I’ve mentioned numerous times on this site that I’m currently broker than I’ve ever been. Well, that’s still the case. And since I don’t currently have a source of income… well nuts.

So this week I’ve found out how many job application forms I can fill in before my attitude problems start to seep into it. It’s one. One job application form. Luckily, I think I can answer in a such a way that you can’t tell the tone of voice I’m using. Like when they ask “Can we contact employers before your most recent employer for information” and I answer “Yes, though I don’t have contact information for people I worked for a decade ago” they hopefully don’t realize that I’m mentally adding “You FRIGGING IDIOT” to the end.

But, man, my rent is going up in a few months. I don’t care for that at all. But also, upon seeing how much money I made over the Summer, the government decided my student loan should be lessened by about five hundred bucks because they apparently assume I should have more money than I do (they already assumed I had several thousand more than I actually do). I guess next time I’ll look harder for the box I can check that says I was paying nearly a thousand dollars in rent because my terrible roommate did not pay. Thank goodness I have a paying roommate now. It turns out that it is really helpful.

In the meantime, I am also trying to do all kinds of reading for the school year. I’ve got one more class this semester than I did in the last, so I’m expecting to be pretty darn busy. I’m trying to get as much of the reading I need to have done before classes begin. I’m quite a slow reader, so this is not easy. I admit, I chose classes in which I’d already read some material, but there is just so much more to read. I’m pretty sure I can fake some it, but I really am going to try to read as much as I can. And that takes time.

All week I’ve been talking about worries I have about going back to school apart from money. Well, the last one is money. I’m so worried about money it even shows up on the list that explicitly excepts it.

My financial state has not been good this year, that is for sure. As you may recall I even went so far as to get a roommate to help with rent because I wanted to climb out of debt (that hasn’t worked, by the way, what with the roommate apparently deciding that paying rent was optional and leaving half-eaten plates of food around would suffice). So here I am, kinda screwed. Still in the worst financial state I’ve ever been in and I’m quitting my source of income to go to school, which I have to pay for. Not the wisest plan.

I have no idea how people afford things. People out there have cars and smoke and drink and can apparently pay for all these things somehow. People have pets and children that do nothing but drain their resources. I don’t get it. At the job I am leaving I made a pretty decent amount of money, but it never seemed to get me anywhere. After rent and bills and stuff, I made enough to occasionally buy a dvd or a book (though not as often these last few years). I guess I did travel about once a year, but always as cheaply as I could. And anyway, it seemed like that was always coming out of credit, rather than ever being the result of any amount of money being saved. I’ve met people who can go on week-long trips at least yearly, whereas all but two of my trips in the last five years have been crammed into weekends without missing work. No monetary progress has ever been made.

I guess a lot of the people out there have people helping them, spouses or families who also have an income to help out. But still, it seems like I should be climbing out of this hole faster than not at all. I know I pay a lot for rent, so that’s a big chunk. I also give a little to some charities every month. That takes up a little of the money too. I am lucky that I don’t eat much, but when I do eat it often includes restaurant takeout and fresh produce oranges/apples/grapefruit/melons. That stuff probably adds up. I have always tried to pay back more than the minimum payments on my credit card, but the debt just grows and grows. Every time the statements look good some other fee comes out of nowhere and keeps me from getting closer to paying anything off. Are those four types of expenditures enough to use everything I earn?

And if they are, how am I going to manage without the money I make now? It looks bad.

Continuing my attempt to look on the bright side I find that the bright side of this is pretty bittersweet. First of all, I’ve cut my charitable donations by more than half. That makes me hate myself all the more, but it will probably be helpful. I always credited those as the reason for getting so much back on my income tax, though, so I sure hope I don’t end up with less coming back to me, or worse, owing money.

Another sad victory, Amazon has told me it can’t find a copy of the Black Panther Masterworks to give me. It’s good because it saves me like forty bucks, but also it is sad because I want to own those comics.

Perhaps I have to look for this silver lining from a different angle. How’s this: I’ve got a paying job now, which means I can just barely afford to buy a laptop before I go to school. So I did that yesterday. I have a new laptop. I’ll talk more about that in the future.

Okay, so, with the release of the latest Swartzwelder novel, the Million Dollar Policeman, I have declared National Bookorderin’ Day in the Nation of PDR. But this year I have a complication: I already bought my books for this year. I did it months ago.

So, in addition to my new Swartzwelder, I’m getting the Black Panther Masterworks, which collects that characters appearances in Jungle Action. I’ve read these some time ago and they were quite excellent. Even saving a bit for a sale price, I’m paying more than I ought to spend these days, but owning this is going to make me happy, so there’s that to consider as well.

On top of this I got the cheapest of the used copies of the Space Quest Companion, which as far as I can tell is a prose retelling of the Space Quest games narrated by Roger Wilco. I would like to read that.

I will not be buying more books this year. This is all the money I can spend.

For more than a year now, I think, I’ve had something of a mission around my apartment, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here. I’ve been trying to get rid of as much of my accumulated stuff as I can. It was easy at first, I left about a third of my clothes in some of those donation boxes, and I just discarded my busted up dresser and this one chair I had. But as time goes on, it is getting harder to find things I can be so easily rid of.

Then I found a bag of disposable razors that I must have got somewhere. It had been quite a few years since I last bothered to go fully cleanshaven, I’ve instead been just using an electric trimmer at its lowest setting to give myself short stubble. But the possibility of using up the razors (and a can of shaving cream as well, for that matter) overcame my laziness and so I have been shaving this month for real.

Of course, I’m not all that good at it.

Not a great picture, but I’m confident that you can tell I’ve been butchering my face.

At any rate, it is getting to the point where my collections of comics, books, and DVDs are really showing how big they are. While I was able to rid myself of a handful of books, I really don’t want to part with most of these things. But there is also a not-insubstantial collection of VHS tapes I’ve collected. Years ago someone was leaving their collection in the laundry room of the building each with three movies taped from a movie network or something like that. I’m now working my way through these, getting rid of them as I go. Many of them are old movies I’ve either seen or never heard of and hopefully, as I get through them, I’ll work up the energy to offer my thoughts on the Internet, since that was my justification for taking the tapes in the first place.

Anyway, my ultimate goal is to have way less stuff. So far, it is going well.

Well, I’m pretty sure I left my copy of Brighton Rock on a bus someplace. It could be worse, I was only a couple pages into it, so I wasn’t all that invested (when I lost my copy of Don Quixote a few years back, I had invested months of reading time into it, so I needed to buy another copy), but I hope that someone finds and reads it. That’s the best result we can hope for at this point.

Haiku!

You ain’t never seen
a truck like this one before.
It has ballistae.

There was this thing in the paper last night about some Austrian priests who wanted to see some changes in the Church and the Pope was all like “Nah”, well fear not Austrian priests. When I am the Pope, I will have your back. Just get me in there, guys.