Another call from the jackals at Citibank almost sent me over the edge, pacing into the kitchen I said to the collections man "there is only so much anti-anxiety medication that I can take, and when I run out, there are seizures, and  there is the hospital, and they, they call me too, there are bills, and if I die, my blood will be on your hands."  

There was silence on the line.  I was shaking.  I realize that I must speak to my psychiatrist urgently about how to handle these collections calls, because they are sending me over the edge into a terrifying place.

"So do you think you'll be able to make a payment?"
"My blood.  Your hands.  I have to go."  I hung up.

Clearly this is not an appropriate way to speak to a bill collector, but I am at the end of my rope, here. If anyone is reading this, do not take out private student loans.  You can lose all of your limbs, or in my case lose your mind, and you will still be on the hook for the $17,000.

That was the last call of the day.  I took half an Ativan and went back to my usual activities.

It has been quite a day. This morning I spent some time on the phone withe a gentleman from Citibank, they call 5-6 times a day as I am about  to default on a private student loan.  Jackals.  As these loans are not discharged by disability, insanity, bankruptcy, only in my death will this loan be discharged.  I asked him what the results of default were, and he explained that the loan would be handed over to a shadowy guarantor, who would pay off Citibank and then go about getting the money from me themselves. 

It was at this point that I began to lose control.  Or perhaps to gain it, to ask the questions I had been wondering all along.  "So, is a man with an axe going to show  up at my door?  Are you involved with the mafia?  Will I get to keep my hands?  My feet?  My kidneys?  Do they still have debtors prisons? Workhouses? Will they actually take the pound of flesh?  Can I decide which pound?  Should I install a security system, of course, wait, i can't afford that...oh, I see, I thought I was being monitored for quite awhile now, I have been being investigated, haven't I.  Well, you know where to find me.  Can I at least decide which hand goes first?"
 "That's ludicrous"  The man on the phone said. "We don't take physical punishment as payment.
"Oh you don't, huh?  Oh, okay, so what's going to happen?"
"Well, first the guarantor will have to gain a judgment against you by suing you."
"You're going to sue a mentally ill, disabled woman.  You're angels."
"We'll, maybe they'll sue the cosigner."
"Even better.  Well, thanks for calling, I'll be sure to keep all this in mind."
I hung up.

They didn't call again for the rest of the day.  What blissful silence.  I spent the rest of the day filling in missing scenes in Chapter 9, the page count now around 210.

I think that this article from the Huffington Post sums it up rather well.

Forgive student loan debt to stimulate the economy? Fantastic idea.

That felt really good. Really good. I was looking back over this and realized that a few entries ago I was on bliss farm. It's called Ativan. It's a great medication. Every month I run out of it, and the real weight (I can't bring myself to say weight of the world, It's the CalArts talking) I don't know, I crash really badly and hear voices for a bit and get really cranky. This time I accidentally took too many when I was going to my grandmother's funeral, which involved a lot of extended parent time, including a 10 hour car ride with them on the way back home.

Here's a few others for the list, it's really satisfying to complain right now, and I'm awake, so why not. These are more trivial. They are also less obvious. Wow, that's obvious.

1. Blogs with ads all over the sidebars.

2. The fact that my mental health office is so overwhelmed that they have 400 people and two psychiatrists, so I see him for 10 minutes every 2-4 months. During which time he throws pills at me (thanks!!!) and is notably absent if they backfire.

3. The fact that I'm so overwhelmed by living (and the clutter in my apartment, which is getting really gross) and a number of other things that it's immobilizing, and instead I pop pills and complain.

4. Lights going out in my apartment. Wow, it's darker. And I wonder why I can't/don't read books anymore and instead read internettery obsessively.

5. I was thinking about all of this overwhelmed feeling, my difficulty with cleaning or sometimes leaving my apartment, and traced some of it back to my parent's impossibly high expectations of me. From youth through high school, I excelled, gifted program, lala, straight As, won awards, driven, all that, blew it out early, and then I went to college and had a nervous breakdown. All that schizophrenia and bipolar in the family, that has popped up all over since, came bursting out. Now, a decade later, I've actually accomplished some of the big things I wanted to do, but somehow for them it's not enough.

My father's father (schizophrenic) used to sit him on his knee and say, "don't end up like me, get an education, get ahead in life." And so he'll sit down and check off how many children of our generation have doctorates. It was his big dream to have his daughters get married, have kids, get PhDs, have great jobs, etc.. etc...

Well, I'm never going to do those things. There would be absolutely no point to me getting in more student loan debt. I'm fundamentally unemployable. I don't play well in groups. The economy is in free-fall. I barely made it through my masters. I'm done.

Anyway, he projects onto me his wishes and expectations for the life he wanted me to have, and he's a good and kind man and all that, but...it's so unrealistic. My mother, too, she's great, but she has this whole idea for how I was supposed to turn out, and I didn't. And they love reminding me of how I'm failing.

Anyway, Ativan is great. It really helped me get through that car ride. Thinking about my parents expectations is really depressing. I should probably save it for therapy. But wait...I'm not in therapy.

For some reason I've had a lot of trouble getting myself to sit down and write. Anything. To the point that I feel ridiculous calling myself a writer. It feels so pretentious, really, but it's a nicer catch-all identity than eccentric deadbeat who has given up on life and needs a kick in the ass to... to... do any number of things. Finally today I sat down and made a list of things that had been bothering me that felt so obvious they were not recognizable to someone.

WTF???

1. Obviously...Scientology is a creepy cult! I went walking in Hollywood today, and, like anywhere else in LA, there was a giant, ridiculously opulent Scientology building.

2. O...hai, i'z in yr list.

3. Obviously...private student loans, I'm the wrong person to prop up your collapsing economy, I have a degenerative brain disorder. I'm mentally ill. I don't know where that money is going to come from. This one because I realize now that it's become my hobby, getting mouthy and overly personal with student loan people, namely those that call about the ridiculously desperate private loan I took out to go to CalArts. The federal people, bless-em, have this wonderful ability to defer endlessly, but this bank...wow, you only have a year's deferment...wow, I have to fill out a form that explains how it's all going to change in a year...I owe you ungodly thousands of dollars...DEGENERATIVE BRAIN DISORDER!!! It makes me feel like one of those lonely elderly people that get all excited when someone calls them, and then get all chatty with the telemarketers. It's in fact, very much the same. But, in a sense, I don't know what else to say. This brings up all these issues of making bipolar disorder my identity...my mother would say "leaning on it." But, then again, I'm on disability, I'm living on a very tight budget right now, and, really, I feel amazingly lucky that I still have my apartment, I will live on crackers to keep it, but, WTF CITIBANK???

Oh, by the way, thanks for the amazing education. I now plan to sit on it and let my brain turn to slush.

4. Obviously...website + rats (does not equal) small business. It used to be amusing when I got these sales calls. It's not anymore. No, I don't want to promote my small business. No, my employees don't need anything. They eat birdseed. Okay.

5. Obviously...guy that chased us off that mall-ish courtyard by the Kodak theatre today. No, I'm not impressed by you sticking your face in the fountain. Please stop chasing me. This sort of shenanigans makes me so glad that I'm the sort of orderly mentally ill person that does not harass strangers on the street. Take away my funding and the vault of pills...might get there. I love making idle threats to the internet.

6. Obviously...Seagrams has all the gross vodka flavors. Wild grape? Espresso? (this is sort of like caffeinated Cisco...danger) Blackberry? Is Nyquil far behind? Did you play tennis with the guy from Smirnoff and lose?

7. Obviously...Tegretol is not helpful. I'm not making foolish manic decisions, but it's yet another Faustian bargain, of taking it before I go to bed and waking up in cold sweats of four foot tall cockroaches chasing me as I vomit sardines and wake up in a sweater dress caked with my own feces, only to wake up again and realize...yes, this happens every time I take it before bed... Or, alternately, taking it in the midafternoon and feeling like I've been lobotomized and being socially retarded for the rest of the evening, only to realize, well, it's an anticonvulsant, so if I go off of it, I'll have seizures. Fantastic.

8. Obviously...cockroach problem is not eliminated.