quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

by "good" i mean "slowly-dying and yet somehow attractive to graduates of our countrys best universities lol"

I see what you did there

the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"

she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf

my career counselor was a MFA and published poet

made me feel psyched about pursuing a career as a writer ;_;

if you write good poetry and get published...you too can become a career counselor to undergrads

he has a job = success

one of my grad school classmates left his editing job to come here and says he writes poetry in one of his boring classes. found out today he edited a novel i read last year that made a big impression on me. i don't understand why he left his job!

And the novel was?

the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"

she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf

― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:39 (57 minutes ago)

Then she was taking her own advice - she enjoyed drinking and got paid to do it.

This one gets double points for also belonging in the "White People who May Be In Danger" thread:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/in-school-in-debt-and-asking-for-help/

he comes off OK compared to most ny times rich people article subjects

but damn

$100k in loans for a jschool degree

i wonder how much of that is tuition & fees expense, and how much is cost of living though.

how much can the tuition & fees cost? $40k?

i think NYU cost $20k a year when I was applying to college in 1991.

people need to do a little math before grad school ffs

What Velko said. I remain glad as hell I was lucky enough to attend on fellowship.

(Not to NYU, but grad school nonetheless.)

I went to Cheap State University for grad school and paid $900 semester

yeah, i went cheapo for grad school, my relatively small 10k undergrad student loan was burdensome enough for me

solidly middle-class and went to oberlin. and no, i cannot throw a rock without hitting some Obie in the head. however, i tend to like this, as that means we can go get drunk.

i ended up with $6000 of student loans from grad school for the semester I did my thesis (that I'd been putting off for 3 1/2 years) so I could afford not to have a job. I think tuition had gone up to $1300/semester by that point. But the majority of the loans were for cost of living, which was budgeted at far higher than it cost me to live.

table: there is an Obie that occasionally makes me want to throw rocks at his head.

I sure wish cheapo state grad school was still $900 a semester

I just checked the current fee schedule for where I went to grad school, and the costs have doubled in the six years since my last semester!

from that article's comments:

This article is very reminiscent of the student who slept in the NYU library because he “couldn’t afford the dorms.” NYU went ahead and gave him a dorm room that year after all the publicity. I remember because I was an undergraduate student at NYU at that time. And it made me angry. I had to take out loans and pay for my dorm but because that kid made the papers, he got his for free. This is going to happen again. I bet NYU will give him a meal plan after this. I wonder if he contacted the times (note he is a journalism major) or if they magically found out that he was applying for food stamps in booklyn….
Education costs money. We all have crazy loans from school (I am in grad school and am up to $200,000). This kid should have gone to state school if he wasnt willing to take out the money required for a private education.

— Elizabeth

I love how it starts off w/ the "I'm the voice of reason" tone and then ends with "oh and I have $200,000 in debt"

FWIW, I have known people who clearly thought it was cool that they were getting food stamps.

oh i know plenty, too, sarahel. if i see j0n pf3ffer again someday, i will punch that fucker in the gut.

ha ha ha! That's the dude from the band, Capi11ary Act1on, right? I think I know someone else who has similar feelings about him.

yeah, that's him. god, what an awful, smug, self-satisfied douche.

the dude I want to throw rocks at who went to Oberlin - similar kind of guy, though sometimes he can be okay - it's just his posts to this other message board/listserv I'm on is just the lethal combination of precocious youth + long-windedness + self-absorbtion + idiosyncratic word coinages and abbreviations. It's probably a very good thing that it's text only.

yeah I can't imagine what his animated gifs would be like

haaa

FWIW, I have known people who clearly thought it was cool that they were getting food stamps.

There was a couple in my wife's grad program who were doing this, it was really weird - everyone there had a teaching fellowship so the guy was covered, and his wife had at least a part time job teaching classes, all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in. They were like weird southern hippie christians and were really proud that they were getting food stamps, like it was stupid for anyone not to do that.

Me and my wife lived for a full year on just her TA money and it was tight but wasn't that hard at all.

xp - ha, more like, he avoided humiliation via image bombing.

I bet they'd be way too large

all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in.

Yeah, that makes a big difference.

food stamps are awesome tho: they get u food

tbh when i first dropped out of school and was working for %7/hr at barnes & noble i thought about going on food stamps.

I'll come out of the closet as an ex-middle class person getting food stamps right now. I'm broke-broke and unemployed and it's a nice burden off my back to know that I eat more than ramen! anyone who is broke / barely getting by should be on them, as far as I'm concerned.

they give you way more money than you need tho, as a single person

which = I eat better than I ever did when I had money

so they give you more free food than you can eat and that is somehow not cool

a friend of mine is on them - and she was weirded out about applying for them at first - but yeah, she said the same thing about giving you way more than you need as a single person.

yeah it's $200 a month (in california at least) which is like...I dunno, you can eat very, very well on that

ive heard also if youre willing to pay somewhat of a premium u can also buy drugs or weapons w/them

haha actually they make you sign something that says you promise not to trade them for drugs or weapons

a rule that I have obv broken many times

its the sort of ingenuity this great nation was built on

but yeah the fact that people are so disgusted that poor, unemployed (including some white people! including some college grads!) can get $200 a month so they can eat decently...I dunno, it's just this very american 'I don't need the government to get by' attitude. don't we have better things to be disgusted about, like uh, the government giving billions of dollars to rich people? any transfer of gov't money to the bottom percentiles is a good thing, considering where that money woulda gone otherwise.

On Thursday, Mr. McLendon applied for food stamps in Brooklyn(...) And he is reluctant to tell his mother and stepfather, who can’t afford to help him, about his decision.

But he is totally OK with telling the NYT about it, because he'd rather have them find out when a family friend forwards them the article.