September 30, 2004

• Two weeks ago, I was going to write a long post, mostly bitching about
  our poverty and my fluctuating hours and yadda yadda yadda. The same
  kind of griping I seem to do a little too often for my liking. But when
  your attention and focus are largely taken up with a certain matter, it
  can be difficult to write about anything else.

  As the days went by, I restrained myself from writing such a post,
  since I've always preferred to keep bitching the exception rather than
  the rule here. The mundane details of my financial state, while they
  may seem pressing to me, are no different from what most other people
  experience from day to day as well, and I don't want it to seem that I
  think my trials and tribulations are really serious in the grand scheme
  of things. They're important to me, but they're not the end of the
  world.

  So as the days continued to progress, I started having other ideas for
  a post, having to do with how my birthday went, some new work I've been
  doing, and the fact that I'm expecting a roll of film back from the
  developers soon. Nice, cheerful stuff which can be written about with a
  little flare and can be tied to greater issues and stuff. I was happy
  that I was putting my stress behind me (well, only in terms of a blog
  entry, but it's a start...).

  The other night, I let off a little bit of steam caused by stress I've
  been carrying around for a year or so. I was doing some meditating on a
  few lines from the writings of my religion, a passage which starts out:
  "Be generous in prosperity and thankful in adversity". I had spent a
  while thinking about being generous in prosperity, and had moved on to
  pondering being thankful in adversity. The angle I was working on was
  that however down I am now, my problems are infinitely less than they
  were this time last year. The forced perspective shift helped lift my
  spirits a little more.

  However...

  Tonight, I called the student loan people to apply to have my payments
  put on hold for a while. Turns out that some changes were made earlier
  this year which resulted in them messing up the automatic withdrawl of
  the payments on one of my loans. As a result, the payments stopped
  coming out of my account. That was 6 months ago tomorrow. At 6 months,
  the debt gets turned over to a collection agency. So... The best case
  scenario is that the payment I agreed on the phone to send today will
  get processed and all will be hunky dory. A more likely scenario is
  that at least the overdue amount and possibly the
  entire loan amount may be turned over to a collection agency, resulting
  in all sorts of unpleasantness and years of bad credit.

  And so, here I am, bitching, despite my valiant attempts to do
  otherwise. Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the
  same. Obviously whatever I've been supposed to learn from this
  prolonged round of adversity still hasn't sunk into my head, so a fresh
  heap has been tossed into the fan so that I can have another chance to
  draw some appropriate conclusions. I will keep trying to make sense of
  it all, though I'll have to take some time out tomorrow to make a whole
  bunch of phone calls trying deperately to make sure that they accept my
  payment and not sell my debt to Legbreakers Debt Collection Inc.

  Okeedokee. Writing that has given me a teeny little bit of catharsis,
  though not enough, I fear, that I'll be able to get to sleep. Sorry for
  inflicting my problems on you, dear readers. I promise I'll rally soon,
  post some birthday pictures and talk about the package I'm getting
  ready to send to my family. If you feel like taking time out of your
  lives to send some prayers or good vibes our way, it would certainly be
  appreciated. Maybe that's the new angle on thankfulness that I should
  be exploring...

  Take care
  -J-

  UPDATE: 10am and some phone calls later, it looks as if disaster may
  have ben averted (knock on wood). Don't want to fully relax until
  everything's fixed, but thanks to an excellent customer service rep
  named Curtis, I'm feeling much easier in my mind. Anyhow, off to work.

  • 1:36 am
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