Blessed Economy

My wife is essentially a student—she's self-teaching so that she can get licensure to work in a specialized field, so as a result she isn't employed. In a good economy, that would be a problem. In the shitheap we live in now, though, my high-end-of-average paycheck ($1k every 2 weeks), we're doing quite well. We don't shop the good stores, but every time we see a liquidation sale, we march in with a fistful of bills and walk out sitting pretty. The missus has doubled her wardrobe, and I've been scooping up all the old games and software that people have been hawking, desperate for money. We've also gotten ourselves a new HDTV, one of those digital frame thingys, and we're moving into a much bigger and better apartment that (after incentives) will end up costing us hundreds less than where we're living now, since they're desperate to get tenants of any kind.

I feel guilty, to a certain degree. I really do feel like I'm profiting off of other people's mistakes. But then, isn't that how it should work? All those pretentious fucks I knew in college kept saying to me in their most condescending voices, "you're an idiot for renting an apartment. You're throwing your money away, not buying a house." Meanwhile, 80% of their house payments went to the bank, and the bank just blew the money on nothing, and then reneg'ed on their loan, and their house depreciated by more than they paid for it. That's not even considering all the money they spent on yard improvements, sewer lines, maintenance, and all the other stuff that's built in to a rental price, but they have to pay for themselves (which doesn't improve the value of their house).

All those fucktards kept chiding me for getting an English degree while they were out getting their MBAs. Then they got a lucrative job at Washington Mutual, while I devoted myself to being a big fish in a little pond, and now they're getting laid off because their company realized they provide no actual value to their employer, while my income has increased steadily and unwaveringly by 28% a year. And because I have practically no investments in high-risk stocks (all my money is in CDs and annuities), I haven't really lost any money in this economy. And once my wife does get her license, she'll be applying for jobs almost completely unopposed, because for all those snobby little assholes who were skating through med school with 'C' grades, their parents started questioning whether it was worth it paying 6 figures on an education that their kid clearly doesn't give a fuck about. So while the health industry itself is recession-proof, and riding a wave of support from a President who wants to amp up health care, there aren't any new doctors coming out of the college circuit, and the ones who are coming out don't know shit about the actual work, they just knew it was a high-paying enterprise. So as the hospitals try to keep costs down so they'll qualify for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy, they spend a lot more time looking at these alternative-certification doctors who really know their shit, and couldn't care less how much they spent on their education. As Keith Olbermann is fond of pointing out—the fact that he went to Cornell A&M just means he was paying $500 per class for his Cornell education instead of $3,000; the classes were all the same.

So you know what? I take it back. Fuck all you self-congratulatory blowhards. You were wrong—that's what happens when you get your life philosophy off the cover of Greedy Fucker magazine. I learned all my life lessons by living. You see, things make more sense when you find them by thinking things through.

P.S. See my new fiction blog, The New Republic, at http://web.me.com/bonwell.parker/The_New_Republic/Blog/Blog.html.