If someone is bemoaning the repercussions of an action, my mother has a response she will go to.
For example, I might say, “I’m sick from eating a whole block of gouda like an apple! Betrayal by those I love most!”
It’s at this point, my mom puts her hands out to her side, and tilts her head back and forth as she says, “cause and effect!” (To her eternal credit, if I said this, she would also probably bring me a ginger ale. I’m aggressively spoiled.) It’s her way of saying our choices have consequences.
“I spent all my money on novelty tote bags, and now I have to eat lentils and rice for dinner!”
Cause and effect!
“I didn’t replace my car battery when everyone said to replace my car battery, and now I have a dead car battery!” (True story. I have since replaced my car battery.)
Cause and effect!
In 2011, as the country was coming out of the recession and I was struggling to find a job, I made the choice to go to graduate school. Not only that, I made the choice to go to graduate school in New York City. No wait! It gets better! I made the choice to go to graduate school at a private school in New York City. And let’s just bring it home- I made the choice to go to graduate school at a private school in New York where I studied textile history.
Trust me. It’s the most lucrative of all the fields of visual culture history.But the thing is, if you go to graduate school at a private institution in New York City to study textile history, you have to pay for going to graduate school at a private institution in New York City to study textile history.
While I was more marketable (debatable), I officially had a pile of student loans that a museum professional’s salary would never be able to touch. Which is how I ended up in IT.
Cause and effect!
I squeaked into this job one month before interest would have taken my grand loan total to six digits, trading collection storage for data storage, libraries for library functions, and textiles for text files (Ha! Proud of that one). And I learned about one of the building blocks of major software coding languages, conditional statements. It’s a structure built off of ifs and thens.
If you click a button, then your internet browser will launch a new window.
If you hit enter, then Facebook will send your message.
If you swipe your finger to the right, then you will crush all the candy!
Cause and effect!
While most conditional statements are far more complicated than the examples above, the irony of it is the mechanics and cogs and ifs and thens of computers was inspired by the overs and unders and warps and wefts of the jacquard textile loom.
We all made those pot holders in elementary school, with the little strings you weave together in an over-under pattern. Most textiles are built on some variation of that weave. But for many years, jacquards, textiles with more ornate designs, relied on a special loom driven by punchcards.
Each row of holes on the punch cards corresponds to a woven row on the fabric.
If the loom encounters a hole in the punchcard, then it sends the fiber through.
If the loom does not encounter a hole in the punchcard, then the loom moves onto the next card.
And how do I know this? I went to a very expensive graduate program in a very expensive city where I learned about textile history.
In two months, I turn thirty, and say, “peace out, ding-dongs” to my twenties. Or since I’ll be thirty, maybe I’ll say, “With best regards, I bid you farewell.” I’m pretty sure that’s how people in their thirties talk. I wouldn’t know. I’m twenty-nine.
But as I think over the biggest lessons of my twenties, they all come back to accountability. The choices we make are ours to reconcile. And no choice of mine has had such far-reaching implications as the choice to go to grad school.
But, guys, something is happening this week. I’ve known it was on its way for awhile. I’ve been telling anyone who will make eye contact me for any length of time that it was coming. Including that one guy in the campus coffee shop at work. I never thought it would get here, and now it’s here.
And I realize I’m adding a lot of build up, so it may be worth clarifying: no, I’m not paying off my loans this week. I’m not a wizard, guys. If I were, I wouldn’t have needed to go to grad school. I’d just be killing it as a wizard-hat maker.
This week I make the loan payment that takes my current debt total to the halfway mark. This calls for a celebratory block of gouda!
I’ve officially paid off one year of my two year program.
I’ve paid off the awkward small talk of trying to get to know your new classmates and hoping they could stick with you through your “verbal diarrhea” phase. An actual opening line I used at orientation: “so, hurricanes, huh?” Hurricanes, indeed, you big weirdo.
I’ve paid off the horrible roommate. I even paid off that one time I came home from spending thirteen hours in the library and she asked me why I hadn’t taken out the recycling, most of which was her used tea bags which, I feel like I should clarify, cannot be recycled.
I’ve paid off the hours writing papers in coffee shops, and wondering if I could trust the people at the tables around me to watch my stuff while I used the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to forfeit my table near the outlet. Outlets are incredibly serious business.
And all it took was four years in Wisconsin. For every coffee and New York bagel from the place around the corner, there were countless Wisconsin mornings waiting till I got to work to drink the free coffee in the break room. (And then later realizing break room coffee is horrible coffee, and an extra thirty dollars a month is not going to be the magic answer to making your loans go away.)
For every conversation with my cohort about ideas for research topics, there have been ten conversations with software developers about end-user implications of a code change. And only three of those ending with me thinking, “how on Earth is this my life?” as I huffed my way back to my office.
For every happy hour after class with the girls, there were more quiet nights in my Wisconsin apartment with whatever bottle of wine was on sale at the Pick & Save, rewatching the early seasons of The Office, teaching myself to crochet because crochet needles were on sale in the one weird craft aisle at target. Did I learn to crochet? I call it faux-chet. It’s like crochet, except worse. Because I don’t actually think I learned how to crochet.
Cause and effect!
I loved grad school. I met some of my very favorite people. I lived in one of the greatest cities on Earth. (Never mind that the city is like that guy who knows how cute it is. It’s got ego problems.) And I got to deep dive into a subject matter I love. Understanding that there are far worse things than how I’ve spent my Wisconsin years, it’s fair to say it hasn’t been easy to walk away from the world I built to pay for the fact I built it in the first place. And I’ve wondered a lot over the past four years if the choice was worth it. If the math checks out. Are the “thens” worth the “ifs”?
But like the loom that keeps chugging and the programs that keep running, life doesn’t work like that. If you make a choice, you can’t take it back. You make the best of the results, and you keep moving.
After all, if you stop, then who knows what you might be missing?
Under The Parrot Umbrella 
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