Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs

I have always been a champion of the debt-free lifestyle.  I would tell myself that if I didn’t have the money in my bank account, I simply could not afford the item I wished to acquire.  Credit cards?  Sheesh.  Those are for crazy people that want to wallow in perpetual financial chains. I still don’t really know what an Annual Percentage Rate is.  The concept of a balance transfer is still lost on me (though I did just wikipedia Balance Transfer and it sounds pretty cool).  The last credit card I “owned” was promptly destroyed and canceled as soon as I paid it off.  You don’t own me, bank!

So one could imagine how much I grumbled when I was forced to accept that graduate school would throw me into an abyss of debt.  The whole concept of paying for two years of education for the next 25 is both ludicrous and daunting.  It doesn’t mollify my horror that everybody else in the United States has debt; I don’t want to have to worry about interest rates, principles, credit scores, etc and so on.  I don’t want any of it.

But I’m an adult.  Someday, I’ll buy a car that wasn’t manufactured the same year that George H.W. Bush left office.  Someday, I’ll take out a mortgage (or two) on a home.  Someday, I’ll have to put my kids through college.  And someday (this particular someday coming up in t-minus 3 months), I’ll be taking out 25 grand in loans to finance my education at the University of Washington.  So while I cringe when I buy a song on iTunes, lamenting the fact that I just made a $.99 purchase, I accepted my acceptance to UW with minimal hesitation.  It’s only a truckload of money, right?

All in the pursuit of librarianship.  See?  Only I can make borrowing books sound epic and sexy.  Well, me and Noah Wyle.

So Denver, this is my letter of resignation.  I’m giving you my two weeks’ notice two months in advance.  I’m moving to Seattle.