officially under $20K

It's been a years-long journey, and it's almost over. Starting out with a towering scholastic debt that was right around $80,000, I've paid that debt down until, just this month, I broke through the $20,000 barrier. In another several months, I'll have paid off all of my scholastic debt, and once I pay off what little credit-card debt I have, my credit rating will go from its current 780 to somewhere over 800 (850 is the maximum).

I will, of course, be in a very spendy, celebratory mood for a long, long time after I officially zero out my scholastic debt. I'm also thinking of taking a trip to Qatar next year, where I'll hang with a South African friend and experience, for a few days, the gustatory delights of that food mecca. I might finally buy myself a new computer—not that my faithful MacBook Air is dying or anything (it's been chugging along with very few problems since 2011), but I think the time has come to get myself an actual, respectable desktop. Should I stick with Mac or go with a Windows machine? I'm equally comfortable with both, and at this point, I think I've passed beyond any Mac/Windows partisanship.

I've written about this elsewhere (cough), but there's a chance I might find myself once again working under my former boss. If so, then because my ex-boss was fairly lenient, I can think realistically about doing another long walk, perhaps the longer coastal walk, within a year instead of waiting two years. That would be a dream come true.

So life is looking up—way up. The only thing that could be bring me down would be some huge personal calamity—a car accident that cripples me, a cancer diagnosis, or a similarly disastrous event. I half-expect something like that to happen; I'm convinced the cosmos doesn't have my best interests at heart, and I've suffered comparable disappointments before. But there's little use worrying about what you can't control, and for the moment, at least, all signs point heavenward, and that's good enough for me.