Loan Consolidation Hell Part II

I underestimated the total amount of my loans, by the way. Oh yes, THERE ARE MORE. It has become clear to me that I will never lead a life as decadent as the life I led in law school.

If I don't get LRAP funding, I will be hanging my prestigious law school degree on the wall of a cardboard box. I would live in my car, but that's about to die too.

I've spent all morning trying to figure out what information this federal direct loan consolidation app was asking of me. I don't know the servicer, lender, or guaranty agency of every single loan (and don't forget that every year is technically a new federal loan!) and hell if I can figure out where my undergrad loans are. It's my own goddamn fault, but this is really confusing. I finally gave up, again, and I think I'm going to heed Allison's advice. I'm a firm believer in the do-it-yourself method - if I can apply to consolidate my federal loans directly with the federal government, I'm reluctant to get a middleman agency involved because I believe that it somehow creates more paperwork and will cost me more money. I don't know whether this is actually true or not. I also used to do my own taxes, on paper, until two years ago when I broke down and got TurboTax because I couldn't believe that I actually qualified for the tax breaks that I had calculated for myself (but it was true). Slowly I'm starting to realize that my aspirations of tackling government bureaucracy by myself are silly, and to hell with it. I need help with this.

Anyway, I consolidated my undergrad loans with a small local organization back in the day, and since they currently have that loan, I think they will let me consolidate my law school loans with them too. I emailed them a "Please help me!" email and asked if they would be able to sit down with me and sort through all of this. They've been pretty helpful thus far, I hope they will help me. This whole thing has me so stressed out that I am incapable of doing anything right this second. I had to take out some Whiskeytown tunes, drink some coffee, and blog. These are my coping mechanisms.

This has taken up so much of my time and energy this morning that I have completely disregarded BarBri's strict bar studying plan method thing and have done nothing. This bar studying stuff is OVERWHELMING. So much info, so few brain cells willing to accept new information. As a matter of fact, yesterday after my bar review course ended around 5 pm, I went home, cooked dinner, witnessed Wade Miller get shelled and watched m fantasy team plummet, swept the upstairs, stairs, downstairs, cleaned the entire bathroom, washed the bathmats, washed the dishes, sliced some celery and watermelon for today's snacks, watched O.C. reruns, wrote in my journal, and read some Gabriel Garcia Marquez before lights out at 10:30 p.m. Alarm went off at 6 a.m., I finally got up around 7:30 to go to the gym. Look at how much I can get done when I'm trying desperately NOT to study for the bar!