I love being a lawyer. I don’t work and get paid while many of my classmates who worked hard are out in the street. Everything is better when someone who once considered themselves your equal can’t afford it. However for the past couple of months I have been rolling with some finance kids from NY and cash has become a bit stretched keeping up with them. The downside of their jobs of course is they have to actually work. Sure, I could be a millionaire in a few years but I’d rather just take the steady paycheck that is based on a fictional abstraction than a sporadic one based on results. Also it seems like every firm in Philly and Jersey willing to meet the NY market is dragging their feet with hiring.

Which brings me to the subject of the Princess. I know many of you doubt the wisdom of keeping her around but look at it this way: Now that the till is a bit empty instead of continuing to roll with the finance kids and their model-hot Swedish entourage I can fake an emergency at work and get some free (though somewhat bland and routine) sex at home. Further, I can put some pressure on her to drum up some cash.  Now usually I would say that that is synonymous with asking her daddy. I let her run-up a 15k tab knowing she could never pay me back, charging some healthy interest in the hopes of getting a daddy check, or in leiu of that unofficially taking over one of his rental properties aka nicer place and no rent. Did I mention I haven’t paid my student loans in several months to finance these NY trips? Anyone who hasn’t deduced that has never been with a swede. Tiger is a damn fool. The only woman he should have cheated with was his wife’s twin sister.

But here is where I give the Princess her do. I think…I think she actually found a job! A real job where she’s on a payroll and pays taxes like an adult! Here are the clues- she’s gone during the day and when she is around she seems tired but not the lazy I’ve been up three hours already tired but the I have done something productive today tired. She also comes back looking borderline respectable/high class slutty.

Granted their isn’t much she is fit to do but one thing she could do is sell real-estate particularly to single male investors. Successful real-estate agents can make a mint. I’m almost proud of her.

Now before all of you go calling me a dick or a chauvinist let me say I will not be spending her first commission check wining and dining a six foot Swedish model before becoming intimately familiar with the details of her anatomy. I will use her money to pay our rent and my back loans…thereby freeing up my own money to go Ikea shopping.

So there have been alot of things to get used to working at my new job.  Just about everyone goes on vacation between the 4th of July and Labor Day.  Just about everyone works between 8 and 6.  Many people are content with their current jobs and plan to work there until they retire.  They see their children and significant others.  If you refer to someone as the “nice” guy that’s usually not enough to identify them.  If you refer to someone as an “asshole” usually that is enough to identify them.  But there was always something more…and unfortunately for nurses that “something more” was the fact that my new profession wasn’t subservient to another.

I know being a paralegal and a nurse have many differences, but at the end of the day they are subservients to lawyers and doctors respectively, and it doesn’t matter if the former has been on the job 40 years and the latter is on their first day…JD equals “Just Do what I say” and MD equals ”My Decision.” 

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As I was cutting the crusts off the cucumber and cottage cheese sandwiches I was making for my mother’s book club and looking at the automated job rejections appear on my hotmail account (after all who reads job apps on the weekend) suddenly it hit me – the idea that was going to get me the best kind of employment, self-employment.

45 minutes later as I was refilling Mrs. Beraducci’s tea I ran the idea by her. See, she’s always complaining about her no-good sons who never come by, call or visit (as if a medical residency, semester abroad or deployment to Iraq was any excuse) and is always visibly jealous of my mom whenever I replace a light bulb, clean out the garage or drive to Whole Foods with her canvas bags so she can get the 5 cents per bag discount. She loved the idea. They say every chronicly unemployed person eventually tries to start their own business. With that in mind may I present Young Men for domestic Companionship and Ambience or YMCA.

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Y’all must think you’re pretty slick. Seriously, pulling something out of Reagan’s playbook: paying faux homage to King (in Reagan’s case in the form of a national holiday) while doing everything you can “behind the scenes” to promote the disparagement harassment and discrimination against African-Americans. Oh, do I have some words for you! But first let me say this to all you minority inmates in debtors prison (which like real prison is made up of a disproportionate number of us) first we’ve got to look up from staring at our own problems long enough to notice things like this and second  we may not have gotten jobs or meaningful contacts out of our fancy degrees but at least we pissed off uneducated white trash like Beck and Palin. Sure they are millionaires and we owe six figures but their jealousy and envy can at least get you through the day.

Ok now for Beck and Palin. Look, Reagan got away with what he did because 1) he was President 2) he was a charismatic actor and 3) that was 30 years ago before the Daily Show.  Glen Beck is so stupid he thought Al Sharpton marched with Dr. King…I mean can he even count to 47? Sarah Palin is on record mocking the very IDEA of being a community organizer… What do you think Dr. King WAS?! The unofficial Prince of Negroes? And these aren’t things those idiots did or said ten years ago, this is all since 2008.

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A question was posed in the New York Times recently

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=10&hpw

asking whether the collective failure of “twenty somethings” to 1) finish school 2) move out 3) become financially stable 4) marry and 5) have a child by age 30 and hence achieve adulthood is so rampant that perhaps we are witnessing some kind of collective devolution such that a new category in addition to adolescence is needed between childhood and adulthood called “emerging adulthood.”  This article is more than just another slap in the face to young people who have never had the opportunity to start a career mixed with some struggling, debt-ridden academic’s sad attempt to make a name for himself.  This article is the very antithesis of what this blog is all about and as such merits a response.  As I peel back the layers of lies and hypocrisy I ask that you the reader not lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day life is not about 1-5. 1-5 simply has to do with a society perpetuating its own existence.  Your LIFE is measured by how you advance an organized movement designed to benefit others well beyond your few years on the planet.
 
First, let me say this: ouch.  I don’t say ouch lightly.  This was not a bee sting or a splinter.  This was a sledgehammer to the ankles.  This is like getting a test back from a teacher that you failed so badly the teacher actually begins to wonder if whether you have some unknown mental deficiency.  I mean, the article is saying someone in my situation is so hopelessly pathetic that SOCIETY NEEDS TO MAKE SPECIAL LAWS TO ACCOMMODATE MY EXISTENCE.  I have a friend who completed 1-5 by age 23.  I was 0-5 then.  Now I’m 28, 1-5, with nothing on the horizon.  This article suggests that when we rent cars, purchase alcohol or engage in other activities that the law treat us differently…kind of like insurance companies do when evaluating what kind of risk you are or mortgage companies do when deciding whether or not to give you a loan.  According to this article pursuing a graduate degree and not being able to get a job right away could eventually make you a protected class under the Constitution!

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Several months ago Erin (I think) wrote an article called why I don’t care about the national debt. Maybe someone else stole the by line but I remember the conversation that spurned the entry. About a week and a half ago the President reminded us how in a generation we had plummetted from 1 to 12 in terms of countries with the highest percentage of citizens with a college degree. And of course this is Debtors’ Prison so you know how we get down. Let’s explore how the three are interconnected.

Student Debt and National Debt. It’s really hard to care about the latter when entrenched in the former, particularly when the latter is used as an excuse for why the govt can’t help you but they need another fleet of 100 million aircraft to hunt the 50 Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. But let’s look deeper. We as students behaved alot like our country, borrowing a ton for a questionable large investment and assuming everything would just work out because hey, it’s us.

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It’s that time of year again. I think it starts with the back to school commercials for Staples and Target. School reminds those of us on skid row and in Debtors Prison that time really is passing and not in a good way. For the chronically unemployed August is when you start looking for and filling out applications for jobs to be sent the Tuesday after Labor Day. This will be my third Tuesday after Labor Day of Unemployment. The first one I sent out 100 applications sure I would get my pick of jobs. Last year I sent out 300 sure I would get a job. This year I will send out 500 sure licking envelopes on materials that still need to be mailed will dry out my throat. Debtors Prison is like San Diego: weather is always the same. Unemployment has seasons and I would say the beginning of the “unemployed year” is August 1st.

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What do student debtors and the unemployed have in common? No, not Benito (or the millions of others who are in the same boat). Selfishness. That’s not a criticism. I’m not judgmental. It’s certainly not praise. I am not Mike Triforce. It’s not even a challenge because I am not President Kennedy.

But I would be remissed if I didn’t point out two trends and suggest that perhaps one should rethink which hole their particular cog in the machine fills.

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People, I look good. I was just looking at some pictures of myself from a 4th of July party.  I mean I look spectacular. Paparazzi would have to follow me for weeks just to even have a chance at a bad shot. You know who looks terrible though? These Bush era big oil attorneys testifying in front of Congress. They are wrinkly, pale, flabby and have the stink of deceit on them. Haven’t they ever heard of face men?

Then it hit me. That’s where my next job is – big oil. If defending rich individual murderers gets you paid then imagine how much bank is in defending industrial murderers? AAAnnnd you don’t have to spend years in the DAs office working for slave wages.

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For a drifter, I really hate sleeping outdoors particularly in the summer.  The bugs are loud as hell. The ground gets damp in the morning. You can’t tell the newly homeless from the experienced hippie. You smell like ass as does your surrounding environment. I’m going over to Benito’s basement and I don’t care if I wake his mother so long as she doesn’t call the police.  I better have a new post though when I show…hence this post. About Monopoly.

So what’s the biggest difference between Monopoly and life? If you said in life everyone doesn’t start with the same amount of money you would be correct. Next question, what is the biggest difference between Monopoly and the life of a student debtor?

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