I've never been in debt. Okay, that's not entirely true. Yes, I've been in the kind of debt where I had to make car payments, and I'm currently in the kind of debt that says I have to make house payments.
I've never been in credit card debt, however. Truth be told, I've never even owned a credit card. I don't trust them. I've been conditioned not to trust them thanks to many years of living with college roommates.
Most of my college roommates had this weird outlook on credit cards. Basically, they thought credit cards were magical pieces of plastic that just magically paid for things and that they were somehow immune from the the ensuing debt that came about due to excessive credit card spending.
I'll admit it: I was sort of jealous of my roommates and their magical credit cards. After all, they always seemed to have money and, if they didn't, they just whipped out their credit cards. Books? Put them on the credit card. Food? Put it on the credit card. Night out at a strip club? credit card.
And yet there I was writing checks and budgeting like a fool. I remember thinking that I was doing everything all wrong. I mean, there I would sit, meticulously lording over my finances, while my roommates went waltzing all over town swiping their credit cards with the careless glee of a six-year-old with a loaded pistol.
Then, one year, I was a roommate with a guy named Chad. Chad was actually a former high school classmate of mine. He was, and is, a tech-head. He's one of those guys who was born to know technology. Way back in elementary school, he taught me how to write simple programs for the Apple IIc, and he always just seemed to know everything about computers.
But he didn't know shit about personal finances. He whipped out any one of his many credit cards with the swiftness and ease of a Old West gunslinger. By the time we became roommates, he had already accrued over $10,000 in credit card debt.
I remember thinking what an incredibly large amount of money that seemed to be, especially when I factored in the understanding that he also received financial aid, and that he also worked. Granted, he worked at the local Brach's candy factory on the Gummi Bear line, which paid about as well as you might imagine, but it was still money, so I came to the conclusion that old Chad was a pretty carefree spender.
Well, one day, I popped into Chad's outrageously messy room where I noticed, tucked between two huge bags of pilfered defective Gummi Bears, a credit card notice that was slugged "Urgent!" and another that was slugged "Immediate Payment Required" and still another that read "We Break Fingers And Toes."
Then the calls started coming in, usually two or three a day. "Is Mr. Haugen available? We really need to speak with him." No, he's not here. "Are you sure you're not really Mr. Haugen?" Yes, I'm sure. "Well, when he comes in, have him call Mike at Discover immediately." *sound of shotgun cocking* Will do.
Chad was masterful when it came to avoiding creditors. He always seemed to leave the apartment just two or three minutes before a creditor called. It was like he had some sort of sixth sense. Which was all fine and dandy, except that I ended up being the intermediary between Chad and the creditors, so I got to absorb all the impatient anger and suspicion of basically every credit card company on the planet.
It was the day a creditor appeared, in person, at our doorstep that I realized Chad's debt situation was probably more dire than Chad cared to admit. There was a knock at the door, I answered, and a gentleman in a suit that looked both impressive and threatening stood before me. He asked to see a Mr. Chad Haugen, at which point I heard a little scuffling emanating from Chad's room as Chad scurried out the back entrance which, conveniently, was located at the far end of his bedroom.
We chatted together, the ominous creditor and me, for about an hour, waiting for Chad to get home, even though, of course, there was no way in holy hell Chad was going to make an appearance while that guy was in our apartment. I even had to produce my ID, so the creditor was satisfied that I wasn't, in fact, Chad Haugen.
After that, I believe, Chad ended up getting a loan from his parents, or somebody, so he could pay off his credit card debt at least enough to keep the creditors at bay. He eventually got a job working at IBM, which was a long-assed commute from Winona to Rochester, but paid a whole lot more than the Gummi Bear line.
As for me, Chad's experience with credit cards pretty much scared me away from plastic for good.
I woke up this morning with the left side of my face practically swimming in drool. It's not my fault, it's really not. I'm not a chronic sleep drooler. Normally, my drool mechanism is kept under tight control. However, this week, due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm drooling truly horrifying amounts of, well. . . drool.
Here's why.
Last Saturday night, Melissa and I went to a local Chilis Restaurant, because I deferred restaurant judgement to her. If it had been up to me, I would have been slurping down Applebees riblets, but Melissa had a hankering for Chilis food, so I acquiesced.
Anyway, one of Mel's most favorite things in the world is chips and salsa. If it were nutritionally possible for her to live entirely on chips and salsa, chances are quite good she'd adopt such a diet plan. Chips and salsa are to Melissa as bamboo shoots are to panda bears. So, no sooner had we sat down then Mel was ordering chips and salsa.
If there's one thing about Chilis, it's that they actually do have good chips and salsa. Now, I realize it's no big culinary triumph to produce good chips and salsa (heretofore referred to as C&A), but I've been to plenty of eating establishments that serve the most God-awful salsa imaginable--think extra-chunky ketchup and you get the idea.
But, Chilis has good C&A, so I dove right into the basket of chips when it arrived, and I promptly grabbed the most dense and solidified chip ever produced. This chip had the consistency of granite. I unwittingly placed the chip in my mouth and bit down hard. The unchip-like chip didn't so much as bruise beneath my teeth, but it did stab my inner left lip with a sharpened chip point that was sharper than the sterile lancets hospitals use to draw blood from a finger. It cut long and deep into my inner lip before I managed to spit the diamond-tipped chip back onto my plate.
If you're at all familiar with cuts in the inner mouth, you know that they tend to develop into a condition known as canker sores. Well, boys and girls, I now have the great poombah of canker sores adorning my inner left lip. This thing is gargantuan. It's so big, in fact, that it actually pushes my lip noticeably outward.
And, I might add, since it pushes my lip outward, it compromises the seal that kept me from drooling all over the place. So, for the past few days, I've awakened in a small puddle of my own saliva, due to the current fault in my mouth levee system. I hope this thing heals soon. I'm sick of washing my pillowcases every morning.
Heh. These are kind of cool. Below are links to pictures from the week during which I tested for my black belt way back in June 2003. In case you don't know what I look like, and most of you probably don't, I'm the guy with the shaved head and goatee. Oh, I'm also one of the few red belts in these pics. Picture quality varies. A lot.
On Monday, March 1, I'll turn 29-years-old. I won't be 30, quite, but I won't be 20 either, not by a long shot. Aging has never been a big deal for me. I mean, it's inevitable, so why bitch about it?
Well, that was before I started feeling the effects of aging.
Basically, from the age of 15 to 27, very little hurt me. I could pretty much push my body to tough physical limits and bounce out of bed the next morning no worse for the wear. This included wrestling, and Tae-Kwon-Do, and hapkido, and long weekend evenings downing pitchers of beer. I could take all the abuse in stride. I was INVINCIBLE!
Now shit is really starting to hurt.
I initially noticed the encroachment of bodily moanings some years back when I started experiencing little twinges of lower back pain. It was pretty much a localized pain, and I felt it primarily in the morning, so it was no big deal. By the afternoon, I was always back to my happy resilient self, complete with the ability to put my foot over my head and run for miles and miles and miles.
Then, in mid-2001, I started my own personal training to try my hand at running a marathon which, in case you didn't already know, consists of running 26.2 miles which, again if you didn't already know, is a shit-long distance to run. Seriously, you're better off taking a bike, or a car, or an ultra-light. Screw it: you're better off just sitting on a deck, grilling a steak and drinking a beer.
Anyway, at some point during my training, right around where I was running 9 to 10 miles with ease, I realized I was waking up in the morning and my body was considerably irritated with me. I ached all over. My joints wouldn't stop creaking and snapping until I stood in a warm shower for about four hours. Now, although I wasn't openly weeping with pain, I think I invented roughly 8,700 new expletives to bemoan my battered condition.
At some point, and I think it was in late November of 2001, I realized that I hadn't even started running HALF of a marathon yet, and my body was basically falling apart, and I came to the earth-shattering conclusion that there was a lot of other things I'd rather be doing than running for an hour and a half every other day. So, I was forced, quite happily, to give up my quest to complete a marathon. Instead, I had to content myself with five mile runs, a regimen I've adhered to ever since.
Things have been pretty much fine now for the past couple of years, with only nominal bodily creaks and groans between my running regimen and my weekly hapkido classes. Recently, however, within the past couple of months, I've noticed a distinct decrease in overall flexibility in hapkido. I have to stretch before class considerably more than I ever had to in the past, and that stretching now. Really. Really. Hurts!
Like I said, such gradual deterioration is only to be expected as I get older. But, still, it's kind of depressing. I've always taken pride in my above-average flexibility (in wrestling, my nickname was Frog) and my overall body resiliency. Now I'm starting to feel, I don't know, not fragile so much, but definitely less than invincible. Granted, I'm not old or anything, not by a long shot, but I don't particularly like being reminded that I inevitably will be, and that it will probably hurt a lot more than it does now.
Plus, I've noticed a lot of little grey hairs in my goatee, and that really sucks.
You know, sitting at work, with the Internet flashing at me throughout the day, I find myself sometimes feeling very much as if I'm absorbing just too much information, as if I'm plugged directly into an AP wire feed.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does leave me, by 5 p.m., feeling as if I'm a Star Trek Data version of Dan Rather, extremely wired with every type of information. Between my work-related surfing, looking for technology-related material, and my usual news-related surfing, I find myself feeling borderline mentally exhausted at the end of the day.
I'm pooped.
It's really amazing how much less you blog once you realize your blog has been discovered by your managing editor. *shaking fist*
