I live 40 minutes away from Uni.

And that's when there's hardly any traffic.

It's really hard for my parents to pick me up from things at school, especially when they don't coincide with their plans in town.

Being in the fall play right now, I don't get to go home until after 6. This is extremely inconvenient for both of my parents, and always has been before. This year, though, I can drive, so I drive myself to and from school every day.

This, unfortunately, requires me to find a place to park. At almost any other high school, this would be no problem at all. It's very different at Uni.

Being on the U of I campus has a lot of perks, but parking is definitely not one of them. For a while, I was parking at the meters. It was convenient, because I could always get a space right in front of the school. However, it was really extremely expensive.

There is a lovely parking lot right behind Uni Gym and Hue House, but we are not allowed to park there. Instead, Uni students can only get parking permits for a lot that is three blocks away.

After 5 p.m., I could move my car to the Uni lot, so that I wouldn't have to walk so far in the dark. This sounds initially convenient — but it's not, especially on the normal rehearsal days where play practice starts PROMPTLY at 4. I often don't get back from eighth-hour PE until 3:55. I also can't leave in the middle of rehearsal to walk three blocks and then drive back.

I understand that there are a ton of other people who park on campus, people who may be "more important" than us silly Uni kids, but it's really not fair that we can't have permits for the lot on the same property as our school. I've heard that it's overbooked, but I hardly ever see that lot full. Actually, I only ever see it full for Uni events, like plays, which take place after the lot becomes open to anyone to use.

Maybe it is overbooked, but the fact that it's never even kind of full means that there are a bunch of people with permits who aren't using them. They're wasting parking spaces that could be given to Uni kids. It's not safe for us to be walking all that way, especially by ourselves, and especially now that it's getting dark a lot earlier. Not to mention the fact that our backpacks can be really, really heavy.

I am really tired of walking three blocks to and from the lot every single day, and I've only had the permit for a week.

I know that I probably do not fully understand the inner workings of the campus parking department, and that this issue of injustice can't be fixed now, and that it will probably never be fixed, but it could be. When all the parking permits expire in May, they should just not let anyone besides Uni people get permits for that lot. Make the professors walk three blocks. We get enough exercise in fitness as it is.

I suppose until the parking people decide to be nicer to me, I will just work on figuring out some other means of transportation. What are the three D's again? Oh yeah … Desination … Determination … Deliberation … oh darn.