Bankruptcy (Moral and Otherwise)

I'll start with the otherwise first. I looked at my account balance online last night (having long ago abandoned the practice of balancing it by hand - too depressing), and I realized that I am much closer to penniless than I had imagined. Hopefully I'll be able to mooch off of the BF for a little while longer; remember what I said a few posts ago about not being able to pay rent? Yeah, aint gonna happen. Which makes me feel very angry and cheated by society, and I'll tell you why.

When I went to a very expensive liberal arts college and took out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, everyone assured us innocent youngsters that we were NOT throwing our money away; we were going to be so competitive in the marketplace with a degree from this completely obscure private university that people would be falling all over themselves to hand us well-paying jobs when we graduated. So, like a fool, I believed these money-grubbing liars. To my dismay, I found when I graduated that in fact I had virtually no skills, other than the ability to explicate Alexander Pope, and that there was no reason in hell why any employer would want to hire me. So I took some crap jobs because I was raised with my parents' work ethic of 'Find a job, pay the bills. If you like your job, bully for you. If not, at least you can pay the bills.' Anyway, I kept on working crap jobs, trying to earn enough to make ends meet and rarely succeeding. Finally I realized I would need to get some real skills if I ever wanted to get out of the crap-job cycle. So I went back to school for my MLIS, and even though I went the cheapest possible route (Canada), I still ended up with enormous debt. Incidentally, I never was able to earn enough to start paying off those undergrad loans, and it sickens me to think about the interest accruing on those.

So here I am: 28 years old, buried under a thousand miles of student loan and credit card debt, with still no job and no real achievements to speak of. Meanwhile the credit card debt is mounting as I sit here unemployed. The reason I am angry is because a) I'm American, and therefore I believe I am entitled to every priviledge under the sun and b) I feel like the whole economic system of our society is engineered to make rich people richer and poor people poorer. When I graduated with my bachelor's, I couldn't afford to take a cherry unpaid internship or live off my parents until something better came along, and my parents didn't have any neat connections to help me get a good job. So how was I supposed to gain any real experience or skills? I had to take jobs that required no skills, no education. And now I am again in the same situation - my degree, while it is in essence a passport into the library profession, has still not afforded me any real skills or experience, reflected by the fact that I can't get arrested in this town, much less hired.

As Virginia Woolf once said, to make it as a writer you need to have a room of your own. Meaning not only that you need to have a physical space of your own in which you can be creative, but you need the financial capability of owning property large enough so that you can have a room of your own, as well as the money to live off so you have time to be creative and don't need to work for your survival. And I think this same message can be applied to success in general: to be successful, you must have the financial means to wait for the right opportunities. I simply do not have the time to wait.

Yes, I probably should not have been an English major. That was my first mistake. Anyway, I felt I had a point to make here, but I think I've done more bitching than point-making and now I'm all agitated, so I think I'll stop here. I was going to say some stuff about moral bankruptcy, but I'll save that for later.