Student Loans

Maybe it's in part because I got my Escitalopram pill late yesterday. I had a great time in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum, but I'd been feeling ill-at-ease since dinner after. I went to bed early, but didn't sleep. Instead, Danae and I had just started watching a movie when I noticed a voice mail. It was from my student loan servicer saying that I'll have to start making payments soon.

I feel deeply that the government, and thus we as tax-paying citizens, have an obligation to make education attainable for anyone who wants it. I also feel a paradoxically opposed feeling that I've been taking advantage of the system. I want to pay taxes and support the important things that government does; I want to contribute to society. And now I've used government subsidized loans to attain an undergrad degree and I'm not in a position to pay those loans back.

I know that I can get them deferred through income-based repayment. The issue is an emotional one. After listening to the voicemail, I felt really bad about myself for numerous reasons. I've wasted all of that money, I told myself. I failed society by not making something of the education it provided me. I cheated the system by gaming an education out of it that I don't deserve. And more. Rational responses to this don't really help. It's another example of the disconnect between rationality and emotion I have in so many areas of my life. Rationally I don't feel like I did something wrong. Emotionally I feel like a horrible person.

As she's so often done, Danae let me sob on her for a while and helped me calm down. We watched the movie while she petted my hair and comforted me, then I slept until an hour or so ago. Sleep is good, today is a new day, and there are many more to come.

Thoughts of Ancient Babylon

The most amazing thing at the ROM for me was a wall panel mosaic from the ceremonial hall of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon.

A lot of the material at museums like that makes me sad. The simple vagueness of the context of some of the items point fingers at the 'gentlemen adventurers' who retrieved these things more as loot for national aggrandizement rather than as archaeological artifacts, heedless of the loss of the information embedded in their context. It makes me sad, and maybe that's a little of where my low mood came from yesterday.

At the same time, to stand in the presence of that panel was, for me, to feel a tangible, personal connection to the people and events of Mesopotamia 2500 years gone. More than that, as I stand and stare at it, I get lost in imagining the place it was once in; that Nebuchadnezzar too once stood and looked at this very same panel.

When Danae and I stopped at the Detroit Institute of Art on the way to Hamilton, we looked at a similar artifact there; a panel from the Ishtar Gate of the city of Babylon. I could have stood and stared at that panel for just as long a time, living briefly in my imagined vista of crowds of travelers passing in and out of the city, looking, awe-struck, at that very same panel. The ROM's panel, from the palace, with it's connection to the king and the court, feels very similar, but different too. More private, more connected to the king as an individual rather than the city and its commerce as a whole. I think I could look at either of them for hours at a time, lost in thought.