So when I first graduated from high school here in lovely Cypress, Texas and moved to Austin in 1988, I never once imagined I would once again be living in a slightly different house with the same furniture and the same people just over 20 years later. Or that the kindness my parents have shown this aging punk would come back to threaten the very existence they have worked so hard all their lives to build.
My parents aren't rich but they live comfortably and like things just so. Everyday spent with the butterfly called mayhem that is me is another test of my poor mother's sanity and crappy threatening phone calls from student loan companies aren't helping.
But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.
When I moved to Austin to attend UT, the money I made over the summer was enough to pay for fall and spring semesters, which ran around $450 a pop. When I went back in the spring of '06, it was $4500 a pop. And rent had gone up proportionately.
Why go back? Well, being a kid who'd never really been out on his own before, I did horribly in school. I was on academic suspension by the time I was 20. But rather than return to suburban Houston with my tail between my legs, I got a job and continued doing what I was doing: pretending to be a rock star. That I was good at. Actually being a musician, not so much. Oh, sure, I played a bunch of shows, went on a few tours, met some people I still know and others I'm glad I don't. But I was never going to make a living at it. It just took me a while to realize it.
One thing I did learn in those first four failed semesters of college was that I had a talent for writing. Some friends had pulled me into writing for my high school newspaper, but it was at The Daily Texan where I really found encouragement and some "veterans" to show me some ropes. Not that I really used it. I shot every big opportunity square in the face, usually through alcohol-fueled manic behavior.
After a failed marriage that forced me to re-evaluate and settle the hell down a bit, I found some stability in a management position in a smallish Austin business. Soon after that, a small rock and roll mag sprung up from the Red River scene, a street perpendicular to the party central of 6th street that actually encouraged original and diverse forms of alternative music, primarily metal and jazz.
The magazine was called Rank and Revue and it was a rag. Poorly written for the most part and the good stuff was usually a Thompson-esque recap of how fucked up the writer got over the evening disguised as a live rock and roll show review. So of course I heard the Siren call and knew I had to be involved.
I knew, if peripherally, quite a few of the people involved, or it was a friend of a friend thing and we all liked to drink, so I fit in pretty well (which is a rarity for me). I also brought with me at least a collegiate sense of journalistic decor, and amazingly people actually listened to me. It was going along great but being the rock and roll lifestyle loving, fey, whimsical creatures that we were, we could not turn a buck. And there I was, yet again, working a day job while whooping it up at night. But the whooping it up led to something: a magazine. And I thought we were pretty good at doing, it we just couldn't get it to show a profit.
(cue violins softly)
Enter Houston's Joe Claytor and Lila Lieberman. They had run a few mildly successful magazines down here and were looking to get involved in one in Austin. They brought a lot of good things to the table, some of felt. Things like organizational skills, business sense and experience actually putting out a damn magazine. Others felt threatened or that they would lose control or I don't know what, but they split and became another magazine called Whoopsy. That magazine is still around.
Anyway, it looked like things were going great, Joe, a long time buddy and workmate of his Anthony and I had just rented a place together, it was going to be the nerve center for what would eventually be an at least Texas-wide source of entertainment news and other crazy bullshit, creativity was tossed around like confetti on New Years and then Joe was killed in a car accident. So now, the grieving ones are left to do the job of the only person who actually knew what the hell he was doing.
Some of you may be saying the above is included only to elicit sympathy. Perhaps partially, that really sucked, but it is really there to illustrate the dire circumstances that led me back to academia with the dream that it would get me where I wanted to be in the "real world." Bwahahahahahahahahahahahah!
That's when I made the decision to go back to school. It was amazingly easy to re-enroll and the government was great with those FAFSA loans, but how was I going to live, I will admit here, that I could have probably worked, but my plan was to school and freelance without having to report to a job 3-4 times a week. That didn't really work out so well, and so loans were in order so I could, you know, eat and have a roof over my head. And Internet.
But with my credit, how the hell was I going to secure loans? Enter mom and dad and dad's co-signature on some loans from a bank I will not yet mention.
Well, to wrap it up (yeah, I know, whew!) I graduated with a journalism degree (not the brightest field to go into considering the state of the print industry this century but it made sense at the time) in December of 2008. Yup the end of 2008, when the economy went all kerflooey.
I didn't find a job for over a year, which already had me going into default (like I said, my parents ain't rich and I'll be damned they pay for that) but the payments are too high for me to make. The subsidized ones are no big deal - those are consolidated and income-based so it's manageable. It's the private loans that are the nuisance here.
I'm close to my wit's end here. I'm sick of tensing every time the damn phone rings. I want to have enough money to have a regular social life. And I want my poor old parents to quit stressing. They're older and neither are in the best of shape (well, compared to many I guess they are - chalk it up to clean Mormon living).
I'm pretty much to the point of just getting a lawyer and figuring out a way for them to just garnish my wages or something. Or make my payments feasible with my current retail income.
So if anyone has info, advice, word of some part time writing work anything, please, please, please let me know.
This is just an introduction. I'll be back 3-4 times a week with statistics and rants. I know I'm not alone in this. Something needs to be done - you'd think banks would be a bit more humble these days.
My parents aren't rich but they live comfortably and like things just so. Everyday spent with the butterfly called mayhem that is me is another test of my poor mother's sanity and crappy threatening phone calls from student loan companies aren't helping.
But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.
When I moved to Austin to attend UT, the money I made over the summer was enough to pay for fall and spring semesters, which ran around $450 a pop. When I went back in the spring of '06, it was $4500 a pop. And rent had gone up proportionately.
Why go back? Well, being a kid who'd never really been out on his own before, I did horribly in school. I was on academic suspension by the time I was 20. But rather than return to suburban Houston with my tail between my legs, I got a job and continued doing what I was doing: pretending to be a rock star. That I was good at. Actually being a musician, not so much. Oh, sure, I played a bunch of shows, went on a few tours, met some people I still know and others I'm glad I don't. But I was never going to make a living at it. It just took me a while to realize it.
One thing I did learn in those first four failed semesters of college was that I had a talent for writing. Some friends had pulled me into writing for my high school newspaper, but it was at The Daily Texan where I really found encouragement and some "veterans" to show me some ropes. Not that I really used it. I shot every big opportunity square in the face, usually through alcohol-fueled manic behavior.
After a failed marriage that forced me to re-evaluate and settle the hell down a bit, I found some stability in a management position in a smallish Austin business. Soon after that, a small rock and roll mag sprung up from the Red River scene, a street perpendicular to the party central of 6th street that actually encouraged original and diverse forms of alternative music, primarily metal and jazz.
The magazine was called Rank and Revue and it was a rag. Poorly written for the most part and the good stuff was usually a Thompson-esque recap of how fucked up the writer got over the evening disguised as a live rock and roll show review. So of course I heard the Siren call and knew I had to be involved.
I knew, if peripherally, quite a few of the people involved, or it was a friend of a friend thing and we all liked to drink, so I fit in pretty well (which is a rarity for me). I also brought with me at least a collegiate sense of journalistic decor, and amazingly people actually listened to me. It was going along great but being the rock and roll lifestyle loving, fey, whimsical creatures that we were, we could not turn a buck. And there I was, yet again, working a day job while whooping it up at night. But the whooping it up led to something: a magazine. And I thought we were pretty good at doing, it we just couldn't get it to show a profit.
(cue violins softly)
Enter Houston's Joe Claytor and Lila Lieberman. They had run a few mildly successful magazines down here and were looking to get involved in one in Austin. They brought a lot of good things to the table, some of felt. Things like organizational skills, business sense and experience actually putting out a damn magazine. Others felt threatened or that they would lose control or I don't know what, but they split and became another magazine called Whoopsy. That magazine is still around.
Anyway, it looked like things were going great, Joe, a long time buddy and workmate of his Anthony and I had just rented a place together, it was going to be the nerve center for what would eventually be an at least Texas-wide source of entertainment news and other crazy bullshit, creativity was tossed around like confetti on New Years and then Joe was killed in a car accident. So now, the grieving ones are left to do the job of the only person who actually knew what the hell he was doing.
Some of you may be saying the above is included only to elicit sympathy. Perhaps partially, that really sucked, but it is really there to illustrate the dire circumstances that led me back to academia with the dream that it would get me where I wanted to be in the "real world." Bwahahahahahahahahahahahah!
That's when I made the decision to go back to school. It was amazingly easy to re-enroll and the government was great with those FAFSA loans, but how was I going to live, I will admit here, that I could have probably worked, but my plan was to school and freelance without having to report to a job 3-4 times a week. That didn't really work out so well, and so loans were in order so I could, you know, eat and have a roof over my head. And Internet.
But with my credit, how the hell was I going to secure loans? Enter mom and dad and dad's co-signature on some loans from a bank I will not yet mention.
Well, to wrap it up (yeah, I know, whew!) I graduated with a journalism degree (not the brightest field to go into considering the state of the print industry this century but it made sense at the time) in December of 2008. Yup the end of 2008, when the economy went all kerflooey.
I didn't find a job for over a year, which already had me going into default (like I said, my parents ain't rich and I'll be damned they pay for that) but the payments are too high for me to make. The subsidized ones are no big deal - those are consolidated and income-based so it's manageable. It's the private loans that are the nuisance here.
I'm close to my wit's end here. I'm sick of tensing every time the damn phone rings. I want to have enough money to have a regular social life. And I want my poor old parents to quit stressing. They're older and neither are in the best of shape (well, compared to many I guess they are - chalk it up to clean Mormon living).
I'm pretty much to the point of just getting a lawyer and figuring out a way for them to just garnish my wages or something. Or make my payments feasible with my current retail income.
So if anyone has info, advice, word of some part time writing work anything, please, please, please let me know.
This is just an introduction. I'll be back 3-4 times a week with statistics and rants. I know I'm not alone in this. Something needs to be done - you'd think banks would be a bit more humble these days.
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