Big Scary College Bear

Umm, so hi, I didn't die. I just got lazy. Turns out that school motivates me to blog, so being out of school saps all my desire to vent angrily to the interwebs. But anyway, that's not what you're here for. You're here for a story! (Yay story time!) Well, this month I don't have a story. (Ohhh, no story time?) I have an extended metaphor because my boyfriend is an idiot. And I mean that in the most loving way possible. You see, it all started this afternoon when I cut a painfully large check for my parents. Writing it in blood could not have made the sum hurt more. Writing it in blood while being mauled by a lion might have made it hurt more; however, I'm not really willing to test that one. But those parameters can probably sum up the amount of money for you, depending on what you consider lion-maulingly painful. When I was trying to explain to my boyfriend why I was paying my parents a check written in my own life blood (which my mom would claim is technically hers to lay a claim on), it turned into me trying to explain how the whole college loans thing works. The man-boy can understand ancient politics, debug a 5 year old computer without a manual, and reads Voltaire for shits and giggles but for some reason he can't grasp the concept of staggeringly large amounts of debt three years from now, so after a half hour of banging my head against his proverbial wall, he asked me to explain it in really simple terms he can understand, like bears and cookies.

I don't understand why this blog keeps coming back to bears.

So picture this. Me, dressed for some reason in a black version of the Little Red Riding Hood costume because I'm an emo kid, skipping merrily through the Woods of Life. These woods are boring, and I've been walking for what seems like an eternity, but is in reality a small blip of time. I decide what I need to spice up my walk is a friend, preferably a very large scary predator because I'm a moron and all the other morons walking through the forrest tell me that large predator friends are a must. Something about protecting me from other walkers and their scary predators or a steady income or some other hooha that doesn't really fit cleanly in this metaphor. But these predators aren't going to just hang out with you. They'd much rather eat you, so you must bribe them for 4-8 years with cookies to keep them appeased. Well, running through the gambit of wolves, tigers, lions, bears, and Gary Busey, I realized I just don't and won't ever have enough cookies to get a really cool meat-eater, like a white bengal tiger with wings and a samurai sword.

So I settled with a pit bull. He was pretty boring, honestly, but he had a pretty moderate appetite, and he at least sounded scary in a "fuck, don't go over there to that meth lab, that pit bull has a taste for human flesh" kind of way. So I raided my cookie jar, that was significantly diminished by the Recession Ants that made off with a good chunk of my cookies, and my dad did some figuring. The Muffin Man of the Forrest (ok, this one is kind of random. He's the federal government) said, "Hey, you're young and that pit bill is probably going to eat you, so I'll bake you 8,000 cookies a year, and you can pay me back at an interest rate of 6.8% after he's sated and you've become friends in four years." My dad told me that was a good idea so that we could milk what was in my cookie jar, and he'd add a little out of his own cookie jar, and we'd all be happy. But a couple things happened with that pit bull. First, when you get a scary predator friend, you have to go where he wants until his appetite for either your blood or cookies is appeased. And this pit bull lived in a neighborhood far away from my home and full of crack houses. Second, and stemming from the first problem, the other people hanging out with that pit bull were negligent at best and maliciously sadistic at worst. The whole year I spent hanging out with that pit bull was the equivalent of having a squirrel chew through my neck - slow, painful, and scarring.

So I ditched the pit bull as fast as I could and decided to upgrade to a bigger predator that lived closer to home. I could have gone up to Boulder and hung out with a stoned buffalo, but he's neither scary nor particularly coherent 90% of the time and we didn't have any common interests, so I declined.  I could have hung out in Fort Collins with a... goat? I don't know, it's got horns and is most interested in the sciences. No thanks to that too. And then I met this bear. Oh my god, this bear. He's beautiful, and he's smart and we had so much to talk about! But... he's really fricken hungry and the Recession Ants were really mean to me. I thought there was no way I could possibly hang out with this bear without being eaten alive in the first month. But my dad, who is in reality a mystical voodoo money man and in this metaphor is a magician who can pull cookies out of trees at the expense of sacrificing a small animal, sat down and did his spooky math thing.

While I was convinced that the only way to make this work was to in-debit myself to the Muffin Man to the tune of 50,000 cookies in 4 years, my dad managed to lower to amount of money cookies I'll have to borrow down to 33,000 plus the 6.8%  interest. Now, this interest on the cookies is weird. Half the sum of cookies I borrow in a year, the interest starts ticking immediately although it doesn't have to be paid off immediately. The other half for that year doesn't begin accruing interest until after bear has decided it's no longer hungry for my flesh. And this happens every year. I could probably sit down and calculate each individual sum, but despite being an Econ major and the daughter of a Mystical Voodoo Money Man, the idea quite frankly makes my head spin. The other part of cutting down how much I'll have to borrow is that I have to bake (?) 5,000 cookies a year by myself to appease the bear, and my parents will wave a magic stick and hope to be able to cover the rest. And rather than have a million checks for paltry sums flying at the bear and confusing everyone involved, we pool it all in my dad's cookie jar and pay the bear out of one pot. Every. Single. Year.

So now that this probably makes sense, go back and replace "cookies" with "money" and I can start loving you again because you're smart.