Bottle's gift card-stravaganza (with a side of politico-economics) - Screaming Females - Chalk Tape

Geez, Bottle. Where did that doom and gloom in last night's album review come from?

Glad you asked. We have money now, right? But, by and large, we're all stuck in various vicious cycles of buying Giffen goods.

What the hell are Giffen goods?

That's where the price of things you have to have to function inflate for normal reasons, but you and everyone else still needs to buy them so they keep inflating, and because they are inflating even more people start buying them as "investments," so everything actually gets worse. Think Irish potato famine, or the housing bubble, or the recent weather related hyperinflation of natural gas in Texas. My problem is repaying my student loan debt, but i'm well past the moral crisis stage, and congress isn't addressing the lack of lender responsibility that bankruptcy is supposed to ameliorate, they just aren't collecting on it at all. I've been bankrupt for my decade, but that 6 digit monolith is still not crumbling and i'll still be out at sea when it starts back up again.  Plus, the situation as a whole is impossible to encapsulate in a few facebook posts, so i'm just back to treading water.

Economics isn't about money. It's about trying to predict human behavior in relation to money.  However, if there isn't anyone with the ability or willingness to solve a specific problem, then none of it matters. I have to earn enough money to pay the debt, but that's still another decade away, and who knows what things will happen to mess it up. Nobody's making a plan to succeed as far as i can tell. I could hand a measly 4 digits back to the department of education today, but that doesn't do anything about tomorrow, and i still have to buy food and gasoline in the meantime.

But, we can't just wipe out all that debt. It wouldn't be fair.

Fair doesn't factor into it at all. Let that notion go, we aren't talking about everyone else, we're talking about me. 

Now you're just being selfish.

Yes, it's my problem. I'm the person i'm talking about. Yes this is a macro-economic problem, but there is no macro-economic solution. I have to hand money to a real person, and that person has to deduct it from my debt; i have to have money to do that. I have to earn money to have money. Anyone with a calculator can do the math and come up with a number that i CAN repay in a reasonable time frame, the rest is up in the air, but we're talking years not 3 or 4 months. I don't hear any ten keys clickety-clacking, do you? 

Umm.

I work full time. Bankrupt. I can't pay for reeducation or relocation, i can't ask for a huge loan, i don't own enough stuff to sell or use for collateral. I can hand over a few hundred dollars a month. Who has 200k to hand me, anyone? No? Nobody? Problem still there, i'm sitting at an empty table. I could buy a lottery ticket every day if you're prepared to never get that money, but until some benevolent force of the universe actually solves the problem, i'm doing the best i can do in a system that doesn't have a solution. Some actual person has to pay it, or hand me the money to pay it, or we really do have to accept that it will never get paid back before i die. That's not morbid, it's a cold hard fact. I can do all sorts of stuff, but if nobody can or will "overpay" for it, then all i can do is shrug and say "sorry."

You sound so angry. It's not like i can magic it all away.

I'm not actually angry, i'm just frustrated and tired of watching everyone dance around in circles while complaining that we have to dance around in circles all day. Of course you can't magic it away. It's a doing problem. I'm doing exactly what everyone thinks is right and proper. Market economics has winners and losers. I am one of the losers, but i'm not the type of loser you want to see, because you can't blame me for making bad choices. I'm not the homeless drug addict you can write off, i'm not the thug or the con man, i'm the polite, friendly, hard working, nice guy who takes care of himself and tries to help the people around him. I don't want a mansion, or a luxury car, or a yacht. I want a simple life with my chickens and vegetables and family, and my records. Unfortunately, the ghost of student loans past keeps tapping me on the shoulder and asking for huge tracts of money from the future that never seem to teleport into my checking account. 

Oooh, speaking of. Two of the albums from my christmas gift card-stravaganza arrived today. Navient doesn't accept gift cards or chickens as payment, by the way.

So, as i once again shrug and apologize for a system i think is dumb, but don't have the power to change, i'll put on Chalk Tape by Screaming Females, and thoroughly enjoy the demos they recorded in 2013 that only existed on 100 cassette tapes that sold out at the first show they played after an extended illness break. 

It's great by the way. It's raw, it's unpolished, it's delicious. It's really just an ep, but pressed as a 12" 45. And thanks again to Plaid Room Records, hope all is as well as can be over in Ohioland.

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