What’s the point of the blog if it has not a theme, is sporadically updated, acts coy and withholding when it comes to intimate details?

I don’t know either. But you care, so I persevere, with vague promises of posting more, and my evident discomfort with really revealing everything is maddening even to me. But I think that anyone who really wants to get to the kernel of what is what with me should read/study/commit to memory the following mundane facts about my week.

1. I have yet another ingrown toenail. I’m suspecting it’s genetic. This one can’t be attributed to running shoes because I haven’t been running because either I’ve been working too much, it’s getting cold, or whenever I’m not working I think “Oh it’s too cold I’d rather crawl under the covers and think about work.” Suspicion: combination of the three.

2. I tore through Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, and now I’m slowly making my way through Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and pretending it’s the book version of Mad Men because I’m sad that the Mad Men season is over.

3. I remain enthralled by the Larry King video podcast and I don’t care who knows it. I watched Kid Rock. I watched Eric Clapton. I watched Jenny McCarthy for chrissakes. I don’t care who it is, if it’s Larry King and it’s on a 2×2″ screen, I am rapt.

4. I started watching The Wire. I never like to admit anything is too hard, but I am having a hard time understanding what the hell.

5. I went to a spelling bee. I felt I could have outspelled the pants off everyone there but that’s an ego thing. I pride myself on being a really good speller. I make typos sometimes and this is painful for me because I kind of think of myself as also a really good typist. And a show-off. I’m braggy.

6. I can’t dress for this shit. I mean, I know: LAYERS. But I hate any season that’s not summer.

7. I felt overwhelmed by malignant envy maybe 2 times this week. This is average for me.

8. I felt sorry for myself maybe 4 times this week. This is a lot for me.

9. I got a new gear shift on my 15-year-old bike that is a non-stop target for neighborhood vandals and man, gear-shift technology has really come a long way since I bought my twice-used Specialized Hard Rock Sport in 1992.

10. My new bike basket is not working out. It’s not attaching properly to the handlebars and it slowly or sometimes quickly starts to dump all my stuff into the street while I’m riding. I get a lot of compliments on it, however, so I’m thinking: who needs stuff? The surly guy at the bike shop even complimented me! Thanks, Jean!

11. I almost missed Halloween because I was holed up at Paragraph and then emerged at 2am and nearly got trampled on 14th Street by drunk revelers and I realized eh, Halloween, not my holiday. My holiday, for those who keep track of these things, is Bastille Day because it’s French and it’s in the summer. And it involves heads on poles. No, not for that reason.

12. I stood behind the so so so pregnant Drea DeMatteo at my pharmacy (or should I say “our pharmacy,” since it’s mine and Drea’s) and eavesdropped on her conversation but held myself back from chuckling along or making a calculatedly clever comment because in spite of the fact that we share a pharmacy and I found her black suede hobo bag with tassels that TOUCHED THE FLOOR remarkable, she is not my friend and I am not a starfucker.

13. Two friends’ bands are playing tonight and I want to go to both. I don’t like going to see bands but I happen to have a minimum of three friends who are in legitimately good bands.

14. I have connected with more random people from my past on Facebook than is healthy or seemingly necessary and it makes me nervous that my policy of being apparently personal but not divulging anything truly personal is going to start getting dicey.

15. I realized that when you interview someone for a story, they Google you. Sometimes you interview like 20 people and you see in your site logs that they all Googled you. I find this creepy and I think this is me just being ridiculous because I mean, everyone GoogleS everyone, and of course I’d Google a reporter who called me. I think Google etiquette involves not admitting you Googled someone, as one of my sources did and I got very “this call is coming from inside the house” scared.

16. I am nursing a very cautious crush.

17. Julie brought me a big bottle of 100% aloe vera and I drank the whole thing as the directions advised me, 2oz. twice a day, and I don’t know what it’s supposed to do but it hasn’t done it yet.

18. Don’t not return an email, especially a business email. Don’t not return a call unless you never want to hear from someone again. Never forget to thank people whom you ask for advice. Don’t take the advice and run. People are busy being important/famous/having ingrown toenails and they took the time to give you, a total stranger, advice via email. Say thanks.

Can I pause here and just say that about 9 months ago, in the throes of doing publicity for my book, a stranger emailed me for advice. I feel no compunction in revealing the details of the scenario because I think she acted abominably. She was trying to decide between the MFA programs at Columbia and NYU, both of which had accepted her, and an old professor of mine suggested she contact me. I gave her a whole boatload of advice, a thorough compare/contrast of NYU/Columbia, based on my experience at NYU and friends’ experiences teaching at/attending Columbia–even though I found her sort of supercilious and full of herself. I was in primo advice-giving mode at the time as I was touring-slash-doing a lot of interviews where I was being asked for my opinion a lot. But I tried to abide by my “all unsolicited advice is self-serving” motto and really help her. We should all be so lucky to have such “problems,” but anyone who ever really wanted to get into one of those programs knows that. Anyway, I never heard from her. And I’m kind of pissed about it. Because if there’s one thing I hate it’s people who don’t express gratitude. I’m old-fashioned: I like to send cards. I like to send gifts. I don’t want to appear entitled, even if I feel entitled. I’m showing off again. Anyway. It’s shitty not to thank someone.

It is also shitty to not RSVP to a party; it is shitty to work very, very closely with someone on their book and then not acknowledge its publication (more common than you’d think!), it’s a good idea to kiss someone’s ass just a tiny bit when you ask them for a big favor, but in a genuine way that shows that you respect them and their time. I’m getting ranty now. I forgive you all. But come on people. Be human. Be nice to each other. Acknowledge people. It’s not a zero-sum game. Even if I am totally winning.

19. I think I should turn this more positive. I like my new shoes. Even if they look a little Wednesday-Addams-ish.

20. I worked hard this week and think I will reward myself this weekend. This means I will go running for pleasure and not beat myself up for only doing half my normal distance because I’ve not been running in weeks. This sounds like a dumb reward but I tend to be extraordinarily hard on myself and I think I will try to give myself this gift. Oh who am I kidding. I’m going to get that Cole Haan bag.

From yesterday’s NYT, more atrocities on the student loan front.

Policy makers and regulators say that there are dangerous parallels between the private student loan and subprime mortgage markets. In both, there have been phenomenal profits, aggressive marketing and, until the recent credit market turmoil, a healthy appetite from Wall Street investors.

And, as was seen in the subprime market, many student loans that were made in the last couple of years are resetting at much higher rates.

– Reeling in the College Bound, New York Times

Oh good! Maybe your president* will now make a comment like this gem about indebted college grads whose federal loan rates, incidentally, have skyrocketed under his watch:

Hear that, graduates? It’s not the government’s job to bail you out for buying an education you couldn’t afford!

More on loans, credit surfing and other topics raised recently in the comments coming later this week, when I don’t have allergy-throat.

*Catherine taught me to call him “your president.” Because he’s certainly not mine.

So yesterday’s post about credit card debt vs. student loan debt was probably one of the least scintillating things I’ve ever written about. But it’s a major source of stress and financial outlay for trillions of people, so I took my theory to my financial analyst and he had a surprising response.

Sounds counterintuitive, but pay down your credit card first, as credit card debt is seen as “bad debt” in building your credit score, and long-term debt that is serviced on time is good.

Which would refute my theory that I should pay down my interest-accruing student loans before my non-interest-accruing credit card debt. I had suspected this might be the case. Credit cards are evil. Student loans are good. Even if they cost you more in the long run.

Which is why it would be batshit crazy to pay off student loans with a 0% credit card. You wouldn’t pay interest, but you would look like a credit risk to anyone interested in giving you credit (that means mortgage officers, loan officials of any stripe). A long-term loan that’s paid off slowly and steadily, like a student loan, doesn’t look as bad as a credit card balance. So forget what I said. I’m back to attacking the credit card debt. And you should too.

Comments/advice welcome.

You know as well as I do that Sallie Mae’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In The Book, I endorse locking in your student loans at the lowest rate possible, then paying off your credit card debt first, because if Sallie Mae is a flesh-eating bacteria, the credit card companies are the plague. Wait, the flesh-eating bacteria is sort of the modern-day equivalent of the plague. They all suck. You owe them money, they are charging you interest, they’re going to come and get you and roast you on a spit.

But usually you can get a low rate for the life of the loan with Sallie Mae (mine is 4.86%, since I consolidated in 2000, much lower than you can typically get now, due to some crap laws enacted in 2005/6) and credit cards typically charge high interest rates (think 19% or more). So if you’re in this typical situation, you pay the minimum on your student loans, and aggressively pay off the credit card.

However, your student loans aren’t always going to be giving you a lower interest rate than you can get from the evil credit cards. I have a credit card balance that, since I have impeccable credit, is living on a 0% interest rate credit card for one year. My student loans (which, not incidentally, are much larger than my credit card debt), are still earning interest at a rate of 4.86%. At the end of the year, I can “surf” the remainder of my credit card debt to a new 0% card. (NB: I don’t use any credit cards anymore besides American Express because I’m not buying things I can’t afford. I suggest you do the same.) But my student loans will be earning interest at a rate of 4.86% until 2018 without abatement. No one is going to offer me a lower rate. Certainly not that viper Sallie Mae. I could do something insane and put my student loans on a 0% credit card, but the monthly payment for that kind of credit card debt would be more than I could pay, and also much harder to surf to a new card at year’s end.

Which brings us to the obvious conclusion: Pay off the highest interest-rate loans first. In my case, that means pay off the student loans more aggressively than the credit card. Since my student loan principal dwarfs my credit card debt, I’m earning interest on an already large principal interest every month. Meanwhile, my relatively paltry credit card debt is earning no interest at all. Watch out, Sallie Mae. I’m not flattered that I’m so ahead in payments I don’t owe anything until Jan. 2008. You’ll be getting large-as-I-can-manage checks from me every month.

I’m going to investigate this further. Remember: the 0% interest credit card is only a good deal if you’re scrupulous about paying the minimum on time every month. And you have to leave ample time to surf to a new card at the end of the year or your 0% will turn instantly to some insanely high rate and you’ll find yourself exactly where the banks want you: in a whole bunch of bad, useless, idiot debt.

A compassionate but finally blistering review of The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts in Sunday’s NYT Book Review.

I have been curious about these “Mommy Wars,” if exhausted by the prospect of reading all the disciplinary tomes that have emerged on the topic of stay-at-home vs. go-back-to-work mothers. The issue seems to be coming to the fore as baby boomers approach retirement, look back on their lives, and feel they have something urgent to teach their daughters. Or this is the supposed rationalization for writing these “I did it my way, and my way is the only way” books about working/mothering.

I think most of these books are truly written as a means to shame women who made different choices from the books’ authors. It’s really all so tedious. If we got good, solid education on the women’s movement in school (which, if you’re me, you didn’t), if we were actually shown what our mothers’ generations worked for and fought for and what we stand to lose by not acknowledging and celebrating it and working to further it, we wouldn’t need such excoriating reminders from people like Leslie Bennetts and Linda Hirshman or the Dread Pirate Caitlin Flanagan. Why isn’t Betty Friedan required reading in high school history classes? Why do we learn about the civil rights movement but not the women’s movement? The issues of both “movements” are still on the table, they’re still present in our everyday conversations, in Supreme Court decisions, in our selection of presidential candidates, in our payscales and secret and not-so-secret prejudices. Why are we so grossly undereducated?

I recommend the book Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, whose font is way too small but whose content is a necessary and entertaining Women’s Lib 101.

Also Jennifer Baumgardner & Amy Richards’ Manifesta: Young Women Feminism and the Future and, of course, the Friedan classic.

From the final paragraph of Eugenie Allen’s review of The Feminine Mistake:

Bennetts is right to dread an exodus of accomplished women from the work force. But this book is so unwieldy, and so polarizing, that it is unlikely to convince many stay-at-home mothers to return to work — or to develop that backup plan. Friedan wrote with elegance, authority and empathy for the readers whose lives she hoped to change. Bennetts seems to have little but disdain for the women she is trying to reach. When I finished the book, I didn’t feel the need to give it to my daughters, as Tina Brown’s back-cover blurb urges. Instead, I dug up an old copy of “The Feminine Mystique.” I hear it’s really great for teenage girls.

I recently joined a new gym. It’s a lot fancier (read: cleaner) than any gym I’ve belonged to previously. I was sucked in because the place is across the street from my apartment, and I had been grousing about my old (read: dirtier) gym’s deficiencies (read: stink; read more closely: too far from my apartment) when I discovered that the clean brand-new gym across the street was on the last day of it’s so-low-you-can’t-afford-not-to-join summer sale. I took it as a sign.

Now I’ve done a bit of research on gym memberships, I know what I’m supposed to ask, I know that any sales rep who keeps exclaiming “the gym sells itself!” when taking you on a tour is hilariously full of it, but still I ended up baffled. The thing is, like anyone who really, really wants you to buy what he’s selling, a wacky gym salesguy is prone to a little fast talk and speedy calculator work. This Wacky Gym Salesguy, however, has me set up in some very spurious situation whereby I’m going to get some big bucks back for “referring” three new clients. Now, by “referring,” WGS means that anyone who signs up without a referral will magically become “referred” by me, and six months from this stranger’s sign-up date, I’m theoretically getting $100 per person I referred. So we’re talking about $300 back, six months from now.

Okay, so I’m a little skeptical about this arrangement (after we calculate all my discounts because he “likes” me, the super-super sale-sale discount, and my $300-back-at-some-later-date, my monthly membership fee is about $3.79), so WGS tells me he’s going to give me a photocopy of the member contract of each person I “refer” so I know he’s a man of his word. No, he won’t put our arrangement in writing, but he will give me photocopies. I’m going to have to trust him, take him at his word, he tells me, gazing deep into my eyes as if to say “Have I ever lied to you?” I stare back, as if to say “I don’t want to die, Daddy.”

The creepy-ish part is that every time I go to my new (clean) gym, WGS comes up to me, calls me by name, and tells me he’s just gotten me another “referral.” Each time this happens I feel dirty, like we have some sub rosa arrangement going on, like we’re playing a down-and-dirty illegal game the stakes of which will only become clear when the severed heads of these so-called “members” show up in my gym locker. Last time I was there, WGS came up to me and, as promised, gave me an envelope with three members’ registration forms. I feel even more like a CIA agent now, because I think I’m supposed to take this as the sealing of our deal and assume my $300 is in an escrow account in the Virgin Islands, but instead I am in possession of the names, addresses, job info and credit card numbers of three strangers. Is this legit? Am I an unwitting dupe in a high-stakes Ponzi scheme?

[redacted]

I don’t know exactly how or when, but I have this distinct feeling that there’s a muffled late-night phone call in my future, telling me to leave 3 large (or is “large” a thousand dollars? “3 small?”) in an unmarked Halliburton case down by the pier.

The NY Times has been ablaze with articles about graduation, commencement speeches, student loan debt, employers doing due diligence on recent grads on MySpace and general advice for the newly mortarboarded. Herein, a round-up because it makes for some good reading. I don’t mind saying that I cover nearly all of this in my book. With far more hilarity.

That said, all of these articles are totally worth checking out, whether you’re a recent grad or not.

Advice to All You Graduates: Let’s Start With That Daily Latte… [6.10.06]

Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center [6.11.06]

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé [6.11.06]

Forgive Us Our Student Debts [6.11.06]