News: The Student Loan Crisis

Posted on August 24, 2010 by pittsburghflashfictiongazette
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There was the Wall Street banking crisis, the housing crisis and soon we will have the student loan crisis.

Hello hello hello, my brother and sister bloggers, writers and Flash Fiction Fanatics.  If you’ve been paying attention to the latest media reports, the United States is about to be hit with another financial tsunami: tens of millions of undergraduate and graduate students will default on their student loans.

To get a degree, undergraduate and graduate students are taking on debt they will never be able to repay.  And with the bleak employment picture projected to remain bleak for several years, many prospective employees with college and university degrees will be forced to work jobs they are over qualified for or jobs that have little to do with their fields of study. 

Increasingly, the American dream is becoming a fantasy.

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My Life

Posted on September 28, 2008 by pittsburghflashfictiongazette

Well, my gout is better today.  I went out and did some shopping: laundry liquid, newspaper, toilet paper, a Milky Way candy bar, a can of pork n’ beans and a six pack of A & W root beer.  The 54C bus inched through “Little Italy” in Bloomfield.  This weekend is the “Little Italy Festival” days.  There were vendors under colorful tents in the drizzle selling food and their wares up and down Liberty Avenue.

I stopped at Nico’s at Pearl and Friendship and had a couple of big glasses of Pepsi and ice.  No beer until the gout is totally gone.  No more salt or tomato sauce in my diet, either.  Not being able to walk is the pits.  Especially if you live alone. 

V, my favorite bartender, was behind the bar.  She’ll only be bartending now every other Saturday since she got a better job.  She’s the one who several years ago talked me into going back to school to get my BA.  I went on to get my MFA, too.  Now I’m an educated bum. 

Well, I should be able to go back to Computer School on Monday.  I wonder what they’re going to do with me, now.  They gave me an extension thinking that I’d have a civil service job by now; but since the hiring freeze all bets are off.  The school is my only source of income.  I’m working with a job developing at the school on two other job leads.  I needed to find something with promise like yesterday.

Pitt beat the Orangemen.  Penn State is on the TV now and I’m blogging and drinking root beer.

GHH

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My Life

Posted on September 24, 2008 by pittsburghflashfictiongazette

I called off from computer school this morning.  I have a little gout in my left foot and it’s painful.  I’m trying to walk it off.  I’ll have to watch what I eat and drink for a couple of days…Duquesne University is holding a jobfair at the computer school today.  It’s always dress for success and bring your resume but they never interview or hire people at these things.  It’s always apply online; and if you don’t have the magic phrases in your resume that the Human Resource Department scans for you never hear from them and you take another hit on your cleaning bill…So, I’m going to take a shower and hobble to Pittsburgh’s “Little Italy” in Bloomfield and pick up eggs, oinions, chocolate milk, olive oil and a newspaper.  Come back and eat and then go through the bills I can’t pay.  I do have an Employment Specialist at a medical insurance company trying to set up an interview for me with his hiring officer and I have filled out an application online and attached my resume for another company so I do have some irons in the fire.  Plus, I was in line for a government job until a hiring freeze was declared last Thursday.  If the hiring freeze is removed any time some I should be okay; but in the mean time I can’t pay my bills.  That’s not a good feeling.  I was homeless once when I was a young man, no doubt I was still traumatized from Vietnam.  I’m sixty one now and definitely don’t want to be homeless again.  It’s scary.  I go back to school and get my BA and MFA and now I’m worried about being homeless.  Well, it’s my own fault.  I was so sure I was going to make it as a writer that I didn’t have a plan B.

GHH

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