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.
Well, yeah.
Kickbacks? Bribery? Stonewalling? Conspiracy?
U.N. fever. Catch it!!
If all of this is news to you, there's probably a reason.
Earlier this week, I was burnt out on painting. Today, I'm burnt out on sanding. I have spent the last two evenings, and I mean evenings that ticked to 2 a.m., sanding down my hardwood floors to remove decades-old stains and assorted scuffs and scratches.
It's no minor league undertaking, this sanding of floors. Nay, it's a fairly involved process which includes both large and small machines. On the large end of things, I had to use an agressive floor attacking sander that ripped away my precious oak floors like a ravenous dog. And, if you let your guard down with that floor attacking menace, it would literally run away from you. That only happened once, thankfully, although it's kind of humbling to have to chase after a sanding machine that doesn't care which direction it's going.
After finishing with the sanding machine, I spent last night going along the perimeter of the floor where the big sander couldn't reach, meticulously going over the floor with a little hand sander that squealed loud enough to be heard in Utah. It took me from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. to get everything nice and sanded down and ready for today's application of stain and, eventually, varnish, which will all hopefully bring the floors back to their original brilliance. I'll just be happy if I can walk on them.
But, oh, the dust. So much dust. Dust everywhere. I woke up this morning and ran an exploratory finger up my right nostril, and what emerged was the biggest dust encrusted booger ever to form within a nose. It was gigant-huge! I bet you all wanted to know that.
Anyway, floor clean up and staining is on the agenda for tonight, and tomorrow I'm off to San Antonio to cover a tech convention there. I'll try to blog when I can from the great state of Texas. Last time I was in Texas, I was in Dallas, and it snowed. SNOWED! I bring Minnesota with me wherever I go.
Mandy says: i lost 20 lbs. gained perfect bikinbody again.
Ryan says: WOO HOO!
Ryan says: Send pics.
Mandy says: the working & school schedule had me gaining weight
Ryan says: Naked ones.
Mandy says: ha
Ryan says: Hey, you've seen my ass. It seems only fair.
Mandy says: and i will be pullinf off another 4.0
Mandy says: so my cumulative gpa will be a 3.93
Ryan says: Way to go, brainiac. I always hated people like you in college.
Mandy says: a 4.0 with a 15 hour load and full-time job
Mandy says: yea, i ruin curves
Ryan says: Curve killers.
Mandy says: but i am alos 27 and still in school
Mandy says: cause i had too much fun at 18
Mandy says: and i still haven't learned to type
Ryan says: You're only 27? For some reason I was thinking you were 31 or something.
Mandy says: that class would kill my average
Ryan says: Hell, I took typing in high school and I still suck at it.
Mandy says: 31????
Mandy says: what the hell?
Mandy says: do not lump me in the over 30 category
Ryan says: Sorry. I just always thought you were older than me.
Mandy says: why????
Mandy says: i will be 28 in may
Ryan says: I don't know. You always seem more mature than me. Then again, so do most 13 year olds.
Mandy says: ha
Seriously, this right here is some gut-busting funny shit. You'll laugh until you stop.
Mitch Berg pointed me to this list of books I have and have not yet read. Time to hit the books, methinks.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart (Okonkwo RULEZ!)
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights (I saw the movie. Does that count?)
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard (I can't read any more Chekhov. Too bleak.)
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22 (Best work of dark humor EVER! My fave book!)
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcĂa - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (I don't care if it is a classic. I'm never reading this fucker again!)
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (What? No 1984?)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (Not this title per se. The one I read was "The Works of Poe, or something like that)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (Who hasn't read this?)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (See also: My Fair Lady, sort of)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (again, who hasn't read this?)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
WASHINGTON D.C. (Rhodes Media Services) -- Amid controversy over whether Sen. and Democratic Presidential hopeful John Forbes Kerry threw several of his Vietnam War decorations--whether they were ribbons or medals, over a fence in 1971 in protest over America's involvement in the war, a new controversy has erupted that has sent his campaign advisors scrambling for answers.
At the heart of the new issue is not whether the decorations were thrown, but how they were thrown. Although the Kerry campaign insists they were thrown with a hefty over-the-shoulder throw brimming with vitality and confidence, some eyewitnesses to the event say it was a more of an underhand toss with a limp wrist, while still others say it was more of a "granny" throw using both hands sweeping up from between the knees skyward in what one witness said made him look like a "total fairy."
"I was there, man," said Bradley Langston, 53, of Pittsburgh. "Kerry was totally half-assed when he threw those medals, or ribbons, or whatever the hell they were, over that fence. I mean, he barely even cleared the fence, for crying out loud. But, yeah, it was a totally wimpy toss, like he was throwing confetti or something. It was weak."
Media orgainizations, sensing a story that may have legs, have been poring over old taped archives and have enlisted the critical eyes of both professional pitchers and schoolyard pansy girly-boys in an attempt to ascertain just how manly or wussy Sen. Kerry's ribbon/medal throwing actually was.
Early uncomfirmed reports say that people can clearly be heard in the in the footage yelling such undignified chants as "we want a medal chucker, not a mother-f**ker," and "we'll give you one last chance, to clear the f**king fence," in apparent response to the senator's throwing prowess.
This story is developing.
UPDATE: Hey, turns out this was actually more than satire. Well, sort of:
With that, he didn't really throw his handful toward the statue of John Marshall, America's first chief justice. Nor did he drop the decorations. He sort of lobbed them, and then walked off the stage.
I'm sick of painting. I can't stand the sight and smell of latex or oil-based paint any more. I can't stand brushes. I can't stand rollers. I can't stand Sherwin-Williams. I can't stand taping. I can't stand taking tape down. People do this for a living? How? Why?
With roughly one week remaining before I'm due to move in, most of the painting is complete, although there are rumblings that, if the girlfriend gets her way, we'll be repainting all the trim in the house all over again, which makes me want to bleed from the ears.
Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard nude. Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard nude. Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard .Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard nude. Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard . Amanda Beard .Amanda Beard .
I finally got all the carpet torn up, and all the carpet tacks yanked, and all the carpet strips crowbarred up and out of there. Now I have to sand the floors, and stain them, and seal them, and I have no idea where to even start doing any of that, and I'm sure I'll mess it all up ten or eleven times during the process, because that's the way things seem to be going.
And the lawn is getting long, and here I sit without a mower. And I'm travelling to San Antonio for work this weekend, which means a lot of stuff that should be done won't be done.
I want to be sleeping.
