Posted on 3 Comments on Parable of the Breadsticks

Parable of the Breadsticks

Remember breadsticks? Back in the 1980s and into the 90s you’d be sitting in a restaurant, and it was almost always an Italian restaurant because anything that wasn’t Italian or Chinese or “Canadian” was unknown so you were afraid of it.

So you’re sitting there thinking about Reaganomics or Miami Vice, and you see a bunch of breadsticks sticking up out of a glass on the table. You grab one, and you eat it. And you think, wow, that’s some breadstick. I am living the good life, sitting here in a restaurant, munching on this breadstick.

That was then. Now you hardly ever go to restaurants because they’re too expensive. Plus you are sad and lonely. And one day you’re in the grocery store and you see a box with a picture of breadsticks on it. It’s a box of breadsticks! So you buy the box of breadsticks because you want to relive your glory days and this way you don’t have to worry about tipping.

You go home, and you pop some frozen thing into the microwave. While you’re waiting for it to get too hot to eat you tear open that box of breadsticks. You put them in a glass, standing up, just like in the restaurants of your youth. You grab a breadstick and you start to eat it.

What the Hell? What is this? It’s just a stick of old dry bread. It sucks. Fuck these breadsticks.

And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. When the meal is expensive and the breadsticks are free, the best part of the meal is the breadsticks. But when the meal is cheap and you have to pay for the breadsticks, the breadsticks suck.

Some people might call this a parable. Others might say it’s an allegory. I just call it shitty breadsticks.

Posted on 3 Comments on Welcome Back

Welcome Back

I have not added a post to the Blork Blog since February 2020. That post marked the end of eras, both in its announcement of the passing of The Mini, our loyal cat of almost 16 years, and also the end of the pre-COVID-19 era.

Future historians will look back in shock and amazement that I didn’t make a single post about COVID-19 during the three (or so) years of the pandemic. The smart ones will realize that I had no desire to add more noise to the very noisy din that was everything said, written, and sung about the pandemic. No, what we needed was less talk, since 99% of the talk was misinformed or flat-out disinformation. There was much noise and not enough signal. I am not qualified enough to provide useful signal, so I took it as a personal act of social responsibility to not add any noise.

Also: I was writing on Facebook, where’s it’s all noise anyway.

Loyal readers (of my Facebook) will know that I’m pretty much fed up with social media. Perhaps I will elaborate on that more one day, but let’s just say that I appreciate being able to keep in touch with friends and family who are far away in both space and time (since we’ve last seen each other) but all other aspects of that form have left me wanting less, not more.

I’ve long pondered a return to this blog, although the glory days of this form are long past and in many ways any writing here will be little more than shouting into an abyss. But that sure beats shouting into social media algorithms, so I’ll take it.

So here I am, today at least, making this re-introduction. I don’t know where this will go, if anywhere, and anyone reading this and my Facebook will likely see some overlap. So let’s turn the key and see if this thing still runs…

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Student Debt: The View from 1987

They’re talking about rising interest rates on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup tonight and some of the callers are talking about the burdens of paying down student loans. It reminded me of an article from MacLean’s Magazine from October 5, 1987, which featured yours truly as a freshly-minted graduate with a student debt problem.

The main point of the article, written by Mary McIver and James Careless, is that the cost of post-secondary education was very high, leading to financial hardships for indebted grads upon graduation. I don’t think this has changed. Unfortunately the title of the article is “The Artful Dodgers,” which is somewhat click-baity (even though there was nothing to click in 1987) and could be seen as as somewhat dog-whistley for those who opposed the student loan program.  The first two-thirds of the article focuses on people finding ways to dodge payments — primarily through declaring bankruptcy — although overall the article does a reasonable job of showing how those people arrived at that point.

Declaring bankruptcy is a last ditch solution for anyone in financial difficulty, and such action is rare among recent university graduates. But Fuller’s case underscores the problem that an increasing number of undergraduates will eventually have to face. With the high cost of tuition and other expenses, many students turn to Canada’s student loan programs for assistance. But when they graduate they often find themselves saddled with heavy debt at the starting point of their careers. The salaries they make in entry-level positions—if they find jobs at all—may cover such basics as food and shelter, but leave little for loan repayment.

I appear near the end of the article, as someone whose first payments are looming.

The numbers in this article seem low by today’s standards, but remember, these are 1987 dollars. However, the debt I owed — $16,000 — might as well have been a million at the time. (Not mentioned in the article was another $3000 I owed in loans outside of the student loan program.)

You can read the full article here in the MacLean’s archive. The bit that includes me is here:

But however controversial the student loan programs are, many students are grateful that they exist at all. One is Ed Hawco, who spent two years at the University College of Cape Breton and four years at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., borrowing increasing amounts every year through the Canada Student Loan Program. He now faces a debt of $16,000, with repayment terms of roughly $250 a month over a 9½-year period.

Hawco graduated with a BA in sociology and psychology in May, and his first payment is due in late November. But the 27-year-old, who recently moved to Montreal to take a job as a photographer’s assistant at $12,000 a year, said, “There’s no way I can meet that first payment, and I don’t know how I’m going to pay any back at all, at least for this year.” On the one hand, Hawco said, “it is frightening to graduate with a $16,000 debt.” But he added, “Thankfully the system is there, because otherwise I couldn’t have gone to university.”

I’m happy to report that I did not declare bankruptcy, although the first few years were very hard. I was able to defer payments for about another year if my memory serves me, but once I started making those payments they were as much as, or more, than my rent. This went on for years. It took at least another five years beyond graduation (and after the publication of this article) before I really found my feet career-wise (and thus, money-wise). I made my last student loan payment in 1997, ten years after graduating.

I was then, and I remain, grateful that the student loan program was there for me. I always resented people who wanted to shut it down or severely curtail it because of a few cases of people abusing the system or defaulting on their loans. My mantra has always been that this is simply the cost of having the system available for those who need it; that you cannot punish many deserving people because of the misdeeds of a few.

That said, many things can be done to make it easier to pay back the loans. First of all, recognition that it can take years out of school before some people obtain the financial footing they need to start paying off debts. The payments could also be tax deductible, which would help a little bit and would signal the government’s acknowledgement that education is an investment in the future of the country, not just the individual.

In my case, as hard as it was, I always tried to keep things in perspective. $16,000 at the time was about the price of a Pontiac Firebird Trans-am. Plenty of people my age in 1987 had Trans-ams. When things were bad I would remind myself that I could have spent that money on a goddamn car, or on six years of education. Which would give me the bigger return on investment (both financial and otherwise)? Right.