What You Pay For

We're in a recession. A country built on credit wonders why it has trouble keeping enough money in circulation. Suggestions of loans on top of loans and more loans wants me to either give them a lump sum wad of cash or go broke and untouchable with an effed up credit score. People don't live that way. And I can't believe that "the greatest time of my life," college comes back to haunt me because I didn't have enough dinero to supplement the full funding of my education.

What a way to start my Saturday morning. With bad news, due to a bank error, your loan defaulted. It's the worst sort of feeling to have someone ask you in very specific terms for an exorbitant amount of money right then and there. It makes me feel infantile. Like I just want to coddle up in to a ball on the floor and wait for my Mama or someone equally nurturing and powerful to come help me. There is a lump in my throat for trying to speak to "counselors" and "specialists" and "adjusters" who all would like to play games with my life. And everyone just tells me it should be simple. Just go find a job where you make tons of cash in short amounts of time while not supporting your day-to-living in the mean time. Then you can get back to the basics. It's enough to make me want to sell drugs. Or flee the country. Or kill myself. Well.......maybe not kill myself, but it's definitely tough.

Me, a sane, calm, saved, rational thinker want to do something irrational to save my ass because right now a private lender--a bank--is making me feel like the scourge of the earth. I wish you could have heard the way that first woman "handled" me. "Sir, the bottom line is you haven't attempted to make a payment so now the loan amount is due in full. " I wanted to flip a shit. I thought about my teacher salary and how I could flip it. Make it into an insanely large number and then be in the free in clear. I called myself trying to take charge of my life, but there is no manual for all of this.

No one tells you when you're 16 looking at colleges that you had better go with a school that will pay for your entire education. If not 6 months after graduation they're coming for you. Really? You give me 6 months to get my "real life" in order or you will rape and pillage my worldly possessions? Who said this was okay. And if they had told us this was what was on the other side of the stage at graduation we would have told them to kiss the deepest crevices of where our sun doesn't shine. I'm appalled. And tired. And exasperated. But mostly I'm broke. I guess I'll just refinance this bull and pay off the new loan. After that though. I'm building me a shack and living in that until I can rub together enough pennies to expatriate to Africa. At least there there'll be no greedy monopolizing giants dying to get their hands on the puny lemur I killed for today's meal. Then again, I could be wrong about that too.

*Author Note: I have since been approved for a refinance so I'm good. Thanks for you all's concern.