lowquality.net

I feel like blog­ging but I don’t know where to begin. Has that ever hap­pened to you?

When I was a kid I would never tell any­one if any­thing was both­er­ing me. Some­times I think this has a lot to do with why I am so tem­pera­men­tal and bois­ter­ous as an adult. When my mom told me my par­ents were get­ting a divorce, I remem­ber not really feel­ing any­thing, I just went back to play­ing with my toys. I was kind of sad, but I didn’t express it. Not at all.

A few days ago I had what felt like the worst day ever. Like I com­pletely hit bot­tom. I felt like walk­ing out of my office and into oncom­ing traf­fic. It turned out that the con­sol­i­da­tion loan that I applied for didn’t really do much to make my loan pay­ments more man­age­able, and that cer­tain repay­ment options I thought I would have with the con­sol­i­da­tion loan turned out to be mis­in­for­ma­tion I received from a Sal­lie Mae cus­tomer ser­vice idiot. At first, I had can­celed the loan because I was ter­ri­fied that I was going to ruin Kim’s life along with my own by hav­ing her involved with this mess (she co-signed for me as a neces­sity). The week­end passed, and on Mon­day I called backed to inquire about the afore­men­tioned repay­ment options that turned out to be unavail­able, but I also dis­cov­ered that, basi­cally, the con­sol­i­da­tion loan was the best route over­all even though it wasn’t really alle­vi­at­ing any stress really. Just to clar­ify: it was the best choice in the way that stab­bing your­self in the face with a ster­il­ized scalpel is bet­ter than step­ping on a rusty nail. I ended up rein­stat­ing the loan just in time for the Fed to cute the rate. My loan went down quite a bit more!

The next day was my birth­day and I told you that story already. My post on Whiskerino con­cern­ing my tat­too and its mean­ing seemed to really invite some pos­i­tiv­ity into my life. I’m often sur­prised at how much peo­ple seem to love me in spite of my dif­fi­cult nature. Some­thing shines through all of my bull­shit– even across the inter­net– and I can’t believe I got so many well-wishing com­ments and, ulti­mately, voted King Beard for the day. The King Beard was kind of mean­ing­less in one respect as I didn’t get it for a photo, I got it for the con­text that I put the photo in. It was nice to with the KB, but what REALLY got me excited was how every­one started post­ing their own tat­too pho­tos and telling their sto­ries behind them. That was amaz­ing, and maybe the best expe­ri­ence I have had in Whiskerino 2007 so far.

I never wanted to involve Kim with my stu­dent loans to the extent that she is now involved, but I feel like now that I have done so I have lifted the bur­den to a point at which I can clearly think about it. We were always in this together, but now we are REALLY in this together. Hav­ing this level of finan­cial respon­si­bil­ity together is on par with mar­riage. I never expected that this would be the order that we would do things in. I always hoped we be liv­ing together before we’d be pay­ing each other’s bills, but it didn’t work out that way.

Since I have known Kim’s fam­ily I have been kind of amazed at how they all try to taken the bur­den off of each other. In my fam­ily if some­one had a baby, they prob­a­bly wouldn’t go to a lot of par­ties because they’d have to take care of it or afford a baby sit­ter. In Kim’s fam­ily, going to a party is like a way to take a break. Gio gets passed around into every pair of lov­ing arms that will hold him. It’s Rum and Erwin’s only peace some­times. It seems so ironic to me, but its they way every one of them was raised. My mother did every­thing her­self– even when she wasn’t alone. I was an only child and I’ve always been kind of used to doing things myself, refus­ing to ask for help. Even when I really needed it. I’ve said it a bunch of times in the last year: “I need help.” I’m not sure if I always accepted it if and when it came to me.

Last week I also received a care pack­age from one of my inter­net friends, Ryan. In addi­tion to some Japan­ese odd­i­ties, cheap sug­ary candy and an awe­some hand­writ­ten let­ter, Ryan sent me some money. It is a con­sid­er­able amount com­ing from a friend I barely ever talk to and, if any­thing, the gift jolted me into a real­iza­tion that I need to take some of my inter­net rela­tion­ships more seri­ously. I pout about how all of my friends live in other places, but at the same time I also act like these peo­ple aren’t really real and I don’t value them as much as I should. Ryan is a good guy, with his own batch of trou­bles. My friends Luke and David are also reg­u­larly involved in my daily life, but more of an effort needs to be made on my part to make them more than danc­ing text on my com­puter screen.