Except they won’t come up past the middle of your thighs. Or they do this weird creasey thing across your hips. Or they pucker out so far at the waist, you look like you’re a little tea pot, short and stout. There is your handle and there is your spout.

If I never had to shop for another pair of jeans, I’d do two cartwheels, a round-off and a Tae-Bo kick across the mall parking lot. Jeans are a fashion staple, but next to bras (which belong in the seventh ring of hell), they’re my least favorite thing to look for, and sometimes, my least favorite thing to wear. I’ve broken nails trying to zip them up. Flopped back on my bed wrestling into them. Analyzed my hindquarters from every possible angle under the unkind glare of department store fluorescent lighting trying to buy them. Liked the way they fit my legs but hated the way they rode up in the crotch. Liked the way they fit around the waist but hated the way they flattened my rump. Squatted down in them to manufacture some give when they’ve been damn-girl-can-you-breathe? tight.

If you’re a Black woman, you probably have curves. And when you’re a Black woman with curves, you’ve probably experienced the deflating realization that most designers have visions of Angelina Jolie or Kate Hudson dancing through their heads when they strike out to create a new line. But newsflash: for at least the last five years, and probably longer than that, the average American woman has been rocking a size 14. But you wouldn’t be able to tell by the waif-like sizing of most jeans or the obvious lack of models with meat on their bones.

So when Levi’s introduced Curve ID, I snickered. Levi’s? The same brand the white girls in my high school poured their stick figures into? Seems as though the company is having a hard time breaking with their own stereotype. Their most recent ads for the line purportedly for thicker girls only proves their definition of shapeliness is a few stick-thin chicks with gams the size of my forearms. They defended themselves by saying they do celebrate different body types. Alas, those images, few and far between as they are, were relegated to a Facebook page with some 3,000 fans, a far cry from the pages of the print magazines that reach millions of readers. Pity.

Just because you drizzle syrup on boo-boo don’t make it hot cakes (I don’t know. Just roll with me.) And just because you feign respect for the shape of “real women” doesn’t make it the dawning of a new day. Levi’s may know denim and they may know capitalism, but they wouldn’t know a real womanly curve if it dropped it like it’s hot on their conference room table.

Someday soon, as Americans get bigger and more women fall into that “full-figured” category, which, at this point, is more the average than the exception, designers are going to have to kick that old school thinking to the curb that consumers want to see beautiful, but bony models wearing clothes they’re hoping will sell. Marketing studies have shown that women are overwhelmingly more likely to purchase a product if the gal pushing it looks more like them in age, race and, yes, weight. That includes jeans, Levi’s. Then you wonder why the clearance rack is clogged up with so many overstocked size 2s.

Curve ID let me down, and not just because of the ads. I bought two styles online, sight unseen, because they were on sale but they didn’t come close to the one-stop, don’t-look-no-further discovery I’d hoped for. The fit wasn’t all that impressive. So the love/hate relationship with denim marches on and my two little trusty pairs will remain on call indefinitely until I either whittle myself down to an itty bitty number in the lower single digits or stumble on a brand that can accentuate all that I got going on. Since Mitt Romney has a better chance of leading a conga line at the DNC than I do of being a waif size 4, my money’s on the former, not the latter. Then again, there’s always sweatpants.

I’ve been through one bad breakup. I should say, I survived one bad breakup. He had been my first love. Next to losing my grandparents, that was the most intense emotional pain I’ve ever been through. That thing was real. I remember it vividly: he called me in the middle of the night to tell me that he had a new girlfriend. I recall sitting up in my bed screaming. Literally. Whole household is asleep, and there I am, mouth wide open, hollering like an infant in a bassinet because this dude no longer wanted to be with me. So much so, he hauled off and got himself a new woman to solidify his done-ness.

There’s one more step in the sordid process of recovering from a broken heart: resolution. Part of that is coming to peace with the fact that it’s over. The other is fondly remembering the good things and learning from the ones that made you want to backslap the foolishness off yourself—like these five things I swear I will never, ever, not never do again.

Allow myself to be giddy about that gray area. Homeboy and I were together two years, three if you count that weird, in-between stage where we did all the things that we did when we were officially together, like spend time and have sex, which of course kept me nice and emotionally connected. But when he didn’t feel like being bothered or when I was getting too girlfriendy for his liking, he swiftly reminded me that we weren’t together. I was just happy he was paying me mind, so I stayed in that space for way too long. Hell, I should’ve never been in the first place.

Have a baby out of wedlock. Aside from being in love with the man, we’d had a baby girl together. I adore her and I surely don’t regret her as my child, but I do regret not waiting until I was in a healthy, happy marriage. My mama warned me not to be like her, a single mom raising a child on my own. But I was too head-in-my-behind, heart-in-the-clouds. I just knew me and this guy were the exception to the statistics, not thinking that once upon a time, my mother and father had probably been in love, too.

Fail to put God at the head. I grew up in a Jesus-loving household and I’ve always had a relationship with the Lord. But ask me if I ever, even one time, lifted up a prayer to ask the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit if I was with the right dude. I just knew what I wanted and pretty much expected God to fall in line with that and oh, by the way, bless the relationship. No wonder that thing failed. Not only was my man my top priority—another fail on my part—but he wasn’t even the right man, which I might’ve known had I invited Jesus into our twosome.

Lose my mind being jealous or insecure. Man, I was a handful back then. I even had an issue with the guy watching porn because I felt so un-fabulous about myself, I didn’t want him to have ready material to compare me to. As if, in our daily back and forth on a college campus that was about five girls to every one guy, he didn’t have enough to work with just going to the café to get a bite to eat. If Janelle now could talk to Janelle then, I’d say get some couch time, get a self-help book, and get over it.

Wait (and wait and wait) on a ring. I learned this one from the next boyfriend, who would’ve made the perfect husband—except he just wouldn’t drop down to that knee and pull that little sparkly piece of finger candy out. We had a ball together and he was a wonderful father figure to my daughter. But after eight years (oh yes, I said eight) I learned the hard way that a guy doesn’t always tell you he’s afraid of marriage. Sometimes he just shows you.

There’s a happy ending to all this hard-knock love lesson learning. My man now is beautiful and kind, and he knows what I’ve been through and appreciates me for the woman my experiences have helped shape me into. But even more important than that, I appreciate me for the woman my experiences have helped shape me into. Janelle 13 years ago wasn’t nearly as thoughtful and fearless as Janelle today is. That’s because, after you’ve survived a broken heart—if you know like I do—you know you can survive just about anything. And win.

We dry hump TV game show hosts. Bob Barker must be somewhere heaving a huge sigh of relief that this girl didn’t come charging down the aisle at him when her number was called to come on down. Black folks have been known to cut up on game shows—the potion of competition and the possibility of free money makes us giddy—but there seems to be a special place reserved on The Price Is Right for our tomfoolery. And although I can certainly appreciate this particular contestant’s jubilance, all the big money spins in a hour-long show can’t justify wrapping her legs around Drew Carey like she’s an extra in Dirty Dancing. Yeesh. Calm down.

We browbeat each other for overpriced sneakers. If I don’t ever hear the word “Jordans” and the number “11” in conjunction again, it’ll be too soon, particularly as it relates to top news stories that involve watching grown men mollywhop women, children, and the maimed and disabled to score a pair of sneakers that cost all of 25 cents to make in some faraway sweat shop. Every single time the news covered a story about some simple-minded crime involving those doggone sneakers, I held my breath waiting for the name of the assailant. And every single time, it was something like Derquan Jackson or Otis Jenkins and I knew, without a doubt, that another one of us had drunk the Kool-Aid and paid dearly for it.

We refer to all Asian people as “Chinese.” My apologies to the entire Asian community for the continuous oversights of some of my brethren and sistren, who seem to think that the whole big continent is comprised only of China. I once heard a frustrated woman in a beauty supply store declare that she could. not. stand. Chinese people, which would’ve probably stung more if the owners of the establishment weren’t Korean.

We don’t code switch enough. Not every Black person speaks Ebonics, but those of us who are fluent in that tongue should know when to turn it on and when to shut it down. I want to pull the lever that opens up the floor and swallows me up when I hear a brother or sister all loud and proud in a corporate setting talking about some “ain’t got no’s” or “I be doing’s.” I’m as improper as they come—English major and all—but my mama taught me early to talk one way around us and another around them.

We beat our kids mercilessly in public. Let it be known that I believe in corporal punishment. My daughter has sprouted up about an inch and a half taller than me now but that chick knows if and when the situation ever calls for it, I’ll climb a step ladder and Macho Man Randy Savage her tail to get her behavior in check. However, however, that type of punishment is reserved for home. Outside, she gets The Look, maybe a scold, but never the full-out hand combat some of our parents are laying on their children in public.

We’re mesmerized by white folks. They ooh and ahh over their hair. They hang on their words. They’re hot on their heels. They throw around terms like “ghetto” in mixed company and crack jokes at our people’s expense. They make me want to tap them on the shoulder and remind them that they are in fact Black, despite their best efforts to be the opposite. They don’t have enough sense to be humiliated by their own shucking and jiving, so I am on their behalf.

We mispronounce all kinds of words. Where oh where do reporters come up with some of the folks they find to interview? Last night on TV, a woman in a headscarf with about three good teeth and maybe four or five bad ones covered up her exposed collar bone after the journalist asked her about the cold snap we’re experiencing here on the east coast. As she was bundling up for effect, the local celebrity shook her head, looked straight into the camera, leaned into the mic and announced that she hoped she didn’t catch ammonia. Now, I’m not a snob, but dammit. Get it together.

Get it off your chest: what do some Black folks do to embarrass you?

Guys will insist that cheating has less to do with how physically irresistible the side piece is and more about the need she’s fulfilling that main girlfriend can’t or won’t. (Even my own boyfriend dared to cosign this idea, which proves he really does have a steel set given the highly sensitive nature of the subject and the potentially volatile nature of this writer.) And in the land of logical checks and balances, it would make sense if your man percolated on your commitment for a breathtaking sista built like the human number eight. Heck, the offense might even seem somewhat forgivable. But being dissed for Brianna Basic can rock your self-confidence down to its core. What does this no-frills heffa bring to your man’s table that you don’t?

With the 80/20 rule in play, there’s as many answers as there are homewreckin’ hoochies in the world. (And with the march of reality TV starlets still beating strong, we’re ever-dismayed to know just how many that is.) Knowing that despite your best, all-in effort, only 80 percent of your dude’s needs are going to be satisfied makes that 20 percent deficient seem like a chasm as wide as Louis Farrakhan’s part. It’s an open invitation for trouble, even in the tightest couples. In the end, does it really matter how the woman who can come between you and your main squeeze looks? Not at all. But it sure makes for plenty of good heckling ammunition when you and your sista circle gets hold of the information.

So beautiful ones, you know as well as I do that 1) a Negro who takes his 20 percent out to market doesn’t deserve your time or tears in the first place and 2) the other woman who didn’t realize she was indeed the other woman should get a pass from any harassment about her physical shortcomings, especially when measured against someone as fabulous as yourself. But if said side chick was a willing participant, fully knowledgeable about you and your role as his woman/wife/girlfriend/lady, then get ready to be as creative as Mother Nature made her homely. It ain’t about maturity—it’s about comedy.

It’s not that I’m vying to be the diva of refined social decorum. It comes from being raised in a household where rudeness—especially from a kid—was not only unacceptable, it was dangerous. Breeze past an adult in the house or at church without saying “hello” loud and clear enough to for them hear and see if you didn’t get yanked up by the back of your collar. Even when I brought friends home from college, they joked about my family being the most please and thank you-ing bunch they ever met. So coming from that immersion in super politeness, it could be just me. But I wonder if my fellow Clutchettes have noticed that manners have taken a massive, long-term sabbatical while bad behavior—like the following examples compiled with the help of my Facebook family—kicks all hell loose on the streets?

1. Not covering coughs and sneezes. It just can’t get any more basic than this but it happens all of the time. How hard is it to raise your hand or crook of your arm to keep personal germs… personal? Somebody launching a spray of nasty, funky snot and spit into the air from their uncovered nose or mouth is setting themselves up to get cursed out after they send everyone around them running for the nearest bottles of Lysol and hand sanitizer. Gross.

2. Loud cell conversations. For some reason, folks’ filters are put in the wind when it comes to talking on the phone in public. They give play by plays of the wild jungle sex they had last night, strategize the child support case they’re waging against their no-good baby father, speculate about the weird bumps they found around their happy place when they were getting out of the shower—all while they’re in the 15 items or less line or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. A personal conversation need not ever become public knowledge but for some reason, folks get real caught up in conversations that put their business on blast.

3. Standing too close at the cash register. Unless you’re planning on chipping in on the bill when that total rings up, there’s no reason for anybody to be standing in the back pockets of someone paying for their items at the store. Put that stuff on the belt if there’s space and then make like Onyx and back the heck up. No one wants anybody breathing down their neck at the ATM so the same goes when they’re punching in their pin on the little card device at the Shop & Save.

4. Letting it all hang out. Ill-fitting clothing is 1) a slap in the face of fashion and 2) an awkward insult to the people who have to lay eyes on it. I don’t care what nobody says: a woman with her 38 DDDs hogging all of the available oxygen in the room in a shirt that is vacuum-suction tight and five inches too low is just as rude as a little dude with his pants sagging mid-thigh and his booty flapping in the breeze. It’s an abomination to all good thoughts to look up and realize that the only thing separating you from some random guy’s wide open butt is a paper-thin pair of dingy cotton boxers.

5. Failure to launch (out of your seat). This one grinds my nerves down to the root: not standing up for elderly people, pregnant women and (for men) women in general on public transportation is fodder for a whole other article in and of itself. But it’s a sad, sad state of affairs when an 80-year-old man with a cane or an about-to-bust lady with child struggles onto the train or up the steps of the bus only to be left standing by a whole row of folks sitting defiant and not willing to do the right thing. At least offer.

6. Acting like you’re at the carry-out. You didn’t bring so much as a bowl of Chex Mix or a six-pack of sodas to your boyfriend’s family function but you have three Tupperware containers stashed in your purse for your own personal after party. You were wrong for coming empty-handed but, unless you were invited to do it, you’re super duper dead wrong for ripping off a piece of foil to take something home.

7. Letting your kids run wild. Nobody but you thinks it’s cute that Little Earl almost knocked down five innocent shoppers while he was playing a solo game of hide ‘n seek in the racks at TJ Maxx. If you didn’t look like you could whoop my behind up one side and down the next, I’d snatch him and shake some sense into him myself, but I’m forced to ask you to do it instead.

8. Facebook and Twitter etiquette. Some people don’t know how to act in real life, so that certainly translates to their presence in the big, wide world of social media. Posting naughty pictures of your ex’s man parts and tagging his new girlfriend or worse, his mother? Wrong. Making smart alecky, disparaging, just plain heffa-like comments on walls and status updates? Stop. Uploading unflattering pictures of your girlfriends just because you happen to look good in them? Rude. Your online activity is still a reflection of you so be ladylike, even in cyberspace.

9. Not speaking. Walking into someone’s house, parking your tail in somebody’s car, going to a function and hanging on the fringes without so much as a ‘hey, how you doin’?’” will surely make you the hot topic of conversation after you leave—and it won’t be about how cute your shoes were, either.

10. Smacking while eating. We’re all very glad that you’re enjoying your food. But c’mon now. It can’t possibly be your first and it’s pretty safe to say not your last meal—and even if it was, that would be all the more reason not to share it with the rest of us. Eat quieter and keep your mouth closed.

11. Driving with unedited music blaring. The beauty of riding around in warm weather is being able to feel the breeze through open windows but you ruin it for everybody else when you pull up to a red light blaring 50 Cent’s finest—especially when there are senior citizens or worse, kids in the backseat of the next car exposed to his every F bomb or B word. Multiply that ig’nance times ten if you’re piping porn through the TVs in your console/visors/headrests.

12. Pointing out to someone that they’ve gained weight. This one is not only dumb, it’s dangerous. You think said guy or girl doesn’t stare at the fruit of their love affair with Five Guys and chicken cheesesteaks each and every day? You ain’t shedding light on nothing they don’t already know. Ask about their family, their job, their neighborhood—heck, their watch or their earrings if you’ve got nothing else to chat about—and let that 75 pound weight gain be the pink elephant in the room that no one wants to touch. They know it, you know it, but sho nuff don’t nobody need to mention it.

13. Soliciting for charity. It’s one thing when homeless folks roll up asking for dough from cars stuck captive at the red light or sitting at the gas pump. But when employees working the register put you on the spot to donate a dollar to something like Children’s Miracle Network—loud and proud so you can feel real miserly if you’re forced to say ‘no’—it’s the equivalent of the cashier leaning over to announce to the line of people behind you that this loser is too much of a tightwad to care about the kids. In reality, you may be spending your very last $10 with nothing to spare and need a little fundraising your damn self.

14. Failing to control your umbrella. It’s bad enough that we’re on the out and about in the rain. But what makes it even worse is when you tilt your umbrella just so, so that the water goes splashing down on the person beside or behind you. Same goes for letting your wet albeit folded umbrella bump up against folks on the bus or train, or shaking it off when you get inside (why oh why did you wait until you were in the lobby on the nice, slippery floor to do that?)

15. Not acknowledging a gift received. There’s no reason why someone who takes the time to think of a friend, a loved one or a co-worker should have to wonder and theorize about whether you got the thing they sent to you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pack of fresh gym socks or a book of diabetic recipes. Thanks are still in order for their thoughtfulness.

16. Public cussing. There’s a time and a place for everything and though peppering your conversation with four letter-riddled witticisms might be the norm at home, when you get outside of your pad you’ve got to be mindful that others might be offended by such unrefined word choices. There are kids, older folks and just a wide range of people who aren’t interested in hearing how many times you can cram the eff word into one Guinness record-setting sentence.

17. Blocking the aisle with your cart (or yourself). There’s no need to leave your basket sitting smack dab in the middle of the same path everybody has got to use to get to the bread and bottled water. It’s got wheels. Whatever you forgot and turned around to go get—take your cart with you.

18. Failure to communicate. Texting, Twitter and Facebook have made it so convenient to shoot your friends and family a little “howdy, just thinkin’ about ya” holler or random little thoughts you’d like to share with them, but when it comes to something major—the death of a relative, the breakup of a marriage or serious relationship, foreclosure on a home—you just can’t sum up the proper amount of concern in 140 characters or less. A message saying “Sry abt ur grandma. She was a gr8 lady” just doesn’t smack of sincerity.

19. Not holding the door. No one wants a door crashing in their face as they prance into their destination. Don’t be a hero and stand in wait for someone strolling clear across the parking lot. But for another person walking ten steps behind, it’s common courtesy to give them a few seconds to get to the entrance instead of letting them hustle up to eat your dust and kiss the glass door.

20. Taking too long to cash checks. You know how we do. We’ll post date it, we’ll give it to you and ask you to hold on to it until we get paid on Friday, we’ll write a reminder date in the memo line. There’s a whole set of time sensitivity rules when it comes to writing checks in the Black community. So if you don’t just go on ahead and take your butt to the bank so Aunt Ruby or Sister Jenkins can stop recalculating her checking account everyday, you run the risk of falling smack into the rude category.

For these and probably a dozen more reasons, I’ve had my Black card threatened on more occasions than I can rightly count. Even my own daughter tried to take it when it came out that she could beat me pretty easily in two Black girl rites of passage: numbers and double dutch. Forget that my graduate work is in African-American studies or that I can flawlessly transition from the Electric Slide to the Wobble Dance without being that person who gets the rhythm all jacked up. Doesn’t matter. You might be born with it, but holding on to it is a whole different story. Lawd don’t I know it. And you might just lose your black card if:

1. You stumble through the first stanza of Lift Every Voice and Sing (or you only come in loud and proud on the chorus) but you know “Moves Like Jagger” word for word.

2. You can name every character on Gossip Girl but struggle to identify the three original cast members on Dreamgirls.

3. You can’t celebrate Barack Obama being in the White House, even if you don’t agree with his politics.

4. You ease your hand down to lock your car doors or subtly grasp your purse strap tighter when you see a band of young, Black men approaching.

5. You brazenly use the N-word in mixed company or even worse, you call a person in mixed company the N-word.

6. You’d rather wear an offensively scaggy lace front or a ri-damn-diculous weave than be caught dead rocking your natural hair.

7. You don’t have at least one uncle living in his glory days, an aunt who’s hanging onto 35 when she’s almost 65, or a cousin who “went away” for a little while.

8. You cannot, on command, list five Luther Vandross songs.

9. You don’t support Black businesses—and you badmouth them to anybody who’ll listen—because you had a bad experience one time seven years ago.

10. You call Kool-Aid by its actual flavor instead of identifying it solely by its color.

11. You don’t get teary-eyed watching The Color Purple, Women of Brewster Place or that Disney commercial with the little boy talking to his grandpa in sign language.

12. You still identify folks as “high yellow” or having “good hair” (I mean, check your calendar. It’s almost 2012).

13. You don’t even pretend to show respect while folks are praying, even if you and God are on the outs.

14. You aren’t familiar with the historical value of the year 1619 but you think it sounds like a good number to play.

15. You believe the only way to celebrate your daughter’s Blackness is to give her a name ending in some variation of –ika, -isha or –ima.

16. You refuse to live in a neighborhood with too many colored folks because you only feel like you’ve arrived if you have a white or Asian neighbor.

17. You shake your hair out of your eyes, flick it off of each shoulder or wear a scrunchie around your wrist to put it up in a ponytail and take it back down, then put it up in a ponytail and take it back down, then put it up…

18. You don’t feel the least bit funny calling a man or woman old enough to be one of your grandparents by their first name.

19. You’ve never watched an episode of The Cosby Show (bonus points if you secretly wished you were a part of the family).

20. You vehemently claim HBCUs are subpar schools but you graduated from a state institution that stays on the accreditation hit list.

21. Your kids have burned through five babysitters, been kicked out of three restaurants and you’ve got a reserved seat at parent-teacher conferences, but you choose to remedy the situation with time-outs in the corner instead of digging in their tails.

22. You look baffled whenever the conversation about Black history veers from Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman or Langston Hughes.

Your Black card, as my friend Shana says, is the one card that can never be declined, denied or falsified. But it sure can be called into question.

What’s on your list? 

Besides running up on him vigilante-style with Joey Greco and his “Cheaters” camera crew in tow, your other option is to do your own behind-the-scenes investigative work to confirm your suspicions and vindicate your snooping.

Y’all know the drill: check pants pockets, sniff shirts, rifle through car consoles, dig in gym bags, scan store receipts, crack Facebook passwords, and read text messages. Those who seek shall almost always inevitably find, so when you uncover proof of his doggishness, the first step is usually one of two things: a) confront him or b) confront the other woman.

Sometimes she’s completely unaware that dude has a girlfriend or, even worse, a wife. In that case, it’s kind of hard to hold her responsible when your man has worked just as hard to deceive her as he did to deceive you. But sometimes she’s just a bold, brash and brazen heifer who could give two pieces of nothing about y’all being in love since college, your two kids or your plans to get married next fall. She’s just trying to get hers. And that? That right there is the brand of other woman who makes you want to grab your sneakers, pop off your acrylics, snatch out your earrings and slather some Vaseline on your face. That is a woman who makes it real hard for a lady to stay ladylike.

I’m not saying that isn’t fair game. I mean, a homewrecker does open herself up to a certain brand of ‘hood justice, as archaic as it might be. But all too often, we get so completely blindsided by our hatred of the recently-discovered other woman that we forget to give just dues to the brothas who are at the whole root and source of the situations. They get to scuttle around unscathed—and in their simple little twisted man minds, sometimes convince themselves that we’re fighting over them—while our female bravado flares up, acts out, and puts all of our good, God-given common sense in a chokehold. While we’re stalking, threatening and following the side-chicks (and don’t think I don’t know that you’re doing it: calling her boss and telling him that she has crabs. Tsk tsk tsk. Shame on you!), the dudes are relishing in their adventures and becoming the #1 storytellers at the barbershop because we fail to throw the whole blame and responsibility at them, not the fool broads they slept with.

Had the man kept his penis in its compartment, you could have spent this valuable time shopping or eating or making love or knitting a sweater or doing a floor puzzle or any other doggone thing you wanted to do aside from having your heart crushed and feeling the need to beat another woman to a pulp in order to defend your honor. There were two people in the relationship: you plus him. So while it may seem like a natural reaction to attack the intruder, the real individual to address would be your now-former boo.

As far as I’m concerned, confronting the side chick is one big, long, sometimes bloody and bail-money-needing vent. It’s a temporary distraction from acknowledging the pain of being played by someone we love—or at least kind of care about—and an opportunity to take it out on the jerk who infiltrated your life while your guard was down. But I think that there’s more regret than affirmation when it comes to rolling up on the other woman.

Text her if you must. Call her, stop by her job, mail her a letter, keep setting off the motion detector in front of her house if it makes you feel better. But don’t forget to put the man who was the reason y’all met in the first place on the same kind of aggravation installment plan.

In fact, make his a double.

Since I’m the first person in my family to have the privilege of going to college, there was no background knowledge on the mystifying world of post-secondary financial aid. Fortunately, a one-two punch of excellent grades and fairly decent SAT scores earned me a full ride to, among others, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first HBCU in the country and an institution that had turned out some pretty impressive luminaries (excuse me for a moment: LU!!! Lincoln pride!!! Okay, carry on.) For my first two years of school, I didn’t have to worry about paying for too much of anything, save a super expensive English book that put me over the amount that my voucher was worth. Then mysteriously, the scholarship was no longer being offered and I was forced to throw together my own financial aid package, a conglomerate of grants, smaller scholarships and those dreaded, damned, “what-did-I-even-learn-that-was-worth-this-much-money?” student loans.

I don’t even want to tell you how much I owe. Actually, I couldn’t even if I really wanted to because I literally avert my eyes from the grand totals whenever I’m on the website. (It’s the visual equivalent of covering my ears and going “lalalalala” when someone’s saying something I don’t want to hear.) Childish? Maybe. Irresponsible? Perhaps. But I tell you as sure as I’m sitting here on this sofa at 7 AM with unbrushed teeth and a silk scarf on my head that if I knew the depth and extent of my debt to that corporate extortionist (and the federal government, because I owe them a few bucks, too), they’d have to cart me away and spoon-feed me Jell-O in a padded white room.

I shouldn’t single Sallie Mae out, though they have been accused of redlining and overcharging Black and Latino borrowers. I hate all student loans from all originators and lending institutions for all people everywhere trying to make a decent living without the ghost of academic past knocking at their door. I hate the concept that you go to school because society and your family and the working world is forever emphasizing the importance of being educated but when you get that golden sheet of paper and all the knowledge that goes along with it, you have to spend the next 10, 15, heck, maybe even 30 or 40 years of your life paying for it. It doesn’t matter if you never do anything with the major you specialized in or the degree you worked so hard to earn. They ain’t splittin’ hairs if you make $17,000 a year as a parking attendant or $160,000 a year as a litigator. They’re going to come for you. And even if you die, your family is still on the hook for the education you took with you to the grave.

There’s been ongoing and widespread outrage about predatory lending from mortgage companies but based on the horror stories I hear from friends and friends of friends and other folks I run into in my random travels, student loans are just about the worst form of predatory lending anytime, anywhere, anyplace. (The credit cards they send you and your jobless college student tail during your first 90 days on campus are THE worst, but that rant is fodder for another article.) What’s ironic is most of the time, you don’t even have any credit but you’re permitted to dig yourself into debt for the sake of your education. You’re what, 18, 20 years old? You’re living away from home for the first time, and the parents and adult family members you’re so hell bent on asserting your independence from are umpteen miles away. You go to register for classes and—gasp—the financial aid office almost gleefully reports that you have a balance and that in order to stay on campus and attend class, you need X amount of dollars to clear up your bill. Panic sets in like the side effects of a bad Mexican dish. Even if you call home and, through a series of heaving, almost incoherent sobs, relay the bad news to your folks, you know they don’t have anything close to the $3,000 or so dollars that you need to stay in school (because it’s never like an easy, breezy 300 bucks.)

Now, the financial aid folks do offer you an alternative. You could just sign this application here and all your worries will be alleviated and your obligations satisfied—for the time being. They shove a few forms with text as dense and intricate as a Shakespearean sonnet under your desperate little nose and explain, in abbreviated albeit cryptic terms, the conditions of your loan with one glowing, neon sign-bright bottom line that sells you: you won’t have to pay until after you graduate. Phew! What a relief. That’s at least a few years away. You unknowingly sign your deal with the devil and traipse off to the cafeteria to get a piece of fried chicken and tell your girls the good news.

Then you graduate. Congratulations flow. You party. You celebrate. You thankfully move into the “I’m an adult for real for real” phase of your life. You might get your first apartment. You hit the pavement to put those book smarts and that internship experience to work in the real world. Oh—and you get a call from your student loan servicer welcoming you to the repayment phase. Yeah, it’s time to pay up, baby girl. You and two-thirds of other college graduates who leave school with debt, most of it at least $20,000. Graduate and professional students have it even worse. Those loans average anywhere between $27,000 to $114,000, depending of course on the field, school and specialty. And in this market, none of those MAs, BSes, PhDs or MSWes are adding up to j-o-b-s. In fact, defaults are at their highest rate in 11 years. And even if, in the dire straits of drowning in good debt gone bad, you file bankruptcy, guess what? Everything, even your gambling obligations, can be discharged—except your student loans. Those you still have to pay.

I’m not even going to pretend to have the solution to remedy the high cost of education in this country. I’m just a freelance writer and editor with a Bachelor of Arts in English and an almost-finished Master of Arts in African-American Studies that together will cost me, by the time all is said and done, way more than they’re probably worth when interest is compounded by them and reluctantly paid by me. I just know firsthand how terrible it is to second-guess your pursuit of education because the only way you can finance your desire to learn is through borrowing money. It’s messed up. There is $85 billion in student loan debt burdening everybody from anesthesiologists to architects. It’s funny—I paid all that money to learn but one of the greatest lessons I got out of school was to read the freakin’ fine print.