“Like a circus trip on mescaline”

That’s how I feel about the Moscow real estate market at the moment. And not just because of our personal issues – which are numerous, and involve my mother’s own contested property in the center of the city.

Meanwhile, our living arrangements are staying the same… for now… but there is a war between our new landlady, the daughter of the deceased elderly woman who was the owner of our flat, and the daughter’s father. Daughter says that dad is a violent alcoholic, and dad says that daughter is a scammer and he’ll be taking her to court.

I tend to take the daughter’s side – since her father had deliberately tried to cover up the fact that his wife had died. He wasn’t planning on telling us at all, even though she was the legal owner of the apartment. He just planned to keep quietly collecting the rent – even as our renting agreement would have become null and void.

Classy.

Anyway, I ought to have a big real estate story coming out on Friday. If you want to read more delicious real estate horror stories – you will love it. I promise.

For the sake of perspective on student debt: my husband got two first-class educations. For free.

He studied theater direction at the Russian Academy of the Theater Arts. For free.

He studied documentary filmmaking with director Marina Razbezhkina. Also for free.

And while he studied for free, he always had ways of “giving back” – whether it’s helping organize a drama lab in a remote town, or put on a play in a provincial theater, or organize a free movie showing for people who may not otherwise be able to afford to go to the movies, or offer help to a struggling production free of charge, and so on.

There’s something weird about a system where everything is monetized. I didn’t notice it when I was much younger. I was just used to it. “This is how things are,” is what most people think when thought to consider it. And more people than that don’t even get as far as that – they have no consideration for the system, they just exist within it. Except I don’t think that this is how things have to be, not really. The people who let my husband get a free education got something right. They were investing into the future – their own, and everybody else’s. They weren’t investing into a golf course for a multimillionaire student debt industry exec such as Albert Lord (incidentally, dude has an appropriate last name).