Skip to main content

I Know What's Good for Me

I was pretty sure when the government took almost all of my money last tax season, that I had paid my loans off, but last week I got a letter stating that I couldn't start the financial aid process because I was in default on one or more loans. Ugh.
My mom got the letter, read it to me over the phone, and subsequently tossed it--albeit accidentally--so I had to find out how to take care of it without any information directly in front of me. No internet, no working iPhone, no letter. Today, I finally got the time to look up the number and sit on the phone waiting for an operator. When he answered and I spouted off all of the information about me ever, he simply told me, "you're paid in full." What? No, they sent me a letter; told me I couldn't get aid; told me I was in default.
"Looks like you made a payment in February of (some amount in the 600s)."
Yeah, I thought so. You know, since I only got about $200 of that fairly large--for me--tax return.
He told me I do still have a balance...of $3.48. And they don't bug you to repay until it's over twenty. He thinks that could be why they told me I was in default, but I am not so sure. I am, instead, very skeptical that the defaults department and the people who shell out the money for Pell Grants are indeed on different pages. I am a pessimist. 
So, he is emailing me a letter saying I am NOT in default and he tells me this should take care of that. I just take it to the financial aid department at Tech and, voila, I have Pell. (Or do I?) Apparently the email can take a few days, so if I don't get it by Friday, I am finding their fax number and calling the government back.
If someone would just pay for this thing, life would be so much less complicated. How likely is that? Sigh.
So, other than the pending Pell money, I am almost all done with the paperwork portion of my enrollment in the surgical technology program. I have yet to get my immunizations all listed and my immunities proven, but that paperwork is with the pediatrician I saw basically all of my life. So, once they dig out my paper chart from the moldy, dusty boxes in some cellar somewhere, I should have that all filled out too. And then, like I SHOULD HAVE like, five years ago when I had to fill out the FIRST immunization form for a job, I will make a copy of the bitch and keep the original in my records. DUH.
Other than that, though, I just gotta work my ass off, both at my job and in this A&P class (if I take it and get a good grade, I don't have to take it at tech as part of my education in surgery, so that saves money and time).
I think I can handle that. It's the other million things I want to do before classes start that are going to be a problem. You know, the budgeting and the saving and the eating better and the exercising and the losing of the weight. All of those things, not as sure about. Absolutely I can work six days a week, twelve hours a day and barely shed a tear. But, ask me to budget my income or do a little cardio every day and life gets very hard. Like I say, I know what's good for me...

I'm Just No Good at What's Good

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I-5

On a chilly Sunday evening in mid-January, two young women rolled up to the TransAmerica Title Building on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, just off Interstate 5, to clean the office. It was their usual Sunday job, though today they had gotten a bit of a late start, having to shower and stop for gas, so they didn't arrive to the business complex until after nine p.m. The office had wide, welcoming windows on every wall and, with the bright florescent lights flipped on, the effect was to create a fishbowl-like scene, the women bustling around in their duties like two busy, little fish. They'd left the door unlocked and entertained themselves by chatting to each other, the two of them best friends. They were Shari Hull, twenty-years-old and the daughter of the owner of the housekeeping company with which they were both employed, and Beth Wilmot, also twenty and a fairly recent transplant to Salem from Spokane, Washington. She'd come for work, and along with steady pay, she...
2 comments
Read more

By the Barrel of a Silver Gun (I-5 Part Two)

In early February of 1981, authorities from Salem flew down the Interstate 5 corridor and assembled with detectives and law officials from northern California and southern Oregon. Each detective had a crime, or two, in their jurisdiction matching a particular modus operandi , and the list of incidents just kept growing. When they gathered, they had no idea the scope of the mystery they were unraveling or just far it was going to reach. It started with a robbery. On December 9, 1980, in Vancouver, Washington, a gas station was held up at gun point, the female attendant left alone in the store. A man entered wearing a brown coat and a fake beard. He demanded cash and brandished a small, silver gun to prove he was serious. The cashier obliged.  A few days later, in Eugene, Oregon, on December thirteenth, a Baskin-Robbins was robbed by a man holding a silver gun and wearing a fake beard and a band aid across his nose.  In Albany, Oregon, a drive-in was hit on Dec...
2 comments
Read more

Wah Mee Massacre

On a chilly February night, five days after the start of the Chinese New Year, 1983, three young men walked into one of the most renowned, high-stakes gambling dens in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown International District and walked away with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets and fourteen lives hanging in the balance in their wake.  The club was the Wah Mee, a sixty-year-old casino and bar that catered exclusively to Chinese clientele and hosted the highest-stakes illegal gambling in the Pacific Northwest. The men were 22-year-old Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak, 20-year-old Benjamin Ng, and 25-year-old Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng.  Willie Mak was born in Kwangtung Province in mainland China and immigrated to the US with his family in 1975 when he was fifteen. By 22, Willie was a high school drop out, working various jobs in and around Seattle, and had a penchant for gambling. He was well-known in the International District gambling clubs, including the Wah Me...
2 comments
Read more