I have managed to set it up so that I have no lesson planning to do this week, and no photocopying to do in the morning, which means I came home and died on the couch, and now I want to go die on the couch some more. Go hug somebody.
Month: April 2024
My Boomer moment
My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)
This should have been easy.
I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.
We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?
The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.
And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.
What the fuck, Best Buy.
(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.
In which Taylor Swift did it again
I pre-ordered Midnights, Taylor Swift’s last studio album, only to discover when I got up on release day that she’d released a previously-unannounced deluxe “3 AM” edition with several extra tracks three fucking hours after the base version of the album released. She waited three hours and then released an entire new version of the album while I have to assume the vast majority of the people who had preordered were still fucking asleep and hadn’t had time to even listen to Midnights yet.
When The Tortured Poets Department got announced, with a pre-order available, although you could, if you wanted to, spend $1.99 to download something or another that was eight seconds long, I decided there were probably going to be shenanigans afoot again and decided not to pre-order the thing this time. It didn’t look like she was releasing any singles anyway, and she didn’t.
iTunes insisted that the thing was coming out on the 21st, so I was a little surprised when my wife let me know yesterday that it was out already. And that I’d been exactly right– Taylor had pulled the exact same bullshit move again, only worse— that now the new version was a fucking double album, and was clearly the version that she intended to release, for a dollar more than the original pre-order price, and a different cover, and yep, you can still order the original, half-length version if you want to … and every single person who pre-ordered it got the inferior version, because no fucker anywhere knew the “Anthology” version even existed prior to it being released a few hours after the fake-out version.
I have come around on her music after many years of loathing her, but holy shit, is this a bullshit move, and the people it’s hurting the most are her biggest fans. I can’t believe I’m not hearing more about it; maybe it’s a function of the fact that most people stream nowadays. I don’t know what proportion of her fanbase is still buying digital music rather than streaming it. One way or another, I feel like she– and by definition, Apple, as well as whoever else might have been involved in this– owes her fans either a fucking way to get a refund or a way to buy the extra tracks for a dollar. This is an absolute fucking asshole move.
Never, ever, pre-order a Taylor Swift album, kids.
(I haven’t listened to it yet, by the way. The new Pearl Jam album is, after four more listens in addition to the two in the theater, absolutely fucking phenomenal, and it’s absorbed my attention. I’ll give it a spin this weekend sometime.)
In which I am free
I was really hoping for a more dramatic picture.
Sometime in February of 2020– I could have sworn I posted about it, but hell if I can find it– I applied for a $30,000, six-year personal loan through Discover. I used the funds to pay off about 90% or so of my credit cards– so, to be clear, someone handed me thirty grand and that wasn’t enough money to pay off all of my credit cards. The payments on the loan were considerably less than the combined payments on the cards, by around $300 a month, if I remember correctly.
In September of 2021, I got that last piece of credit card debt paid off, giving me a $0 credit card balance for the first time since my freshman year of college. It probably put around $150-200 a month back into my pocket.
Two years later, aided by that extra $300 and a few stimulus payments from the government that I didn’t need because I’d been able to keep my job and work from home, I paid off my car, a full year early. Another $237 a month went back into my pocket.
On May 9th, 2022, my student loans– nearly $70,000 worth– were forgiven through the Biden administration’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Another $545 a month went back into my pocket. I started paying a thousand dollars a month, sometimes more if I could afford it, on the personal loan, which had a monthly payment of $607. The entire time I was paying off the loan, I never made a single payment for just the amount that was due.
I have been watching a little bar crawl across the screen of my phone over the last four years as that personal loan got slowly whittled down. Last Saturday, I made my final payment of $756, and then reloaded the app about a dozen times an hour for the next few days, waiting for it to update and show me that the loan was 100% paid off. I was looking forward to the screenshot.
Turns out when you pay off a personal loan, which I did almost two full years early, they just … close the account, which feels kind of anticlimactic.
Other than a small installment loan through Apple that I will pay off on the paycheck after next, my mortgage, and a home equity loan that we used to remodel the bathroom– and to be honest, for some reason I don’t even feel like the home loans count, I am now completely debt-free.
No student loans.
No credit cards.
No personal loans.
No car payment.
A thousand bucks a month now back in my pocket.
If I was a Republican, I’d already be writing my personal finance book, talking about how my good financial decisions and iron self-control led me to shake off a lifetime of bad habits and Get Out of Debt.
That is not what happened.
The fact is I’ve been incredibly lucky.
I was lucky enough to be back in education when Covid hit. If I’d still been a furniture salesman, I’d have been fucked.
I was lucky enough to be married to someone who both handles her money better and makes more than me, so I wasn’t trying to pay for my entire household on my salary and could devote large chunks of it to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that the government sent me Covid relief checks that I didn’t really need and could devote to debt relief.
I was lucky enough to qualify for President Biden’s improvements to the PSLF program, which I had tried to take advantage of several times before and hadn’t been able to for one reason or another.
I was lucky enough to have a good-paying union job that provided me with a steady paycheck and yearly raises that, for the most part, I also didn’t really need, and lucky enough to get hired by a higher-paying district when I left South Bend schools. Most of that extra money went to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that my family has largely avoided any sort of financial crises over the past four years– no sudden illnesses or injuries, no major accidents, no natural disasters, fires, thefts, or anything else that could have suddenly laid claim to who knows how much of my money. One bad car accident and I could be millions of dollars deep into medical debt instead of being practically free of it.
I have been very, very lucky. And while I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m never using a credit card again– they’re fucking useful, that’s why they exist– I’m hoping to never have to dig myself out of that hole again.
But one way or another, this week, I’m celebrating. Celebrating, and trying my damnedest to not run out like an idiot and spend myself right back into a hole again. I’m not buying a car until the boy turns 16 and gets his license, and provided that nothing stupid has happened in the meantime, he’ll inherit my current car at that time. So I’ve got four years– three and a half, really– to take that surplus and invest the shit out of it. If I stay lucky, the market will continue on its current trajectory, and maybe I’ll get to retire before I die.
Mean but true
My favorite moment at my kid’s Spring Concert tonight was realizing I recognized a piece of music they were playing, asking my watch to recognize it basically for no reason at all, and being greeted with an error screen I had never seen before– “No Music Detected.”
No Music Detected being tossed at me during a middle school band concert is a little on the nose for a smartwatch music app, don’t you think?
On the Theatrical Experience
It hit us sometime this week that we hadn’t even considered the idea that our son might want to join us at the Pearl Jam Dark Matter Theatrical Experience. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it got me briefly looking at tickets again, which entertained me greatly. Our showing, the sole one available when the email went out from Ten Club in the first place, was nearly sold out, with only a few stray seats available. Ironically, one of them ended up being next to us, so the boy would have had a place to sit while he was simultaneously bored out of his mind and paralyzed by loud.
At some point they’d added a second screening and not told anyone. That one was happening at 8:45 PM, and it had sold about eight seats, which entertained me, as it suggested that a) everyone who wanted seats had bought them for the first show, and b) the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are roughly my age, their late forties if not older, and had absolutely no interest in going to an 8:45 PM anything on a goddamned Tuesday.
I didn’t take the picture above– I snagged it from Reddit– but it gives you a pretty good idea of how the thing went. I am provisionally very happy with the album, more than I thought I’d be, and as a music lover the notion of sitting in the dark in a theater with a good sound system (critical, it turns out, and apparently some of the theaters weren’t well-chosen, but ours was fine) and listening to a new album by a band I love for the first time is pretty Goddamned appealing.
Unfortunately, the second listen, the one with the “mesmerizing visuals,” was a little half-assed. They put the lyrics on the screen, which was nice, as if you know PJ you’re already aware of how close to impossible Eddie can be to decipher on an early listen, but the visuals themselves basically amounted to a different high-res, movie-screen-sized screen saver for each song. They weren’t particularly thematically linked and they weren’t, like, in time with the music or reacting to it or anything. And for some reason the lyrics weren’t there for half of one of the later songs, for no clear reason. This appears to have been the print and not somehow the result of our theater, as there were other gripes about it on Reddit.
The point was the music, though, and again, I’m a big fan of the album. I’ll talk about it more once I’ve had a chance to listen to it at home– and, while I’m griping, it wouldn’t have killed them to put the name of the damn song up in the corner of the screen during the second listen, either– but it’s solid, and possibly their best work since Avocado. We’ll see.
Indispensable Pearl Jam songs
There’s a new Pearl Jam album out this week, and unless something has gone very wrong, by the time you see this I should be sitting in the dark with a bunch of other flannel-clad nineties dorks listening to it. They’re doing this limited-engagement one-night-only movie theater thing, where they play the album, which is called Dark Matter, in complete darkness, and then play it again with what they’re calling “mesmerizing visuals.” So by the time I get home, I’ll have heard it twice, and hopefully I won’t stink of weed or have a headache. We’ll see.
Pearl Jam has been my favorite band for a very, very long time. During that time I have formed Opinions. And I saw a Reddit thread the other day that was asking if you could only keep two tracks from each Pearl Jam album, which ones would they be?
None of you care, I know, and this will absolutely take longer to write than will be worth it– I’m starting it on Monday night– but it’ll be fun, and oh also I have no intention of sticking to two songs, so here we go:
TEN (1991)
Best Song: Black, my favorite song, period.
Indispensable Songs: Black, Jeremy, Alive, Release
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: This might be their only album I can name every song from.
Let’s be real: every song on Ten must be kept, but if you put a gun to my head, it’d have to be those four. I could maybe — maybe— do without Oceans. But I can’t.
Vs. (1993)
Best Song: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, my second-favorite song.
Indispensable Songs: EWBtCiaST, Animal, Daughter, WMA
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Go, because Pearl Jam also has Why Go and it messes with my head.
Vs. is another album that is burned into my head forever and I need damn near every song. I mean, maybe I could lose Glorified G in a pinch, or maybe Leash, but that’s about it.
Vitalogy (1994)
Best Song: Better Man
Indispensable Songs: Better Man, Nothingman, Whipping, Corduroy, Bugs
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Stupid Mop, which I swear to God and sunny Jesus was called Hey foxymophandlemama, it’s me on the original album release.
Fun fact: Vitalogy is actually my favorite Pearl Jam album. I walked across Bloomington at midnight to buy a copy of this album on release date and then stayed up to listen to it, pissing my roommate off to no end. I am literally the world’s biggest fan of the song Bugs. I love this album.
No Code (1996)
Best Song: In My Tree
Indispensable Songs: In My Tree, Red Mosquito, Off He Goes
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Red Mosquito
I didn’t like No Code the first time I heard it. I’m not sure what the hell I was thinking. I have every word of Red Mosquito memorized and I have no idea why I can never remember the damn song’s name. It’s literally in the first line. I’m not very bright sometimes.
Yield (1998)
Best Song: Wishlist
Indispensable Songs: Wishlist, Given to Fly, Low Light, All Those Yesterdays, Faithful
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Brain of J.
I was in the middle of a heavy hip-hop phase when Yield came out, so it’s one of the very few Pearl Jam albums I didn’t pick up immediately upon release. And it took a while for it to click, as did a lot of the middle-career Pearl Jam albums. But it’s got some amazing stuff on it, especially when played live and Eddie can never get the words to Wishlist right.
Binaural (2000)
Best Song: Nothing As It Seems
Indispensable Songs: Nothing As It Seems, Insignificance, Of the Girl, Parting Ways
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: n/a
Binaural is one of the few Pearl Jam albums where I’m known to skip tracks, mostly because most of my favorite songs on this one are better live so honestly I don’t listen to it very often. I think it might be my least favorite of their studio albums, which doesn’t mean I don’t like it (I listened to it today on the way home from work, in fact) but something has to be my least favorite album.
Riot Act (2002)
Best Song: Love Boat Captain
Indispensable Songs: Love Boat Captain, I am Mine, All or None, Cropduster
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Absolutely fucking Cropduster.
Love Boat Captain was our song at our wedding, and was quoted in the program: Hold me, and make it the truth/ That when all is lost, there will be you. This entire album is indispensable.
Fun fact: I’ve spelled indispensable wrong every single time I’ve typed it in this post, including that time, where I accidentally put an “e” after the “d.”
Lost Dogs (2003)
Best Song: Down
Indispensable Songs: Down, Yellow Ledbetter, Hard to Imagine, Dead Man Walking, Last Kiss
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Drifting, because they also have a song called Drifting Away
Technically a two-disc collection of rarities and b-sides and not a true studio album, Lost Dogs is still a fantastic collection even if the ludicrous Gremmie Out of Control and Dirty Frank are on it.
Pearl Jam (2006)
Best Song: Oh god this is hard World Wide Suicide
Indispensable Songs: World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Gone, Come Back, Inside Job
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: None on this one
My god, I love this album. Affectionately known as the Avocado Album, I saw them at Lollapalooza while they were touring for this release, and I love it. I love it all. Absolutely the best of their post-nineties releases.
Backspacer (2009)
Best Song: Just Breathe
Indispensable Songs: Just Breathe, Unthought Known, Amongst the Waves
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Force of Nature
I also saw them on tour for this one, at Deer Creek. Backspacer has always felt like them stepping back and taking a breath after Avocado, but there’s definitely some good stuff on here. It’s super short at only 37 minutes, though, so there’s no way for it not to feel a little unimportant in comparison.
Lightning Bolt (2013)
Best Song: Sirens
Indispensable Songs: Sirens, Swallowed Whole, Sleeping By Myself, Yellow Moon, Future Days
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Swallowed Whole
I don’t give Lightning Bolt enough credit, I think, because it’s organized so oddly– all of the best songs are in the back half of the album, and other than Sirens I don’t really love any of the first six or seven tracks. That last third or so, though, is phenomenal.
Gigaton (2020)
Best Song: Dance of the Clairvoyants
Indispensable Songs: Dance of the Clairvoyants, Seven O’Clock, Comes Then Goes, River Cross
Best Song I Can Never Remember The Name Of: Seven O’Clock
I really love Gigaton, although I admit I don’t know it nearly as well as many of their other albums– probably because I’m not buying the concert bootlegs as fanatically as I used to and so I don’t have live recordings of any of the songs on it. Every time I listen to it I’m surprised at how good it is, which you’d think I’d have gotten over after four years. It’s not as lopsided as Lightning Bolt, either, so I really don’t have an excuse.
And there you have it. I’ll have heard Dark Matter by now, or at least be listening to it, and I am a big fan of the first two tracks, but we’ll see. The environment might have me come out raving about it or if it’s not as positive as I want it to be, it might hurt my opinion of the album. I can also imagine a world where I’m tired from work (ILEARN started today) and don’t really want to be out in public. I’m sure there will be a review of it soon one way or another.
#REVIEW: Silver Under Nightfall, by Rin Chupeco
Yes, that’s right, three book reviews in three days, although this one is going to be shorter. Rin Chupeco is kind of a known quantity around here; this is the … sixth? of their books that I’ve read, and I’ve enjoyed all of them and at least one or two have made my end-of-year list. And, honestly, Silver Under Nightfall sat on my unread shelf for long enough that by the time I picked it up to read it I’d forgotten what the hell it was about.
And, honestly, I may never have known what it was about– it’s possible that I just ordered the damn thing on reflex because of 1) that cover (my god, that cover) and 2) Rin Chupeco. Again, known quantity. I buy Rin Chupeco books. It’s a thing I do.
It’s, uh, about vampires? And a bisexual vampire hunter who falls in love with both members of an engaged outwardly-cishet vampire couple? And there is so, so much sex that I promise you is nowhere to be found in the Bible, and that’s three super queer books in a row now. And I’m sorry, but “vampire hunter who falls in love with some vampires” should absolutely have led to me putting this book down, never looking at it again, and quietly looking down on anyone who said good things about it. I’m tired of vampires. I’m tired of vampire books. I’m definitely tired of vampire books where the vampires are irresistible and fuck everything. At least there are no werewolves, I suppose? Yet?
Finished the fucker in a day. Reflected on just how different Chupeco’s writing style is in this book compared to everything else they’ve written. Looked up the sequel. Got mad that the sequel wasn’t available in paperback yet, since my copy of Silver is in paperback. Spent ninety fucking dollars on the absolutely fucking breathtaking Illumicrate editions, which will probably take so long to get here that the paperback will be out by then anyway.
I’m mad at myself. Go read it.
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