*A free guide to understanding credit*
Yeah... I just saw one of those 'understanding' credit commercials. What got me about this one was that the guy in the commercial said "I liked college. It was like there was a money tree and I kept shaking it and shaking it", and the commercial shows him using a credit card to make a whole bunch of purchases. Then they show him in the present day... looking distraught... "I wish I knew then what I know now." The point? He wishes he knew what credit card debt was all about. This will never fail to amuse, frustrate, and anger me. What he wished he knew is that when you BUY something with a CREDIT CARD you actually have to eventually PAY for it with MONEY. What a concept... money in exchange for goods and services! The fact that people don't understand what a credit card is will never fail to boggle my mind. But these people are far better than the people who know how credit cards work and don't care. Something Andrea said to me will ALWAYS stick in my head. We were talking about being in debt, and she said "There comes a point when you just have to say 'the well's empty, you can try to get water out of it if you want, but there's nothing there'." She was effectively saying that if someone comes after you because you're in debt to them (because you bought stuff you couldn't pay for), everything's cool if you don't have any money to pay them. Hell, maybe the big companies will forget you owe them money and move on. A person like this physically sickens me. Someone who irresponsibly gets away with getting things for free and there are no consequences. What bothers me is the injustice of it all. My inherited sense of justice is what pushes me towards law... and my observations of the constant injustice that is life (like the above) is what pushes me away. Here's a rule of thumb, kids, if you don't want to piss me off: If you have the cash in a bank account to buy it, you can use a credit card. If you don't... don't. Easy.

In other, completely unrelated news... I find myself day-dreaming more frequently and more intensely than I used to. It sometimes relates to what I'm doing and sometimes it has nothing to do with what's going on around me... but I'm literally sucked out of what's going on, and I start thinking about what could be or what should be. After the election I spent some time thinking about what I could do to make people listen to reason... and, in my mind, became an influential political force. Or I let my mind float to Las Vegas where Ken and I spend countless hours catching up on things and acting like brothers, while "saving the earth" from "alien forces"... or I'm at Adam's, thinking how Ken would fit right in if he were here. And so on, you get the drift. I don't know what this means, but I'm starting to think that I should just write down all my day-dreams (as I really don't ever remember my night-dreams). Maybe my creativity is back? Let's hope so.