The Sallie Mae Pay-Off Cake (This Year's Best Accomplishment)

After sixteen and a half years making payments toward one of my student loans, I finally paid it off last Friday morning.  

And made myself a celebration cake to beat all prior celebration cakes.  :)  A glittering rainbow,  some shiny coins, a goodbye scroll, a few smiley faces, a bluebird of happiness?  OHHH YEAAAH, it's got it all.  :)

I first took out this student loan in the summer of 2000, a month or so before starting grad school at New York University.  That is so many lifetimes ago now, it seems, so all the better to have all the payments for it finally completed.  

Even with jobs, grants, and scholarships, the student loans were also always necessary for me throughout college and grad school, but the debt is quite a burden to carry, and as with everyone after a certain age, if I knew then what I know now and could redo it all, who's to say. . . .And I still have an insane amount of student loan debt, but let us celebrate today what we can, right.  Never again having to pen into my journal my new-and-improved Sallie Mae balance is an accomplishment. 

I have been keeping diaries and journals since I was nine, and while looking through some of my old ones late this summer, I soon grew tired of seeing how many times I'd written "My Sallie Mae balance is now down to $[whatever-amount]" or "Another payment today.  New balance:  $[whatever-new-amount]."  Blah blah blah, entry after entry, year after year. . . .When I was twenty-three. . .Thirty-three. . .Thirty-nine. . .Until I got sick of it late this summer and sat down with pen and paper to figure out how much I'd have to work to pay it off by the end of this year.  THIS year, finally.

I calculated my wages, my usual number of hours/week and hours/month, what overtime would maybe be available throughout the fall, and how much extra I'd need to do in order to make the final payment on this loan by New Year's Eve.  I came up with the number of extra hours I guessed I'd need to work--and I worked them.  And worked them, and worked them. . .days and nights, going back to work after just a few hours of sleep from the shift before, giving up days off to get a few more hours. . .the past three months. . . .And I ended up working only one hour more than I'd estimated that I'd need to and actually paying it off two weeks early, so all my estimates were spot-on.

I gave up what was to be my second visit to Boston, in October, for this.  I had already booked the flight and gotten the days off work but decided to be a grown up and do this instead.  'The  right thing to do, but I so wanted to be there in the fall. . . .It was to have been the weekend of David Ortiz's final game with the Red Sox and of an Oktoberfest-themed 5K race I'd intended to run.  My designated "Boston days" found me back at work here instead.  Life goes on, and I'll get back to Boston sometime, and now the loan is paid off. . . but the trip would have made for some sweet autumn memories. 

I made the final payment last Friday morning, hours after returning from a week of "merry early Christmas" with my family and set out for the grocery store for cake-baking and cake-decorating supplies soon after.  ♥  The cake was the classic Hershey Celebration Cake but with hot coffee and buttermilk replacing the hot water and milk per an Ina Garten recipe.  Candy-tape made the rainbow, I dolled up a few yellow gumballs for the smiley faces, the coins were easy to find with Hanukkah candy this time of year, and I crafted the bluebird and scroll out of homemade marshmallow fondant.  It is not the most prettily-frosted cake, but I was too tickled by the cause for celebration to care.  :)

And I called my dad--who had warned me in summer 2000 not to take out this loan in the first place, but I had just turned twenty-three so knew everything and didn't listen to him, of course--to tell him the good news. ♥ 

Stuffed was unimpressed and remained on his warm radiator-perch all afternoon.

I should have followed his lead, as it turns out, for I came down with the flu Friday evening and was sicker all weekend than I'd been since early 2012.  But until then:  happiness and cake!  :)

Even if fatigue ultimately caught up with me, I reached my goal and have kissed this debt goodbye.  And the fresh new journal I begin next month will be the first in almost seventeen years that won't mention it.  And the flu has now mellowed into a cold, and there are still two slices of cake in the fridge.  :)

♥

Valen-Christmas 2014, or Kindness Toward Self and Others, or Issues: I Have a Few

After Mike and I exchanged cards and gifts Valentine's Day morning, he left to spend the weekend with his family.  Since he hadn't been able to visit them in December, the weekend became a combined Valentine's Day-Christmas (that I deemed "Valen-Christmas") for them.  I had packed a couple gift bags for Mike's family into his rental car, enjoying the opportunity to mix and match Christmas wrapping paper and handpainted Christmas ornaments with Valentine's Day flowers, heart-printed tissue paper, and heart-shaped cherry pies.  Two of my favorite holidays rolled into one this Friday.  

Mike returned Sunday evening with a car full of our Christmas presents from his family, and while our Christmas-in-February was fun, I was more grateful for the gift of his having made it home safely after a few hours of driving on slippery roads.  We usually take advantage of our once-or-twice-a-year car-rentals by heading to a local shopping plaza and stocking up on some things that are easier to bring home with a car, and we had planned both to do that and to enjoy a belated Valentine's dinner out, but when he called to let me know he was back and temporarily parked across the street, his first words were "I hope you're not disappointed, but the roads are awful. . . ."  No, I was not disappointed.  I was relieved, not really feeling like being out on them, or even away from home at all.  He returned the car, ordered a pizza--extra cheese with mushrooms, my favorite--we opened our presents, and we called it a day.  With his being gone and our plans abruptly changed, Valentine's Day didn't feel like it usually does here anyway.  I had sent the Valentine's Day bib to my niece but had mailed only a few cards.  I didn't even bake a cake, having expected us to eat out.  Due to my work schedule and energy level, this past Thanksgiving had the same play-it-by-ear feel.  Sometimes it's just like this. 

When I was younger, even a couple years younger, I would have beaten myself up a bit about these things--I should have made a cake and cookies, I should have knocked his socks off with some beautifully-creative impromptu dinner for us, I should have gotten more mail out, what happened to the homemade heart-shaped gluten-free cookies I was going to send to Mom--but ohhh noooooo.  One of my wishes for my thirty-sixth birthday was to be kinder not only to others, but to myself, as well.  It wasn't just words randomly typed into the text-box here; It's something I always need to work on.  I'll eat junk food in my packed lunches for a few days and spend my lunch money on a gift for someone instead.  I'll skip an extra couple hours of sleep in order to catch up on emails or get a long letter written.  I'll treat Mike to a book or cd he's mentioned but will rarely do the same for myself.  I go through phases and sometime long stretches of taking the time to watch movies and go for my beloved long walks, but spending this time on myself usually takes a backseat to looking out for my loved ones.  (I always make the time for journal-writing and that kind of reflective and prayerful quiet time, so that's in my favor here, at least.)  There is always more (and more and more) I want to be doing for people--and I love doing it--and I'm better at taking care of them than of myself.  It's just one of my issues.  When I mentioned this to my mom years ago, she seemed almost puzzled by the fact that I didn't "get it" and just said, "Well, Vally, there's always more that it would be nice to be able to do for people"--with an implied "???" clearly heard at the end of her statement.  And she's right, but I can be hard on myself and this runs deep with me. 

Almost a year after declaring that I wanted to do better in this regard, though, I can say that I'm getting somewhere.  I'm more likely to allow myself to sleep when I need it.   If I send ten Valentines instead of twenty, life goes on.  My loved ones know I love them even if their cards arrive a day late.  I am finally, in my late thirties, becoming gentler with myself.  I splurged last month and treated myself to a bottle of long-wished-for L'Air Du Temps perfume.  I recently bought myself a couple nightgowns.  I've been watching more movies.  Owning a camera now that can take good pictures outdoors should help me stay on-track with my daily walks.  Slowly, I am finding ways to balance showing love toward others with showing love toward self.   (Why is it just sooooo fun to give to others, though, and such work to take care of myself?!)  When I say that I like growing older, this kind of learning is one of the reasons why.  It is fascinating to me to see how issues that were so big to me ten years ago are no longer things I even think about, let alone "get hung up on," and how characteristics I accept as simply being my personality end up, given enough time, having been just quirks or the way I was during certain stages of my life.  Finding these patterns and putting these sorts of puzzle pieces together:  That's so much of the beauty and benefit and fun of aging. 

After all that, it will likely not surprise you to hear that while I nestled a number of mini heart-shaped pies into tissue paper for Mike's parents on Friday, I also set aside a few for myself.  And that a Valentine's Day that began with wrapping presents for others ended with curling up in a granny square afghan watching movies with Stuffed on my lap. This balance, even if it needs to be re-calibrated from time to time, has been one of the great gifts and lessons of my thirties, and I am most thankful for it.  ♥