I’m not watching youth hockey on a Friday night, YOU’RE watching youth hockey on a Friday night!
Jesus Christ you annoying little shits STOP TOUCHING EACH OTHER
Teenage boys need to be sent to an island, far away from everyone else, and not released until …
… hell, just not released. Send all the teenage boys to an island. Far away from me. Forever. I have been a middle school teacher for a very long time and this is the most exhausting spring in my memory. I’m going to bed.
Consider this a preview, I guess
Yes, I know I haven’t reviewed the Pearl Jam album yet.
I fucking love it. I’ve been sitting on writing about it to see if the shine wears off and it hasn’t. This is their best album in a long, long time– definitely since Avocado and probably before that.
But I’ve been shaky and nauseous since I got home this afternoon after a day of feeling fine, and we’re still doing state testing tomorrow so I absolutely cannot miss work under any circumstances, so I’m probably going to go to bed obscenely early tonight. I’ll try and get a fuller review tomorrow, but if you’ve ever enjoyed a Pearl Jam album, you need to download this one right the hell now.
#REVIEW: The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, by Taylor Swift
It’s boring.
There, I said it.
I could make this post a lot more complicated and detailed if I wanted to, I suppose. I have had a lot of thoughts about Taylor Swift over the years, and I am fully aware that Ms. Swift has no reason to care in even a hypothetical sense about what I think. She’s a billionaire and she’s more talented and influential than I will ever be at anything and I’m not the target audience for this anyway. I have had many, many opinions about her over the years; I still never really thought disappointment was going to be one of them. One of her greatest talents is how incredibly ear wormy her music is. I don’t care if you’re a Taylor Swift fan or not; you have five of her songs memorized. You may not even know you have five Taylor Swift songs memorized, but you do.
I have listened to this album at least four or five times by now, and I could name a couple of individual lyrics over its 31 tracks, but none because I thought they were clever or impressive. I was psyched about her doing a duet with Post Malone; he’s wasted. There are people mad at her about a line about living in the 1830s that is utterly a nothingburger and is out of context besides. There’s another line in another song that I thought was memorable until I realized that Justin Bieber of all fucking people had already written it. There’s one song where she says fuck, like, sixty times, but I can’t remember the name.
Four listens and I can’t hum a single track and there’s nothing I can even start singing along to even if I was capable of matching the slow, breathy voice she’s using for every single song. The whole thing sounds incredibly samey and there’s little variation in tone or tempo or musicality anywhere.
Also: ma’am, you are in your mid-thirties and it is time to stop singing about high school.
I dunno. I genuinely loved Evermore and Folklore and Midnights was pretty OK with a few tracks I really liked. This one’s a dud for me musically, and lyrically it’s yet another Taylor Swift Has Ex-Boyfriends album after three in a row with very little of that type of content.
I take no pleasure in this, but blech.
Taking the night off
I have managed to set it up so that I have no lesson planning to do this week, and no photocopying to do in the morning, which means I came home and died on the couch, and now I want to go die on the couch some more. Go hug somebody.
My Boomer moment
My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)
This should have been easy.
I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.
We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?
The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.
And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.
What the fuck, Best Buy.
(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.
In which Taylor Swift did it again
I pre-ordered Midnights, Taylor Swift’s last studio album, only to discover when I got up on release day that she’d released a previously-unannounced deluxe “3 AM” edition with several extra tracks three fucking hours after the base version of the album released. She waited three hours and then released an entire new version of the album while I have to assume the vast majority of the people who had preordered were still fucking asleep and hadn’t had time to even listen to Midnights yet.
When The Tortured Poets Department got announced, with a pre-order available, although you could, if you wanted to, spend $1.99 to download something or another that was eight seconds long, I decided there were probably going to be shenanigans afoot again and decided not to pre-order the thing this time. It didn’t look like she was releasing any singles anyway, and she didn’t.
iTunes insisted that the thing was coming out on the 21st, so I was a little surprised when my wife let me know yesterday that it was out already. And that I’d been exactly right– Taylor had pulled the exact same bullshit move again, only worse— that now the new version was a fucking double album, and was clearly the version that she intended to release, for a dollar more than the original pre-order price, and a different cover, and yep, you can still order the original, half-length version if you want to … and every single person who pre-ordered it got the inferior version, because no fucker anywhere knew the “Anthology” version even existed prior to it being released a few hours after the fake-out version.
I have come around on her music after many years of loathing her, but holy shit, is this a bullshit move, and the people it’s hurting the most are her biggest fans. I can’t believe I’m not hearing more about it; maybe it’s a function of the fact that most people stream nowadays. I don’t know what proportion of her fanbase is still buying digital music rather than streaming it. One way or another, I feel like she– and by definition, Apple, as well as whoever else might have been involved in this– owes her fans either a fucking way to get a refund or a way to buy the extra tracks for a dollar. This is an absolute fucking asshole move.
Never, ever, pre-order a Taylor Swift album, kids.
(I haven’t listened to it yet, by the way. The new Pearl Jam album is, after four more listens in addition to the two in the theater, absolutely fucking phenomenal, and it’s absorbed my attention. I’ll give it a spin this weekend sometime.)
In which I am free
I was really hoping for a more dramatic picture.
Sometime in February of 2020– I could have sworn I posted about it, but hell if I can find it– I applied for a $30,000, six-year personal loan through Discover. I used the funds to pay off about 90% or so of my credit cards– so, to be clear, someone handed me thirty grand and that wasn’t enough money to pay off all of my credit cards. The payments on the loan were considerably less than the combined payments on the cards, by around $300 a month, if I remember correctly.
In September of 2021, I got that last piece of credit card debt paid off, giving me a $0 credit card balance for the first time since my freshman year of college. It probably put around $150-200 a month back into my pocket.
Two years later, aided by that extra $300 and a few stimulus payments from the government that I didn’t need because I’d been able to keep my job and work from home, I paid off my car, a full year early. Another $237 a month went back into my pocket.
On May 9th, 2022, my student loans– nearly $70,000 worth– were forgiven through the Biden administration’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Another $545 a month went back into my pocket. I started paying a thousand dollars a month, sometimes more if I could afford it, on the personal loan, which had a monthly payment of $607. The entire time I was paying off the loan, I never made a single payment for just the amount that was due.
I have been watching a little bar crawl across the screen of my phone over the last four years as that personal loan got slowly whittled down. Last Saturday, I made my final payment of $756, and then reloaded the app about a dozen times an hour for the next few days, waiting for it to update and show me that the loan was 100% paid off. I was looking forward to the screenshot.
Turns out when you pay off a personal loan, which I did almost two full years early, they just … close the account, which feels kind of anticlimactic.
Other than a small installment loan through Apple that I will pay off on the paycheck after next, my mortgage, and a home equity loan that we used to remodel the bathroom– and to be honest, for some reason I don’t even feel like the home loans count, I am now completely debt-free.
No student loans.
No credit cards.
No personal loans.
No car payment.
A thousand bucks a month now back in my pocket.
If I was a Republican, I’d already be writing my personal finance book, talking about how my good financial decisions and iron self-control led me to shake off a lifetime of bad habits and Get Out of Debt.
That is not what happened.
The fact is I’ve been incredibly lucky.
I was lucky enough to be back in education when Covid hit. If I’d still been a furniture salesman, I’d have been fucked.
I was lucky enough to be married to someone who both handles her money better and makes more than me, so I wasn’t trying to pay for my entire household on my salary and could devote large chunks of it to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that the government sent me Covid relief checks that I didn’t really need and could devote to debt relief.
I was lucky enough to qualify for President Biden’s improvements to the PSLF program, which I had tried to take advantage of several times before and hadn’t been able to for one reason or another.
I was lucky enough to have a good-paying union job that provided me with a steady paycheck and yearly raises that, for the most part, I also didn’t really need, and lucky enough to get hired by a higher-paying district when I left South Bend schools. Most of that extra money went to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that my family has largely avoided any sort of financial crises over the past four years– no sudden illnesses or injuries, no major accidents, no natural disasters, fires, thefts, or anything else that could have suddenly laid claim to who knows how much of my money. One bad car accident and I could be millions of dollars deep into medical debt instead of being practically free of it.
I have been very, very lucky. And while I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m never using a credit card again– they’re fucking useful, that’s why they exist– I’m hoping to never have to dig myself out of that hole again.
But one way or another, this week, I’m celebrating. Celebrating, and trying my damnedest to not run out like an idiot and spend myself right back into a hole again. I’m not buying a car until the boy turns 16 and gets his license, and provided that nothing stupid has happened in the meantime, he’ll inherit my current car at that time. So I’ve got four years– three and a half, really– to take that surplus and invest the shit out of it. If I stay lucky, the market will continue on its current trajectory, and maybe I’ll get to retire before I die.
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