(Ever notice how news announcers seem to say "An 'Istoric Event" instead of "A Historic Event"? Guess it's a weird relic of British pronunciation not to pronounce your Haitches and treat the first letter like a vowel...)
So the world is exploding (again), a pandemic is raging, politics are happening, Antarctica's sliding into the ocean...but I'm still allowed to celebrate one small victory.
On this day, June 12th, 2020, at 9:00 am EST, I paid off my student loan!
This albatross was hatched back in the murky days of 2006, in that weird period after 9/11 but before the Housing Crash of Aught Eight. The economy was going gangbusters, and I'd just graduated from High School, a fresh young proto-Rick who'd rolled a natural d20 in the Ambition department but a d1 in the Clue department. Because of my talent in art (and probably some backdoor-deal machinations between Howell High School and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which I only cottoned to much later), I got accepted to SAIC with an $8,000 scholarship.
Now. This was back in the days when middle-class parents were wont to co-sign on ungodly student loans because - all together now - "Getting into a good college means getting a good job." Although what kind of good job Art School would get you was a bit fuzzy. I'm not sure of all the details, but the original loan ticket was $29,290.00 at around 4.25%, with two disbursements of $14,645.00 - one on 09/25/2006 and the other on 01/09/2007. That was enough to send Proto-Rick tripping off to Chicago, where he lived in a wonderful dorm right in the middle of downtown, complete with a new Apple MacBook Pro and the starry-eyed prospect of infinite possibilities in a vast cityscape.
Long story short...I ended up spending only a year there. Never graduated, never got my Bachelor of Fine Arts. The way they had things set up, it was very "rich kid playground", at least to my mind - the professors were serious, but I don't know if the school was serious.
See, this was a "progressive school", so they let you have a choice between traditional grades and simple "Pass/Fail". Guess what I chose? Because Fuck Grades, right? I just went through four years of that shit - toss em out! But other schools, it seems, still go by a little thing called GPA, so my transcript read like a whole lot of nothing. I ended up enrolling in Lansing Community College and basically starting from scratch, remedial courses and all. It was like Chicago never happened.
But it had happened...it had $30,000 happened. That's the kind of number that doesn't really register until you have to pay it. Until you realize that you'll have to pay one thousand dollars thirty times over. Had I been able to pay in $500.00 from each paycheck, starting from the time I got back from Chicago, it would have taken me two and a half years to pay it back. Try doing that on minimum wage. Which is the only kind of job available to someone with a High School Diploma and one year of art school.
I paid on it off and on. I definitely relied on my parents a lot to get me through the next six years - they let me stay at home rent-free, and paid my tuition for LCC. I got an Associate degree in Graphic Design, and tried starting a career in printing - the closest I could get to an actual artist - but that was a shitshow: printing is a dying industry. I went from a little hellhole of a family-run digital printing company, to a larger 4-color shop which ended up shutting down after four months. I finally ended up applying to the machine shop in town, where they make car parts; ironically, it was working in one of the least-skilled jobs I've ever had that I managed to make headway on my loan. They were working us 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, at least 6 days a week (until the pandemic hit), and all that overtime was a godsend. In the ten months I've worked there, I managed to knock out almost $20,000 worth of debt.
So where does all that leave me? A puddle of resentment and regret? I don't know. I really have no idea how to process it. Living in Chicago was great, but that school...the practical side of me wishes I had buckled down and just gone to Community College in the first place. Then again, I wouldn't be who I am today, really, if I hadn't gone through the whole experience. So I won't regret what happened; life's too short for all that.
Coda
I remember stopping in Chicago back in 2013, on my way back from a trip out to Albuquerque. I didn't really have to be back in Lansing yet, so I decided to look up a buddy of Joe's so I could spend the night. Wandering out of Grand Central Station, I happened to find myself on Madison Street again. I headed east toward Millenium Park, till I found the corner of Madison and State. My dorm was in a tall white block they called the "Madison Building", the only structure to survive the Great Chicago Fire unscathed. It was all boarded up. The Great Recession must've hit SAIC pretty hard. I imagine that, when the shit hit the fan, even the richest parent thought twice about sending their child off to art school.
I tried the door; of course it was locked. I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. I remembered waking up in the morning to an inexplicable blue light on the white walls of my dorm room, somehow reflected from the many windows of the building across the street. I would sit with my coffee and enjoy the stillness, or maybe get dressed and march down to Millenium Park to watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan. Then as I walked back, the hustle of the city would hit a new gear. You could hear the thunder and squeak of the El overhead as it churned its way around the Loop and then off to parts unknown; the subterranean howls and strange air coming out of the subway entrances; the honking, the hollering, the bums shaking cups and singing, "Spare s'change". It was like the whole city was a vast organism, alive, pulsing, with veins and blood and respiration (its breath smelled like pee, naturally).
Even standing in front of the derelict building on a cold February evening, I could still feel that pulse. But I knew I couldn't live here again - that life was behind me. All I could do was visit. I triangulated my way back to the nearest El station, and took a couple of trains until I could link to the Brown Line, and headed out to Mexican Town to where Joe's friend lived, leaving the Madison building and my Chicago Year behind.
Rick Out.
So the world is exploding (again), a pandemic is raging, politics are happening, Antarctica's sliding into the ocean...but I'm still allowed to celebrate one small victory.
On this day, June 12th, 2020, at 9:00 am EST, I paid off my student loan!
This albatross was hatched back in the murky days of 2006, in that weird period after 9/11 but before the Housing Crash of Aught Eight. The economy was going gangbusters, and I'd just graduated from High School, a fresh young proto-Rick who'd rolled a natural d20 in the Ambition department but a d1 in the Clue department. Because of my talent in art (and probably some backdoor-deal machinations between Howell High School and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which I only cottoned to much later), I got accepted to SAIC with an $8,000 scholarship.
Now. This was back in the days when middle-class parents were wont to co-sign on ungodly student loans because - all together now - "Getting into a good college means getting a good job." Although what kind of good job Art School would get you was a bit fuzzy. I'm not sure of all the details, but the original loan ticket was $29,290.00 at around 4.25%, with two disbursements of $14,645.00 - one on 09/25/2006 and the other on 01/09/2007. That was enough to send Proto-Rick tripping off to Chicago, where he lived in a wonderful dorm right in the middle of downtown, complete with a new Apple MacBook Pro and the starry-eyed prospect of infinite possibilities in a vast cityscape.
Long story short...I ended up spending only a year there. Never graduated, never got my Bachelor of Fine Arts. The way they had things set up, it was very "rich kid playground", at least to my mind - the professors were serious, but I don't know if the school was serious.
See, this was a "progressive school", so they let you have a choice between traditional grades and simple "Pass/Fail". Guess what I chose? Because Fuck Grades, right? I just went through four years of that shit - toss em out! But other schools, it seems, still go by a little thing called GPA, so my transcript read like a whole lot of nothing. I ended up enrolling in Lansing Community College and basically starting from scratch, remedial courses and all. It was like Chicago never happened.
But it had happened...it had $30,000 happened. That's the kind of number that doesn't really register until you have to pay it. Until you realize that you'll have to pay one thousand dollars thirty times over. Had I been able to pay in $500.00 from each paycheck, starting from the time I got back from Chicago, it would have taken me two and a half years to pay it back. Try doing that on minimum wage. Which is the only kind of job available to someone with a High School Diploma and one year of art school.
I paid on it off and on. I definitely relied on my parents a lot to get me through the next six years - they let me stay at home rent-free, and paid my tuition for LCC. I got an Associate degree in Graphic Design, and tried starting a career in printing - the closest I could get to an actual artist - but that was a shitshow: printing is a dying industry. I went from a little hellhole of a family-run digital printing company, to a larger 4-color shop which ended up shutting down after four months. I finally ended up applying to the machine shop in town, where they make car parts; ironically, it was working in one of the least-skilled jobs I've ever had that I managed to make headway on my loan. They were working us 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, at least 6 days a week (until the pandemic hit), and all that overtime was a godsend. In the ten months I've worked there, I managed to knock out almost $20,000 worth of debt.
So where does all that leave me? A puddle of resentment and regret? I don't know. I really have no idea how to process it. Living in Chicago was great, but that school...the practical side of me wishes I had buckled down and just gone to Community College in the first place. Then again, I wouldn't be who I am today, really, if I hadn't gone through the whole experience. So I won't regret what happened; life's too short for all that.
Coda
I remember stopping in Chicago back in 2013, on my way back from a trip out to Albuquerque. I didn't really have to be back in Lansing yet, so I decided to look up a buddy of Joe's so I could spend the night. Wandering out of Grand Central Station, I happened to find myself on Madison Street again. I headed east toward Millenium Park, till I found the corner of Madison and State. My dorm was in a tall white block they called the "Madison Building", the only structure to survive the Great Chicago Fire unscathed. It was all boarded up. The Great Recession must've hit SAIC pretty hard. I imagine that, when the shit hit the fan, even the richest parent thought twice about sending their child off to art school.
I tried the door; of course it was locked. I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. I remembered waking up in the morning to an inexplicable blue light on the white walls of my dorm room, somehow reflected from the many windows of the building across the street. I would sit with my coffee and enjoy the stillness, or maybe get dressed and march down to Millenium Park to watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan. Then as I walked back, the hustle of the city would hit a new gear. You could hear the thunder and squeak of the El overhead as it churned its way around the Loop and then off to parts unknown; the subterranean howls and strange air coming out of the subway entrances; the honking, the hollering, the bums shaking cups and singing, "Spare s'change". It was like the whole city was a vast organism, alive, pulsing, with veins and blood and respiration (its breath smelled like pee, naturally).
Even standing in front of the derelict building on a cold February evening, I could still feel that pulse. But I knew I couldn't live here again - that life was behind me. All I could do was visit. I triangulated my way back to the nearest El station, and took a couple of trains until I could link to the Brown Line, and headed out to Mexican Town to where Joe's friend lived, leaving the Madison building and my Chicago Year behind.
Rick Out.
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