Leave it to Alpha Man to turn something he read on Sweet Hot Justice into a racial conspiracy theory. I have an alternate observation along the same lines of what does or does not constitute “rich” for tax purposes or in terms of being able to travel in certain circles.  My (new job) rich friends make less than my (old job) poor friends. A lot less actually. I am talking 50% on average. How? Why? I find the answer not in any historical patterns but in the age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?

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She’s not pregnant anymore. There are hundreds of ways to end that joke that are pro-choice, pro-life and my favorite pro-funny.  I chose probably the worst ending and I bet you still laughed.  At the end of the day I am pro-choice because I find more women are willing to have unprotected sex with me (because you can only buy condoms but so many times a week) if they know they can just get the little bugger fished out by a professional wrangler.

If I had gone the medical route I would have been an abortion doctor. You get to meet a bunch of loose mostly single women with low self-esteem, there is no word of mouth if you do a lousy job, business actually improves in a crappy economy and no matter what you charge it’s cheaper than the only other option. Come on, that was funny! Anyway, Benito wanted a more serious article so I was going take the opportunity to explore the other pro-choice rationale.

I’ve always been fascinated that gun-toting, war-mongering, execution happy conservatives are PRO-LIFE even though most abortions occur in populations they would regulate to second class citizenship. Eventually I assumed it was simply to get a poor uneducated demographic to repeatedly vote against it’s own economic and societal interests. Then Alpha Man started writing alot about debt and the inter-generational transfer of wealth. That got me thinking: what if you could guarantee that in a marginalized population the next generation kept arriving early? What if money that could have been a first house and or college for kids 1 and 2 had to be spent on kid 0 conceived at junior prom and kid 3 and 4?  In a time when at least the most blatantly discriminatory laws are off the books and our race/class caste system depends more on money than ever, are restrictions on reproductive rights one of the last legitimate places where we can legally perpetuate a permanent under class?

Eh. Maybe. Anyone else in the mood for pregnant lady porn? Ha! Joking again. How could anyone want to censor this guy?

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.

Mike Triforce here.  Hold the applause.  I am just not in the mood.

A few days ago I wrote a post about how the Princess was around less and given our financial bind I naturally assumed that that was due to finding or at least actively seeking gainful employment (though the couch, unwashed dishes and unwalked dog surely missed her) but I was wrong. I am still in shock but I had to…I don’t know…let me just say it.

The Princess…went back to school.

What. The. FUCK?! This trifling, shiftless, good-for-nothing waistrel has been nothing but an anchor around my neck.  She can’t…we can’t…there’s no…

I mean, where to begin?  Ok, I’ll just say it.  I was counting on her daddy’s money.  Money that could have floated some of our bills or paid off some of MY LOANS for the education that is PAYING OUR BILLS.  Instead that money is going to pay her tuition so she can study Art History or some other useless endeavor.   I just wanted to tell her that those people leading the guided tours at museums aren’t speaking from academic knowledge, they are just repeating what they are listening to…they’re not deaf, that’s an earpiece. 

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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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I hate pre-season football.  It’s kind of like masterbating in my book. If you hear it from the other room it sounds like the real deal but at the end you don’t feel like a winner and you haven’t conquered anyone.  In my disgust I decided to see what Benito and company have produced recently.  Predictably it was a sea of crap, and really I could comment on anything written in the month of August but for the sake of time let’s focus on this “Tales of an Unpublished Author” series.  Typical Benito, he finds a loser similar to himself who writes about why he has accomplished nothing in life.  Soon he will have kids writing who got rejected from every school they applied to giving advice about how to get into Yale Law or Harvard Med.  So that’s why I hate this blog. 

And here’s why I love America.  May I present Ms. Kathryn Stockett whose novel “The Help” has been a best-seller for over a year now.  Ms. Stockett is a lilly-white 41 year-old who, from the looks of her, is no stranger to cosmetic surgery (the work is very tasteful).  She comes from old money and her book is a condescending tale chronicalling the generations of black servants employed by her family told form the perspective of one of the servants.  I promise this is not a joke and I can’t believe neither Alpha Man nor Simons Girlfriend has written about this.

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Law Firms are not complex organizations. Lawyers come in essentially two flavors: associate and partner. Associates, office space and furniture, cases, clients and profits (in reverse order of importance) belong to partners and the more you have of each the more important you are. Everyone else, secretaries, paralegals, tech guys and contractors are chattel, somewhere between a chair and a mule, with of counsels being an anomoly (think talking Donkey). Other offices are more complicated.

I think the biggest difference between a law firm and a regular office is the frequency of disputes with no clear winner. Even first year associates have different leverage walking in on day one and if a dispute occurs (usually over a hook-up that shouldn’t have happened) prior connections or the female associate’s willingness to sleep around quickly determine who has the upperhand.

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The following prose is inspired by interviews with and commentary from Mike Triforce and is posted with his infered blessing and endorsement.  This in no way reflects my own thoughts and feelings. Thanks for your support during my rough patch asshole.

I make my own sandwhich
It happens – like laundry or other minutaie
But as I search for pickles the magnitude of it hits me
What wonders will the world never see
 - or see hundreds of years later
 - because Einstein on some random day
 - had to make his own sandwhich

So yes Princess it could be the end of the world
I could be writing a song
Or rehearsing a part
Or trying to figure out exactly how much I can charge this chump client before he starts raising red flags

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So Benito every now and again adds another blog to the blog roll and one of them is called “Sweet Hot Justice.”  I decided to peruse the blog and what I found was…well I don’t know how to describe it.  It read like a bunch of excerpts from Lisa Scottoline novels, only more risque because it doesn’t have to appeal to the 55+ crowd that constitute 90% of Scottoline’s fans.

This post is NOT another rant about Lisa Scottoline, and it’s also not a call to arms for female attorneys.  I’m not even sure what this is.  So I suppose read on and we’ll find out together.

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