Mr. Angst arrived at home tonight with Legally Blonde, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the soundtrack to Garden State. He read that we don’t have any chick flicks on DVD and wanted to buy me some. And the soundtrack I just wanted.
:::sigh::: That makes me all squishy.
I got a preliminary financial aid package from one of my schools today. As expected, it consisted entirely of loans. Mind you, it included the maximum subsidized Stafford loan as well as a hefty chunk of “need-based” loans (which appear to have a more favorable interest rate), but it’s still all loans.
Granted, it’s nothing I wasn’t preparing myself for. Of course, Mr. Angst and I chatted briefly about it, and he mentioned that he’s pretty sure his entire program will only cost about what one year’s tuition will cost for me. That makes my stomach kind of hurt, but it also makes the debt spreadsheet (yes, I have a projected debt spreadsheet) look a little less ominous.
Still, thinking about all of it makes my stomach hurt again.
I guess I’m a little spoiled—my undergraduate student loans were small, mostly because I worked hard and got scholarships, and also because my family had some bad financial times right when I was going in. Doesn’t seem like the same rules apply in law school—my financial situation next year will be much worse than my parents’ was when I was a freshman in college, but it seems I still won’t get any grants. Also, it doesn’t appear that law schools convert loans to grants for good grades. Man, I was really lucky in college.
Look, I know most law students must be taking out loans for all this education. What I really want to know is how you can make the nausea go away? If you’re a law student or a recent graduate, tell me how you manage. Do you still make enough money to eat and live and have an occasional good time and buy work-appropriate clothes after the big chunk of change comes flying out of your bank account at the beginning of the month?
Anyone out there want to tell me how they do it?
This is a short little story, mostly because it doesn’t need a lot of exposition to get the horror across.
I was at the grocery on a Sunday afternoon so the place was packed. I was heading straight for the self-checkout. (Yes, I love the self-checkout except when I’m buying alcohol because then you just have to wait for the cashier to come check your ID anyway.) In front of me was a mother and her two daughters. The daughters—both tweens—were acting like morons, as tweenagers are wont to do. I was annoyed by them, but blew it off. Kids are kids, right?
That’s what I was thinking as I was trying to get around them, so I could get to the checkout lanes, when one of the daughters audibly FARTED right in front of me. Like two feet in front of me.
One part of me wanted to get sick. Another part of me wanted to grab the girl by the shoulders and smack her for being gross. A third part of me wanted to use my cart as a roadblock for the mother and tell her how GROSS her daughter was and how she should be ashamed that her daughter FARTED in the GROCERY STORE. In FRONT of me.
Instead, I sped up, cut them off right in front of the self-checkout, and took the only open station. It was the only form of polite retribution I could think of.
I played handyperson this weekend while Mr. Angst was away. The master bathroom toilet had a small, slow leak that was dripping on our floor, so we turned off its water a few weeks ago. We’ve been using the guest toilet since then and I’d been meaning to fix the darn thing for a while.
I had discovered that the leak was somewhere along the water supply line—either in the line itself, or in one of the connections—so I went to Home Depot and got a new supply line. I wasn’t sure how long it needed to be, so I got a 20″ one. This turned out to be too long and, after I’d installed it, I discovered that the leak wasn’t in the supply line or the connection after all—it was in the fill valve. So I had to go back to Home Depot.
Meanwhile, the sky outside was turning an ominous black color. It seemed that my afternoon was going to be all about water because as soon as I got out of my car at Home Depot (round two), it started to rain.
So there I am, back in the store, trying to decide between buying a whole new fill valve or just a rubber ballcock washer. (Yes, it’s called a ballcock washer and I still can’t help but laugh when I see that word.) The Home Depot guy is helping me decide when, out of nowhere, we hear a giant crack of thunder—and the lights go off.
Not for long, though—the generators kicked in almost immediately. I actually would have been pretty disappointed with Home Depot if they hadn’t had emergency generators. My faith in that place is unshaken. So the Home Depot guy convinced me to splurge on the new fill valve ($6.47) instead of the washer ($1.47), and I paid at the self-checkout.
I can see now that the skies have opened and I know my umbrella is going to be of little use. I pull it out anyway, because that’s what you do when it rains, and make a rush for my car. I’m wearing flipflops and water is already building up in the parking lot so of course I slip. My left shoe hydroplanes as I’m running to the car—that funny kind of running you do when you don’t want your feet to get wet—and I barely stop myself from falling. So my feet are completely wet, as are the bottom of my jeans, but at least my ass isn’t wet, right? (I do have a sore calf to show for my graceful recovery.)
Now I’m on my way home in the driving rain, when it actually STARTS TO HAIL. Did I mention that the sun is still out in part of the sky? There’s a rainbow in front of me, yes, but there’s also marble-sized hail pelting my car. I love spring thunderstorms, but not when I have to be out in them. Note to God: please keep me inside the next time you send a string of thunderstorms my way.
And now that I’ve typed all this up, I see that it’s not a very interesting story, so I’d better wrap it up. I replaced the fill valve with no problems, tightened all the connections, and turned the water back on. We now have a working toilet in the master bath again. And all I had to endure was two trips to Home Depot and a giant thunderstorm. Not so bad in the grand scheme of things, I guess. Maybe I should bag this whole law school thing and become a plumber’s apprentice.
