Guess what?

I’m debt free. This fact quite pleases me. Thought I’d let you know. Toodles!

* * *

Just kidding. What I really want to do is shout from the rooftops that I paid off $47,508.63 in forty-four months, having even overcome an eleventh-hour fit of profligate spending on gifts and coffee in April. In fact, I owed substantially more than the figure above if you count what I paid off from three years’ worth of job searching and moving. I have no idea what that number was, because I paid it off sort of haphazardly, but, as I say, I suspect the figure was substantial.

So what’s stopping me from shouting from the rooftops? Well, for one thing, my roof is all pointy, and I’m not exactly gifted with a fine sense of balance. That and no one who knows me in real life knows how much I owed.

I recall reading that most people are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than about their finances, but I suspect academics might be even more reluctant to talk about money. In all my experience on search committees, I can remember exactly one candidate asking about salary. And while whining about our risible stipends was practically required for admission to candidacy in my grad program, no one I knew ever talked about how much they were in hock, despite the ubiquitous unopened credit card statements on everyone’s kitchen tables. Even—or perhaps especially—now, my colleagues downplay their reasons for teaching summer school: they’re doing so to test-drive a different set of assignments or texts, not because their HELOCs or their kids’ student loans dried up. I suspect this reticence is a vestige of the gentlemen’s-clubby origins of academia. The life of the mind is expensive. Aspirants to it must be to the manner born. As for the manor, well, that goes without saying.

I wish I could say I do not regret having borrowed so much. After all, Sallie Mae enabled me to get a delightfully elite education, and really, had I to do it all over again, I would have chosen the same program. Never mind that Sallie Mae reminds me of a character out of Faulkner, one of those grotesque shrews who wear their hair in iron-gray screws.

Moreover, Sallie and her passive-aggressive little friends Amex and Visa have shaped my career in ways I don’t like to acknowledge. In fact, it is partly because of them that I am at JPU rather than a more glamorous place, which had offered a marginally higher salary but was located in the most expensive city in the country. There I would have had easy access to dazzling library collections. Would my second book have lived up to the hopes I’d had for it? It’s impossible to say, of course, and I’m careful to avoid contemplating other people’s greener grass or what could have been. I chose my own adventure. So what’s next?

As the song goes, I-I-I just wanna celebrate. I could call Dave Ramsey, a financial guru whose acolytes call in to his radio and TV programs and announce their debt freedom over the audio from the climactic scene in Braveheart. Women in particular sound endearingly silly. I disagree with Ramsey’s conflation of credit and debt, though I guess for the weak willed or stupid, it’s just better to remove temptation altogether. I can handle credit. It was financing the Profession that I couldn’t handle. So I won’t be calling Ramsey, but I still need to commemorate the present occasion.

How, oh 2.5 readers, shall I do so? In the years I’ve been paying off Sallie I’ve learned I can get by on very little, and I’ve lost the inclination to acquire stuff. Last summer it occurred to me that, for what I was paying Sallie I could buy two new iBooks, an iPod, and an iPhone. Each month. That was a depressing realization. But, then again, what would I do with them? When my next paycheck deposits, I’ll feel rich. Sure, I’ll be kicking the former payments into retirement and house funds, but meanwhile, I can’t decide what else to do. Perhaps blogging about it will suffice. Or maybe I can finally get that pony.