Tuesday will be a good day.  It's a day of barbecuing, drinking, setting things on fire, and so on.  I think it should be a day of meditation about how far the United States has regressed, but I'd rather blow shit up anyway.

It's a good thing that today ended up being better.  If it hadn't, I don't know what might have happened.  So far, the bad mental health rut is generally past.  Somehow, I made it without smoking or drinking.  I deserve a cookie.

I finally finished the Team of Rivals book that took me nearly a month to complete.  Books don't take me a month.  Shit, I read Ulysses in three days back in high school.  Unfortunately, it is a fairly dense (though engaging) read which didn't gel well with my current habit of reading right before bed, when I'm already tired.  Finally, it's onto my book about Che.

Summer financial aid is (finally) coming Monday.  More that 90% of it is going to bills and living expenses, as it should.  A little bit, though, is going toward a fucking mandolin.  It's about fucking time I finally got one.  I've been trying for months.  I've got my eye on a Fender a-style with pickup.  I've played three different units of the same model -- they all play very well and have good enough sound for a beginner.  Of course, at this point I'm worried more about the play than the sound, because I am such a beginner.

Since I was off of work today, the thrill and excitement of my afternoon was to consolidate my student loans.  I had consolidated a year ago to "lock in" a 2.8% rate for the first (gulp) $54,000 I had borrowed while at Ball State.  Today, I consolidated the variable interest loan that I had taken for this year to lock in that interest rate at 3.8%.  With the help of the Internet, I completed this task in about three minutes.  What did we do before computers and such?

You may have heard on the news that rates on the variable interest loans are going up, hence my consolidation.  This is because the people running the government are horse's asses who don't care about education.  For that, they should be beaten severely.  Education is more important than 99.9% of the shit that the government pays for, and because of bad policy, graduates are getting out of school being already over their head. When the average person graduating with a bachelors degree faces $20,000 (or more) in debt before they get a job, that's a problem.  Soon, there will be no teachers or literate journalists (who arguably exist now with at least one exception I know of...) as those professions make too little to afford loan payments.

I'm going to be paying out the ass for the rest of my life.  Upon graduation, I'll be putting my loans on the 30-year plan, and they will essentially be another mortgage in size and monthly payment, but certainly equity free.  And this was the excitement of my day.  Can you believe that people do that (financial stuff) for a living?  Of course, no offense to those who do, but it's not my bag.

Suddenly makes my loans seem worthwhile.