Sauve Qui Peut; or, Arashi ga Kitta.

Did it bother you, needing to deal with your ex's paperwork? Asked C, over salad last Monday, wondering why I was so detached and sealed in my own head.

She was right, of course. I'd been in a foul mood all that week, and much of it had come from needing to scan and send off to L a nastygram from the BCSL people. Her payments bouncing because she hadn't put money in her account, the letters coming to me because she hadn't changed her address with them. I've warned her about this, and about her need to file taxes, but it's ultimately not my responsibility. I think she's gotten bad advice - potentially disastrous advice - on the tax front, but what can I do? Warn her yet again?

Of course, it stirs bad feelings because she owes me a little money. This has happened before, and of course I stepped in each time and did what needed to be done, but no longer.

In the scheme of these things, it's not so much. I have a friend who had his bank account cleaned out and his car stolen by his girl, (he eventually married her) and a cousin who was almost murdered by his wife for the Life Insurance (and if not for the RCMP intercepting the plot when her new lover was a little too clumsy when mail ordering poison, she might have succeded). So, perspective is helpful at staunching- or at least slowing- the curdling of feeling. And it's more the money that she doesn't owe me per se, anyways, that galls, the gifts unreciprocated the year she was away, the inability to remember my birthday, and so on. She has a gift for me, she says, that she will bring back from Korea when she comes back. Of course, she's postponed her return many times, so that only reminds me of other broken promises, so you see the problem. She says I'll see her in the Spring. Sure. But she said that last Fall, too. And then went to the Phillipines, with her lover, as it turned out.

She says, and has said, she will pay me back, and I don't doubt her sincerity or desire so much as her finances and her - well, let's just say that she and I both are bad at keeping things organized, if in different ways. We both thrived in chaos long before we met and will continue to do so as we tumble through the cosmos on our increasingly divergent paths.

But in any case, I should count on no financial help from that quarter. Certainly not in a timely fashion, or enough to change the big picture. How many early colonies or besieged cities scanned the horizon looking daily for the relief that would never come? I feel shamed, and petty, to think of it at all. But it chafes, slow and unyielding. All I want is a gesture. A card, even. Something to keep in my pocket while I cut my way out of the trap in which I've been caught. This is Stalingrad, and the snow has started to fall, and it's sixty miles of Russians and landmines between me and anything resembling safety.

So, what to do? It seems, now, that junking this job unless absolutely necessary is to be avoided. For the storm has finally come, and like most of my generation, I am still paying off the debt of 1980's educational policy. How is it that I didn't lay a solid foundation in my 20's? writes my new acquaintance the sex columnist, but of couse, almost no one our age did, because there were no careers to be had, and no one had any idea what to do about it, least of all our elders. Education is valuable for its own sake, they said, and Student Loans are a great deal. It's free money! When I hear my baby boomer colleague complaining about how kids today don't seem "passionate" about education and learning, or I read that professional flibbertygibbet Margaret Wente yack about how we've all done it to ourselves with our Student Loans and Credit Cards, I want to commit an act of violence. Or introduce them to my English Advisor, a briulliant woman who was still working as a sessional instructor in her late forties, her Phd juat allowing her to be a better class of temp.

We were all fleeced, you fools. It's a casino and the game is rigged.

Anyway, priorities. Redouble my efforts to pay down debt, whatever the cost. Perhaps a second job. Well, after the election, anyway, which will see me working as a registration officer. Anything will help. But what about all my friends, my countrymen, in worse positions than I am? I at least have options. I'm afraid for you all. Even L, rich family or not.

We have been standing and talking when we should have been running. And all my years of education may have done is let me see, clearly, what is coming, and what it means as the snowflakes start to fall, ere the snows begin to swallow us and everything we hold dear.