Modern life, lockdown, political reality got me down.
I paid off the last of my student loans. I feel real goddamn conflicted about it, which is weird, since you'd think it'd be an absolute win. But paying off student loans has been the one thing I've had to focus on for thirteen years. It has informed all my decisions, it has prevented me from making moves, it has instilled protestant guilt in me for not working or not working enough or not having a real job or whatever the fuck. I'm sure I'll get over it but right now I feel like a schmuck.
Looking at my financial records from Sallie Mae, I borrowed just over $130000. Looking at my payment records, I paid them back over $200000. I'm sure some asshole with an accounting degree or a job at his daddy's brokerage firm will tell me that $70000 is a good bargain over X years at such-and-such yield. All I know is how miserable I felt for over a decade.
Two paragraphs ago I tried to use "it's" as a contraction for "it has". I feel like that may have been correct when I learned those words in 1978, but is not correct now. Anyone?
Ingrid got a smart phone. My position as "useful person to have around" just took a major hit. She has not been able to successfully activate it yet, so there's hope.
Oh, listen to this story about me being a dumbass:
So, I finished up Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, a couple years after reading Ancillary Justice. I looked on the library website to get the third book in the series, and The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. It took a while for the holds to arrive, since libraries are both half-shut-down and probably under a ton of pressure from people out of work, parents homeschooling, and bored people who remembered that libraries exist.
They'll hold the book for 10 days at your branch library. It took seven days for both books to be at the library at the same time. Once they were, I went and looked at the hours for my branch: three days a week, three hours a day. And I had missed the hours that day, so I had to wait all weekend.
Labor Day weekend.
Naturally the day after Labor Day is Tuesday, and the library's not open on Tuesday. On Wednesday I was super depressed (see first, second paragraphs) and I forgot I was supposed to call the branch and set up an appointment to come by and pick up my holds. I had tried calling Tuesday, but no one answered. Funny that, no one answering the phone on a day when your building is closed.
So I felt really stupid, set up a couple of reminders on my calendar app so I wouldn't forget on Friday, tried to call the closed library again on Thursday just in case there was a bored librarian hanging out in the stacks on her day off.
Well, today is Friday, and I called two hours before they open, just in case. And someone answered! I said I was calling to set up an appointment to pick up my holds, and the librarian said "yeah, we're open 1:30 to 4:30," and I said, "great, let me schedule a time" and they said "go ahead, whenever you want in that time frame", and I said, "pardon?" and they said, "we're open for three hours starting at 1:30, so come on in," and I said "I don't need to schedule anything?" and she said "yeah, what have I been saying?" and I said, "well fuck."
If there's anything more on-brand for me than continually fucking up a process which is not actually required for the thing I want to accomplish, and getting real emotionally invested in my own failure, I don't know what it is.
--12:05 PM, EST, Philadelphia PA, pink moon is on its way
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