So I was letting a buddy crash on the couch while interviewing in Philly for a job.  He’s been out of work for about two years now, about nine months of which he’s been looking for work outside of the legal field.  His interview didn’t go well, as I knew it wouldn’t.  Even after two years of living on couches and eating Chef Boyardee, the kid is not quite over himself.  Anyway, he spent more time getting to the within-walking distance interview than he spent in it, and of course he comes back to the Princess and I going at it and I don’t always close the bedroom door in my own place when nobody else is around.

So he bangs on the door and get this says “show a little respect.”  I come out still at attention and ask if he has some sort of problem.  He then goes on to list several problems he has with me and when I tell him to get the hell out he laughs.  You know what he says? He says “you owe me.” Well, the police begged to differ.  But let’s examine what he meant by that.

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As inmates in debtors prison we are an ignored constituency due to several factors that make us unlikely to vote, particularly in non-national elections. Still, it is useful to look at certain political deals in the making and ask “how does this further screw me?” Case in point: tax cuts for the rich in exchange for unemployment benefit extensions.

It’s a brilliant win-win for the Republicans politically. If the President agrees he looks weak and further exacerbates the deficit. It will also piss off Federal employees who just got their pay frozen for two years. If he doesn’t agree then taxes go up for everyone and the Republicans will bitch about that.

Sadly, unemployment doesn’t affect us much. To receive unemployment you need to have worked for a certain period of time and have made a certain amount of money. Obviously, we’re in the same boat as far as taxes are concerned. You can’t be taxed on jack shit. So, does this mean we shouldn’t care?

If you’re like me you have some crab tendencies. I’m in this barrel, why the hell should you crawl out? The crab philosophy says it’d be better for ALL taxes to go up rather than none…but the crab philosophy also says if the American dream is out of reach for ME it may as well be out of reach for as many people as possible, so let’s cut taxes, sell the rest of the country to the Chinese, and be done with it. The point is crab tendencies could lead to two different conclusions depending on how much patience one has.

But what if we are motivated by something other than spite?Well there is the deflected glory theory – that your life’s meaning comes from the accomplishment of your generation, ours being the election of President Obama. But as I just explained unless the lameduck Congress forces through a bill that extends middle class tax cuts while letting the others expire the President is likely to take some shit for whatever happens.

I think the reason I care so much about politics is that even though it exists in an alternate inside the beltway universe of fancy dinners and trust funds it still resembles my and all other student debtors lives…in that the common sense answer is the only one certain not to happen. Why is it that my leaders must choose between letting the unemployed twist in the wind while the country builds itself back up or giving them a mere subsistence while giving millions in tax breaks to the rich and thereby preventing a return to federal fiscal responsibility?

Probably the same reason I could never find a conventional job.

Every actor asks themselves this at one time or another. It’s called the “porn flu” and I’ve got all the symptoms: trouble affording the lifestyle I deserve, fed up with my day job (yes I am still employed) and no relationship I value enough to not put that person at risk of STDs. Hey, before you judge that street goes both ways.

Currently several additional factors have caused my porn flu to spike. Sasha Grey’s ascension to Entourage fame shows a pornstar can go mainstream. The market for certain acts, particularly gay on straight porn is particularly high. I have a sweet professional name “Donkey Dong” and finally I have the best background story ever: I am selling myself to pay off my student loans.

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So Mike Triforce recently got lit up when he commented on a guest post by Sweet Hot Justice on ATL.  The post consisted of a girl complaining that she was too perfect to date. She made too much money and was too attractive and too much fun to be around. Here at Debtor’s Prison we think you are likely to have a slightly different problem when it comes to meeting relationship material.  Like most of our problems it is a compound quandry. Whereas endless debt can be broken down into borrowing too much for too little and little to no economic opportunity and water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen so too can stagnant dating be broken down into friend erosion and of course the constant shame of debt and perceived under achievement.

Because of Benito this blog has a tendency to treat debt and unemployment as two almost interchangeable phenomenons. This is not the case and nowhere is it more evident than dating. One of my favorite analogies is that unemployment is like race and debt is like sexual orientation (aka one is readily discernible while the other can be disguised if one so desires but both are often the cause of discrimination). An unemployed person simply cannot afford the wine/dine entertainment heavy initial phase of dating. A debtor can just put it on his or her credit card and pray.

I think there should be an all encompassing term or score that is derived from one’s employment or lack thereof, age and debt, but that is a topic for another post. The salient point here I think is that if you have trouble meeting people it’s because of friend erosion.

Face it, you’re out of school and there is nothing else quite like it for making friends. If you all don’t go to the same location afterwards you see your friends less. If your friends are somewhere where they are closer to other elements of their circle they become closer to those friends and drift farther away from you. So if you can’t afford to live in Center City like everyone else because of that loan payment or move back to the suburbs because you lost your job well…relationships change. Suddenly you are not tagging along to work happy hours or tapped to escort a friend’s significant other’s friend to a wedding or concert.

And this is the reason this ultimately may be a commentary post as opposed to advice…I have no idea what to do about this. All I can say is that anything you do to try and meet people to fill this gap be it yoga, joining an animal rights group or pretending to follow a sports team will ultimately end in failure.  The WORST thing you can do is join a faith community to meet people. This is stupid because most religions have guidelines about dating AND it’s a horribly disingenuous thing to do.

I would say as things stand now a relationship is most likely to occur in the following situations: 1) doing something you’re ALREADY passionate about 2) doing something that requires alot of sans internet downtime and 3) the internet.  If through debt and/or possible unemployment or underemployment you’ve managed to hold on to your position coaching your nephew’s swim team because you were an All-American in college there’s a chance you might meet a kid’s aunt/uncle/older sibling.  You’ll be in a familiar environment where you hold some authority and that’s your best chance to display the qualities that might attract a mate.  Your next best chance is a situation where you’re just around a certain group of people alot without internet.  Long drives and campaigns come to mind.  Hanging around a bar or convenience store doesn’t count, the proximity must be brought about for some kind of point like getting to a destination, be it physical or political.  Finally there is the internet.  Statistically this is a valid place to look for relationships and you’re not one to look down on anyone.

The worst part of all this is that it shatters another illusion. You thought if you did everything right you’d be ok even in a shitty economy. Well, you wouldn’t be here if you still believed that. You also thought your friendships were based on deep special bonds between unique individuals not simply chance and convenience.

We pray not to be brought to the test because the results are so often heartbreaking.

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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