Cusp This!

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Raisin’ the roof!

My credit limit was raised today, effective immediately. 'Dear, yb, by not carrying a massive credit card debt, we’ve been engineering ways to make sure that you start to! Congratulations, why don’t you write yourself a check made out to CASH for the entire NEW limit of your credit card? Why not??'

It reminded me of when I was 15 and hanging out with the very wrong crowd in hometown Tennessee one of the boys from the group received a pre-approved credit card in the mail—the kind that are now illegal. He decided to spend the entire limit (which I believe was $2,000) on a gun. He bought something big and scary. He was 18—had been held back or something but was a senior and I was a freshman. He was the creepiest of the group of bad boys, and I only tolerated him because I had a crush on the moody rebel that was also an actor. If it had been a post-Columbine world, I probably would have been as worried about this event as I should have been.

I remember being shocked that he spent money on a credit card, as I had an innate sense from my father that such a thing was pure evil. The idea of buying a gun just seemed absurd. Who cares about guns anyway?

A few months later (this was after I had been arrested for shop-lifting sunglasses and my parents grounded me for 3 months effectively crushing my membership in the bad crowd), the gun-boy was in a serious car accident. He was okay, but he couldn’t work and the hospital bills were are burden to his parents. When they found out about paying off some credit card for a gun that their son had bought on top of everything else, they were devastated.

I remember being so grateful for my parents for being so right, about the crowd, about credit cards, about everything. That was the last time I really tired to be bad-girl. Stripping for a few months in college was more about my confused feminism than my need to be a bad-girl.

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