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# Some self-involved meandering
My HECS is paid off. I am no longer faced with the possibility of men in gray suits turning up on my doorstep with tyre irons to break my legs and make me work for the guvmint. For furriners and the like, HECS is a federal government scheme wherein they pay for one’s university education and then you pay them back some token percentage of the total cost. It used to be totally free, but that was crazy, and in the mid-eighties sanity prevailed and the token repayment was instituted.
I’d probably still be in Bundaberg if not for HECS, bumming around town and cursing my shitty life, because fundamentally, I am a lazy lazy man. I have difficulty imagining that I would have worked hard in order to afford my education. You never know though, there’s a lot to be said for the path of least resistance, which is what made me work hard to earn my university entrance grade in the first place. That sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps, but not meeting parental expectation is often more effort than the work to get the grade.
So here I am, with a degree in IT that I only took after realising that an Arts degree in history is pointless if you don’t want to be a teacher or a post-graduate student. Oh sure, I did some comp-sci courses at the same time, but it’s not like I took them at all seriously. Until I was faced with the fact that IT was the thing that bored me the least
I am sure I am a disappointment to my parents. By traditional measures I am not the success that my maternal cousins and some of my paternal cousins are. Doctors and engineers and post-grad students who go back for more, oh my! Mum is also not getting a biological grandchild until she nags my sister. They might surprise me one day and reveal that they too think traditional measures are bizarrely weird. Hope so, because I don’t plan to assimilate any time soon.
Navel gazing aside though, I have paid off my HECS. I got used to having no money when I was at university – materalism was burned out of me long ago – so I never felt overly constrained by not having any spending money. With HECS paid and $company forced to pay something approximating market rate, the last month has been odd. Suddenly I have all this money that isn’t spoken for the day after payday. We can actually afford to send tWM to the school she has been going to all year :- ) I can replace the car, the fridge and the lino in the house. And you know what? Nothing has actually changed! I will be paying for tWMs education and a new car and new lino and then a new fridge, so all my money will still be spoken for the day after payday. A wise man once said, You’ll always be poor, you’ll just have shinier stuff to distract you from it.
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# I see a V8 American Supercar in your
future. My mother has had no luck on the maternal grandchild fron either, both her kids are too busy with adventures overseas (my sister only recently came back) or pursuing careers.
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# Hey now there, what's wrong with navel gazing
It's my favourite pasttime not to mention belly button lint is fun to find and remove..
If you are a disappointment to your parents I am sure as hell my ancestors are turning in their graves, what with their political amibitions and respectable (now none) fortunes, and no, no grandkids either..
As for postgrad degrees -bleh – they're a dime a dozen now, all you need is money. Just check out UNSW – it's managed as will be openly admitted by our chancellor – as a private organisation. What this really means is that they are charging more, and spend more on marketing and advertising instead of academic salaries. So we have an increasing number of disllisioned lecturers who complain openly to students about how shitty their pay packets are and in effect tells us "well I aint in such a good mood so take a guess at how much you'll get outta me in this next hour"
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30 days since 07/08/2010