Ouch. That Smarts.

"You know," I said to a caseworker in the dictation room this morning, dead eyes meeting dead eyes, "I would never cheat on my wife, but this job can definitely suck my dick."

I've been trying to leave for maybe eight months-- maybe nine.  Maybe it's been since my kids were born, I don't know.  I don't remember.  I've sent out so many emails, it's disgusting.  I've been on Idealist.org so many times it's appalling.  Every time I attach another horseshit resume to another fantastically made up cover letter email, I want to shit studs and puke drywall.  It's repetitive and demeaning and unkind.

The rejection emails do not bother me, not even a bit.  I could care less.  I couldn't care less?  Who cares?

Not me!

I just submitted an excessively and predictably lengthy application to work for the V. A. as basically a mid-level bureaucrat, desk-jockey, paper-pushing, phone-weilding asstriloquist.  And, I've got to tell you, plate tectonics and priorities really must be shifting in this harried little head of mine, because I'm practically salivating at the thought of sitting at a desk all day, answering the telephone, talking to down-on-their-luck, washed up, beaten down, PTSD'd vets about the process of securing, exploring, appealing, and exercising their benefits and horning in on markedly more money than I'm making and sucking at the glorious teat of a federal pension.

mmmmmmmmmmmm...... suck suck suck suck suck suck suck................. moist

But, of course, I'm getting WAY ahead of myself.  The job was open from the 18th-20th, and there are fourteen (FOUR-FUCKIN-TEEN!) positions open in Philadelphia.  Now, because it's the government, they want to make sure you're nice and smart before they hire you, you know, so you fit in with everybody else already on the federal payroll, so you had to submit your transcript(s) in order to complete the application process.

This wasn't easy to accomplish when you work full-time, have two children, and only two days to accomplish this feat.

Muhlenberg, my undergraduate alma mater, made it pretty easy, and relatively inexpensive.  For an unofficial transcript, you fill out the form online, pay $7.25, ($5.00 for the transcript, $2.25 internet service fee) and they email you your grades in around 24 hours.  Done and done.

La Salle, graduate school and true to its staid Catholic roots, is a little bit more rooted in the dark ages.  After tithing $32.50 (don't ask me where they came up with that bizarre number) they will Express Mail you the transcript.  They don't do the eThing.  Fortunately, I had until 11:59pm on the 20th to fax the transcripts to the gub'mint, and I did it by 8:20pm.  And everything was going fine.  What wasn't going particularly fine was looking at my Muhlengrades, which I hadn't really thought about since I graduated back in 2002.

I graduated as prick # 211 out of 450 some other pricks and pracks.  Solidly middle of the pack-- indistinguishable, certainly academically, from one schlub to the next schmeck.  Sure, I wrote, edited, published, promoted and sold a book as an undergraduate, and I was in a lot of plays, and wrote a lot of plays and had one of those plays be a semi-finalist to go to the Kennedy Center, and I distinguished myself as the first Jew on our hallway to have sex with a Catholic girl, (I didn't even have to tithe) and I probably distinguished myself in other ways, too, but, academically, not really very much happening there.

I got a D in biology-- having sex with the Catholic girl didn't help like I thought it might-- and I guess that's because I never went to class.  I guess the biology class I took in high school, where we spent untoward amounts of time coloring in pictures of amoebas, talking about "Power Rangers" and watching "The Money Pit" didn't help like I thought it might.  A cold, hard C- in Critical Thinking, which I think, objectively and non-academically, is something at which I'm pretty adroit.  I bombed a couple other classes, too.  Oh, right.  Intro to Psych.  C-, which is kind of funny, considering that I work in an inpatient crisis psychiatric hospital and I supposedly know my dick from a mushroom.  I did very well in all my theatre courses, but I guess you'd have to be Nicolas Cage on ice and ether to fuck that up.

Joking aside (really, it's no joke: I hate that flat affect fuckstick) I was surprised at how saddened I was by my college grades.  I ended with a cumulative GPA of 3.302.  I looked at the scanned transcript and I was disappointed in myself, something I would have bristled at had it came from my parents-- but it never did.  At least, I don't remember them saying they were disappointed in my grades-- certainly not in college.  Where grades were held in extremely, I think excessively, high regard in my wife's family, in my own, they were not really relevant.  Far more weight was given to the overall experience.  I remember my parents being concerned for how I was doing in college on an emotional level, particularly since, mid-way through my sophomore year, I started going to the counseling center for once-a-week sessions and didn't stop until I graduated.  I had suicidal thoughts for the first, and only, time when I was a freshman.  Bullied mercilessly, lost and lonely, and stripped from the tender clutches of my once-adoring mother, I got very dark indeed-- and told no one.  Because, well, why would I?

In grad school, I ended with a cumulative 3.7, because, I guess, La Salle gives out A's like communion wafers.  I got tons of them, and never went hungry.

I guess, if I'd wanted good grades in undergrad, I would have, I don't know-- studied?  I didn't think you were supposed to study in college, so I didn't.  I never really knew how to study anyway.  In high school, I did my homework on the bus on the way to school, and I did fine, so I didn't really know what all those people were doing in the college library all the time.  I went there because there were hot girls there and I liked hot girls.  Now, when I got to the library, there's just mentally unstable people cursing under their breath and blowing air on their notebooks filled with religious ramblings.  I masturbated, a lot, in college-- and my eyesight was always poor and my palms are still hairless to this day, but I guess educational mediocrity is the price for my ambivalence and spilled seed.  And I suppose, in the end, I'm okay with that.

Especially if it gets me a comfy office chair and a G7 pay rate.

Loan Shark

Every month, on the 18th or thereabouts, $436.06 gets automatically debited from our joint checking account. If you're thinking, "Oh, that must be the monthly payment on their gently-used Land Rover HSE, you'd be wrong. Not only would you be wrong, but you'd be guilty of residing in the same fantasy world in which I find myself vacationing on occasion when I think I'm married to the cast of "Coyote Ugly" and I sing like Josh Ritter.

No, $436.06 is the monthly sacrifice I make to Loan Sharktrix Sallie Mae as I diligently and automatically repay the debt I incurred by obtaining my Master of Education degree from La Salle University. After a month or two of writing out the checks by hand, I buckled under the emotional weight of what I was doing and passionlessly set up the automatic debit. That way, it's like getting fingerbanged in your anus by Edward Scissorhands while you're unconscious, having been drugged with Rohypnol.

There is a tremendous amount of guilt associated with this massive student loan (when I started repaying it, in 2009 or whenever, it was a staggering $38,000) due to the fact that, while I am gainfully employed, which allows me to repay the loan, I am not gainfully employed as a teacher. Nor have I ever been since graduating from the program (yes, I did that fateful 1-month stint as a long-term English sub, but I was still enrolled in the MaEd program at the time, having one last course [Geography] to complete) and that is rather a hard pill to swallow.

I don't know how many of you out there reading this have graduated from either undergraduate or Master's level programs and have obtained degrees which you are not utilizing, but I suspect, if you're reading this and you are in the same boat as I am, you understand how I'm feeling about all this. Granted, I'm not especially using my undergraduate degree either, but, and this is going to sound terrible I know; I didn't pay for it. So the sting isn't quite there. My parents (Christ knows how-- must have sold a LOT of heroin, not to mention a fair amount of overpriced burn bags) paid for my undergraduate education in total.

Gone.

Whoosh!

There it was.

There it went.

Boom went the dynamite.

And I feel incredibly bastardish for having said that, but, really, it drives home the importance of having kids pay for things themselves because, you know, when you haven't paid for it, it's a lot easier to undervalue it. Whatever "it" is. Like a boob-job, for instance.

But my graduate degree I did pay for, and, every time I look at our bank statement and see that rather sizeable chunk get taken out by Sallie Mae's bony, terrible fingers, I shake my head. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know whom I was trying to please. Well, that I do know-- my parents and my wife. And, really, the community-at-large who had been either secretly or overtly hoping that I would do something sane, logical, and appropriate with my life. Become a cop? Jesus.

What was he, bucking fananas?

He loves wearing neckties and he has a calm, gentle, funny way about him. Shove him in a classroom and forget about him. That seemed to be, well, appropriate. And so I went to work in a psychiatric hospital. To stick it in people's faces? I don't know. I don't think so. Not consciously anyway.

I just checked out, mostly for shits and giggies, the total loan payoff-- the amount I would need to come up with if the loan were to be paid off in full by the end of this month:

$29,600.38

It's like-- what the fuck has been going on for the past three years? Almost $15,600 over the course of three years, and I've barely made a dent. Thanks, 6.8% interest!

I wonder, though, sometimes, if I'd feel any better about this massive debt I owe if I were teaching as opposed to doing what I'm doing now. Would it make any difference? After all, the amount owed wouldn't change. A job's a job's a job's a job.

Isn't it?