying to separate myself from endoplasmic reticulum by surrounding myself with other materialistic people.

And then it hit me, right at the intersection of Beacon Street and Massachusetts Avenue: the reason for spending all that I’ve spent. While I spend hours toiling in class being drained of everything human and pumped instead with some academic notion of humanism, I feel less and less human every second. College is a strange place in its isolation — you’re constantly surrounded by people, but they’re constantly locked in ivory towers built of textbooks and MacBooks. It’s easy to commit yourself to being a student and forget that you’re a person, too.

But while some people mollify this separation anxiety by volunteering in downtown elementary schools or writing poetry in the Public Garden, I choose to spend money. Shopping is the furthest possible thing from rows of desks and chalkboards and Times New Roman, and it involves passive, carefree involvement. You are free as long as you’re within the walls of some kind of store or shop, because you cannot apply Marxist criticism to a T-shirt and you cannot take the derivative of a jar of queso.

As I entered Danielsen, I felt a little better. The blame was successfully shifted from myself to the bureaucracy of the university, and it felt cathartic. Even though I was still broke, I was all right, because at least I was still human after all.

Lauren Rodrigue, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].