Classes started today at my university. The only class I've had so far is Intro to Music, and since I'm going to D'Argo Con (Dragon Con) tomorrow morning, I won't have any of the others until I return next week. Aside from that, all that I did today was work.
One of the two main hotels is supposed to have wireless internet access. The other merely has “high speed internet access”. Either way, there's a good chance I'll be able to post from the room, in which case you should expect to see daily reports on the con, starting Friday (unless there's a way we can post from Ray's dad's house, where we will be Thursday night) and ending Monday (when I have to come back).
Mood: Pathetic.
Around the time that I wrote my end of semester report, we learned that our landlords are planning to sell the house we rent. This has thrown my personal life into a bit of upheaval, and is causing serious emotional strain for all concerned, but for me particularly. I don't fully understand why, and can't really articulate what I suspect, but this is my attempt.
Warning: Aimless whining sob-story ahead. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Moving, by itself, is not the issue. In fact, it's probably the easiest aspect of this situation to solve (possibly the only one that I can solve in the short term). Rather, it's more like the wrong straw at the wrong time breaking the camel's back.
To begin with, I'm coming off of a bad semester, probably the worst I've had since I've been in school. It has made me question my choice of major (although I've always been fairly honest with myself on the prospects of an Art Degree), my job prospects post-graduation (a deadline which is looming ever-closer). My grades were the lowest they've been (not bad, just a touch lower than normal) mainly due to the compromises I had to make just to get stuff done. Then, just when I think it's over temporarily and start to relax, I get this in the face (a week after making a non-trivial cash outlay on a luxury item, no less).
I was depressed after I first heard, but was relieved when we later learned our landlords were willing to work with us on the timing. That relief evaporated the other day when I suddenly realized that Gena was actually planning to be gone at the end of this month (due to miscommunication and miscomprehension on my part, it was a bit of a surprise, despite her saying as much last year … I had been under the impression her plans had changed in the meantime, and that she was as relieved to stay another month or two as Pete and I). That would mean we'd have to pick up her share of rent and bills, which neither of us can afford. Ever since then, the situation has been fluctuating day-by-day.
This instability has made me seriously question the state of my life, and the results aren't pretty.
I'm tired of living day-to-day, check-to-check, accomplishing little except killing time and bringing myself a step closer to inevitable death. I see and feel a desperate need to plan for my long-term future while I still can, but I don't know how to get there from here. So much time has already been wasted. Fifteen years since I graduated high school have passed by in the blink of an eye, and I'm still functioning hand-to-mouth. I came to school in part to give myself time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Not only do I not know, but I have even less idea of what career I want than when I started.
Last Friday was my 33rd birthday. Distressingly near the midpoint of my life expectancy. I feel older, physically (in the slowly eroding health sense), but I feel precious little wiser or more accomplished. The only things I presently feel I've obtained as a result of my most recent life decision (college) are memories (good and bad), a few new friends, some minor artistic development, and several times as much debt as I've ever had in my life (tens of thousands of dollars).
Most of my friends in both of my current “circles”, and even my brother (11 years my junior), are married now. Some have houses and/or new cars. I'm not jealous of those things, and I don't exactly judge success by those milestones, but it brings up issues that I've been trying to cope with for years now and pokes them really hard. I feel like life is passing my by (indeed, like it has long-since passed me by). I've been feeling that nearly continuously since my mid-twenties, but it was never quite this potent, for this long.
When my married friends have the sort of problem I'm having right now, they at least know they have someone right there, sharing the burden.
I can't bear to be around my family for long right now, because they have drama of their own in their lives right now, much of it long-term situations that I can't do much about. This just makes me feel guilty that I can't help, and in some ways, also guilty as a contributing factor. The problem isn't that I'm unsympathetic … the problem is that I'm more sympathetic than I probably need to be, but feel largely unable to do anything to help. I know it's not my responsibility to solve everyone's problems, but I feel like it is nevertheless. Indeed, karma and the golden rule would seem to operate here.
Mom is working in a factory doing manual labor. I know she won't be able to keep working there for too many years (she really shouldn't be working there now, actually), and her prospects for retirement are basically nonexistant. She is crammed into a too-small apartment with my brother and his wife, and maintains two storage buildings for property that she really should rid herself of.
My sister is in the middle of a somewhat messy divorce, and is trying to get her own life back on track. She's been dealing with the crises leading up to this for some time now.
My brother is actually in a halfway decent position right now. He's still young, married, with a stable (if not high-paying) job, benefits, and a reliable car. I gave him some advice yesterday on something I wish I had listened to when I was his age: start saving now, even if it's only five or ten dollars a week. Plan ahead. Don't live hand to mouth.
He says that that is what he currently intends to do: pay off bills to start building savings. I hope so. By the time he gets to my age, he'll be glad for it.
My friends are generally busy with their own lives, and drawing on them too much for support tends to remind me that I'm in this situation and they are not.
On top of all of that, I have worries over the global situation and the domestic economy, and I've long since lost faith that this country stands for anything except crime, conformity, and making a quick buck at the expense of others.
At any rate, whatever the reasons, it's affected me pretty seriously in the last two weeks.
And yet, I've never been very pro-active about solving housing or employment problems, and I'm not very good at it. I feel defeated before I even try, which I know is stupid and only guarantees defeat, but I can't seem to get around the mental block. I don't have a lot of patience with extended sessions of searching … because of the unlikelihood of success on the first try, the process tends to easily trigger bouts of introspection.
The only relief I get is from all of this is when I manage to distract myself from thinking about it too closely (which is getting harder and harder to do).
The really annoying thing about all of this is that I KNOW my current crisis is just temporary, and that I will most likely land on my feet one way or another. I know there's a light at the end of the tunnel … I can see it. I'm just having a hard time coping in the here-and-now.
As for the long term issues, none of them are new problems to me … I've worried over them all before at one time or another, some of them several times. Although I like to think that my current situation will carry through to action when I'm in a better position, I can't be sure that anything will actually change. I know that I'm the only one that can make that happen, I just don't know if I will … or even if I can. I fear that once I am settled again, I will fall back into my old complacent patterns. What's worse, since I've gotten like this over something so minor, what will happen when something more serious hits (like, say, the death of close family or friends, or a major illness)?
One other good thing has come out of this: I've been forcibly reminded of the value of family and friends, which I sometimes tend to take for granted, being reclusive. (I am a humanities student for a reason. I love being around people I know, but I hate being around people that I don't know, and I'm not overly fond of travel. Which usually means that I'm stuck wishing my friends and family would visit more often.) If not for the people in my life, I doubt I'd be coping even this well.
I can't be sure it isn't just my reaction due to stress, but I've probably already been more social in the last two weeks than I was in the prior two or three months. It's possible I've fallen out of the years-long “reclusive” part of my social cycle (believe it or not, I'm not always as reclusive as I've been in recent years).
I leave you with this thought.
“Life's not a song.
Life isn't bliss.
Life is just this:
It's living.
You'll get along.
The pain that you feel
only can heal
By living.”
Mood: Slightly twitchy, considerably less pathetic.
After I posted my last entry, I talked to my Dad and set up an emergency backup plan for myself in case we can't find something. His basement is unoccupied, but crammed with tons of boxes, so some sort of rearranging would be necessary, but it's feasible. That put me a bit more at ease.
When I got home, Pete was telling me about a duplex he looked at today, which sounds workable (aside from the fact that it's gas-heated, has a $150 non-refundable pet deposit per cat, a full month security deposit, and no room for the pool or a lawnmower) and apparently available now. It's also within walking distance of Mom's place. We are going to look at it tomorrow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Last night I went to Chris and Jenna's, and then to see Troy, so I was sorta doing fine.
Today, I woke up, and was still sorta ok, but slightly on edge. Then, at work I made the mistake of looking into exactly what my situation is and what it will take to get out of it.
$23370. Five little numbers. They seem so small.
When those numbers tell you how much in student loans you have accrued, and you still have another year and probably a bit over 5000 to add on top of that, plus nearly 3000 in credit cards, they become absolutely terrifying.
Assuming I pay off my cards before I get out of school (which I'm dubious about, but intend to make a serious effort at), that still leaves me almost 30,000 dollars in debt.
At the standard rate of repayment (gotta pay it off within ten years) that's $275/mo. At the extended rate, it's only $137/mo, but that's for twenty years and results in almost $10000 in interest. Fifteen years since graduation may seem like the blink of an eye, but twenty in the future is a major chunk of the rest of my life (I'd be 53 before I finished paying that off, assuming I stuck with the minimum).
Obviously, what is required is to reduce/mitigate the debt as much as possible, and/or get a job where I can afford to pay more than the minimum and yet still afford to live. It's just that my job history doesn't give me much hope.
Options to help reduce the amount owed: Volunteer to go to another country with the Peace Corps for two years. Teaching in certain areas for five years. Law enforcement or military service (bloody unlikely).
Friday evening, we had some roleplaying, during which I could focus on something else. I started calming. Yesterday, I did some packing, some talking, and watched a few movies. I was doing halfway decent. I thought that I might possibly be returning to normal … at least, as normal as one can get when one is facing what seems to be a largish debt, with extremely vague plans for coping with it, and with seemingly few prospects and little in my past history to suggest I will be able to.
Then I went over to Mom's to hang out for awhile. Not a huge critical error, but it did remind me of my problems, set off another bout of introspection, and trigger some annoying dreams about next year's graduation and the potential severing of most of the ties that I've managed to make at school.
Those dreams may provide some insight, however. I think a lot of my emotional difficulties right now may be because I'm be getting a sense of precisely how tenuous my connections to life really are.
Life is a terminal disease. Time marches on, and we all get closer to death with each passing day. I've always known it, intellectually, but it never had much impact for me before. People like my brother probably have little sense of it … my own has only been developing in the last decade or so, especially in the last five or six years, as I began to approach my thirties and realized that carefree youth was coming to a close, and I was Getting Old (dum dum dum!). I know most people realize this eventually. Somewhere, dimly, I even knew that I would. But not today, thanks. I'm too busy killing time to notice that I'm killing MY time.
The closest I have ever really come to permanently losing family is when my mother's parents died in the 1990's, and even then I wasn't as close to them as I've been to my dad's parents. I've never had to face that sort of loss. Same goes for friends; I've never lost one due to accident or illness, even though I've always been aware that the Reaper has been stalking on the peripheries of their lives all along.
I play at being reclusive, and to a large extent that is exactly what I've always said it is (a natural inclination that I've always had). But I can't be sure that, somewhere deep down, I'm not trying to retreat from making yet more connections that I know are inevitably going to be cut … sooner or later.
It's the eternal dilemma. Make more connections to try and spread the pain of the loss (or in my case, merely imagining the loss), which provides more opportunities for loss. Or refuse, in an attempt to shield yourself and get in a position where a mere handful of tragedies at the wrong time would leave you completely cut off from everything that ties you to life right now.
I'm not certain that's part of it at all. As I said, I can't be sure.
I pay too much attention to statistics. If you gathered together all of the people that I know personally into a room, you'd still have less than were wiped out in the intial impacts on 9/11 … much less the final total.
Thinking about this sort of thing tends to remind one of how important each one of those connections are, which tends to remind one of how easily they can just go away, which tends to remind one of how important they are, … and on and on and on. Left in that state, it's just a bunch of pointless, venomous tail-chasing.
And, as always, Time and his low-life cousin Entropy are the enemy. The amount of Time we have left is constantly decreasing, the amount we've wasted (on pointless bickering and griping, and sheer mindless self-interest) is constantly increasing.
Who designed this whole Life thing, anyway? I think there are a few fundamental design flaws… :)
There's more to say about this that isn't dealing with tragedy, but I'm going out to lunch with some of my connections.
Lunch was pleasant and amusing, but it wasn't entirely successful at distracting me, through no fault of my friends'. I suspect it's because we were still inhabiting the real world; the most successful distractions I've found so far are gaming and fiction. Pure escapism.
Ray and Stacy graciously stuck around for several hours and we had several good conversations, but then they left and I started to backslide almost immediately. I can't keep my emotions in check for more than a few hours at a time. I've got to get a handle on this, somehow.
My hope at this point is that it really is the impending move, with all of the uncertainty that it engenders, that is forcing my mind to return to walk these bleak paths of fevered apprehension time and again. I have put myself in a situation where I need to have long-term stability in order to extricate myself, and suddenly, as I reach the penultimate milestone, I'm thrown into extreme uncertainty.
Whatever it was that I was thinking about when I wrote the end of the previous entry, I've forgotten about it now.
I've been relatively stable since I posted my last message, although by no means relaxed or in a good mood. I can no longer tell whether this is just normal apprehension and loneliness, or if I'm merely in a relatively controlled phase of what I've been worried is full-blown depression.
Time will tell, I suppose. Our move is imminent.
Had a good game last night, although I was jangling all night because I knew it would be over all too soon. I've been looking forward to games a lot more lately (and dreading their end more). I know that depressives gravitate towards anything that will relieve their pain even momentarily, and I worry that this is the reason. Then again, lonely people will also gravitate towards whatever social contact they have available.
OK, maybe I'm not so stable as I'd hoped.
Nearly had an attack as I was walking in the door from work today. It's like a wave of solid emptiness welling up and making you want to fall on the ground and twitch for awhile. Later, was talking to Stacy on IM, and I did lose it after she went offline.
That may be the worst part of this. The emotions wouldn't be so bad if I could keep them mostly reined in, but every so often I start to crack at the seams, and I do a fair impression of Sarek from the eponymous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It's quite thoroughly terrifying, the loss of control.
Last night I watched Six String Samurai with Gena, and it has to be one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen.
I was pretty emotionally numb when I started watching it. My mood actually lifted a bit from near catatonia to numb-but-active. Today, I'm a bit jangly again. I put it down to becoming a bit gunshy of going to work (and subsequently coming back home).
Today we go to sign our lease on the new place, pay the deposit, and learn when we can move in. After that, I should be able to plan when I will need help moving, and eventually should be able to find out if we can actually fit all of our crap in the new place.
Today's Mood: Variable.
Last night, after feeling faint from “blood loss” (i.e., spending money on the new place and going through a moment of anxiety about how to get through the next three months or so), I started feeling a bit better. A lot better in fact … I was nearly back to my old self. I was cheerful, even hopeful.
Unfortunately, I'm not out of the woods yet. I still have the stress of endless packing and actually moving to contend with over the next week and a half or so, and no solid plan on how I will accomplish it. I woke up today in much the same mood that I started yesterday in, and I've been in flux ever since. It doesn't help that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the longest days I am at work (and thus, they've been the hardest parts of my week during this mess).
I got my manager to install Lightwave for me on my work machine so I'll have something to distract myself with when it's dull in here and I need something to do.
Last night I lost control again. The stress of moving (and specifically, of having to fit all of our stuff into the new place) just boiled up and over, and the barriers collapsed.
Thanks to some of my friends, I've been put in a situation where I can't justify not making an appointment with SMH, so I did. The timing will be tight, since I'll need to make a visit to another building to pay the fee between getting out of work and going for the appointment, and I'll have to walk, but I should be able to do it. Especially if my shift replacement comes in early.
On Friday I had my appointment, was diagnosed with and have entered treatment for clinical depression. Just getting that problem seen to acts as a huge anti-depressant, and I've been riding the improved mood all weekend. Thanks to Ray and Stacy for kicking me into actually doing something about it when I needed to, rather than letting me magnify the reasons not to in my head; I owe you guys big-time.
I'm still waking up a little early and tense, but 1) my medicine can't be expected begin working for awhile yet, and 2) one of the temporary side-effects can be increased anxiety.
Yesterday, we had a yard sale, and my step-father and mother brought his truck and helped me move some of the heavy furniture. I have a few pieces left that most likely won't get moved until next weekend, but I've got a lot of boxes to move between now and then. Getting a lot of that done is also a huge relief to me.
Today, Ray and Stacy are coming to help me transport some of those boxes.
Yesterday's moving went pretty well. Ray and Stacy and I took two loads in our cars, including the TV, stereo, and most of the boxes I had sorted already. My owing of them continues to grow. I took another load myself later on, then went to Mom's to hang out. I was pretty much fine all day, up until I realized that I still haven't gotten the Financial Aid sheet for next year.
Today I woke up tenser than I've been since before my appointment. Today I have to take care of getting the utilities transferred into our name, call Financial Aid about that sheet, and go back to work for the first time since I visited the doctor's. Thankfully, all of that seems to have been taken care of (except work, which has another hour).
I'll be glad when this medicine starts kicking in.
Whatever I was riding last weekend is tapering off, and my medicine still hasn't kicked in (nor am I really expecting it to, not for at least a few more days).
Last night I suffered another bout with emotional distress, caused by my usual problems with the longer shifts I have on Tuesdays and Thursdays, coupled with coming home to yet more packing and sorting boxes in a lonely and uncomfortably hot house. It wouldn't be so bad if I had company. I didn't make a whole lot of progress, partly because of those problems, and partly because one of the boxes I was sorting contained a lot of memories.
Among other things, I found some cards I recieved when I graduated high school, old books thought long lost, and a TV book from 1994. As it turns out, this Friday is the ten-year anniversary of the original local broadcast of the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember what we were doing that night and the next day, because we made it an event.
I'm still waking up an hour or two early (it's almost as though my body knows what time I set the alarm for and refuses to wait that long, regardless of when I go to bed), tense and so forth. I seem to be losing weight (which isn't such a bad thing, as long as it doesn't get out of hand), but that may be partially because I'm walking more to get from my car to work every day, lugging boxes and furniture around, and so forth.
I was going to go over to Mom's last night but by the time Randy or Mom would've gotten home from work, I was getting sleepy and had to go to bed (on MWF my shift starts earlier). Perhaps I'll go hang out tonight, or maybe Ray and Stacy will want to do something after they bring over boxes. I really should move some more stuff and break down my computer desk, though.
Today I made the mistake of looking up the side effects of my new medicine, and came across people complaining about how it was useless or counter-productive. That was a bit distressing, but it was mitigated by the fact that I know at least two people on the same drug or a variant thereof, and neither seems to be complaining, and at least one is almost enthusiastic about it's benefits. Trust people you know more than people on the net.
I think that I might move my clocks, clothes, groceries, toiletries, pillows, and the mattress for my futon over to the new place tonight so that I can sleep in relative comfort. Possibly will also bring the cat so that she can start getting used to it.
… Madness takes its toll.
Well, it's another long day at work, nobody around to distract me, nothing interesting to do on the net, and a lot of tedious and lonely work remaining to finish the move.
Went to Mom's last night with perfect timing. Randy pulled in right behind me. Hung out there for an hour or so, and would have stayed longer, but I was getting sleepy. Then I went to the new place and unloaded my car, set up my mattress pad and sleeping bag, and crashed out. I was actually cold last night, rather than miserably hot.
My medicine is beginning to have side effects, mainly in that it's making me drowsy during the day, and I start getting sleepy earlier at night, as mentioned above. And yet I'm still waking up an hour or two early, and tense. Right now I can feel the tension in my scalp and neck, but I don't feel much anxiety.
Sigh. Two hours left.
Is anybody even reading this?
As I type this, it is raining outside for the seventy millionth time this month.
I am here at the Geek Palace on my laptop, sorting and packing up the last few boxes of my junk, and doing some preliminary cleaning. All of my furniture is already gone to the new place, which doesn't yet have internet access, so we've left the router and wireless in place here until the very end. We don't have a cable modem for the new place yet, so who knows when it'll be up over there, but I have net access at work, so I won't be totally out of touch.
My car is parked in the garage, and the back seat is loaded up with some paintings and sketch pads.
This weekend was pretty busy. I wasted time at Mom's with Randy on Friday instead of doing what I'm doing now (there's only so much of this one can take at a time). Randy made me play City of Heroin for a few hours. Then we went to the new place and ate pizza and played board games for a few hours, then finally I went to a late movie.
Saturday, we mowed the lawn here for the last time, then moved the Deep Freeze, pool, bed, computer desk, drafting table, and lawn mower.
Today I've been bouncing back and forth between doing stuff here and unpacking. I'm hoping to finish packing up and stuff tonight, and tomorrow will be split between cleaning here and unpacking at the new place, with a possible game of Doctor Who tomorrow night.
BTW, the current operating name Pete gave the new place is Geek Station Zebra.
At any rate, I think I'm going to take the laptop over to the house soon, and the internet will probably be taken down tomorrow, so this will most likely be my last post from the Geek Palace (aside from the post I put up early for tomorrow).
This is the Geek Palace, signing off.
This is the first entry now that we have internet access back. Yay, I can communicate with the noosphere once again!
Well, as far as I can tell, my moods are returning to normal. Whether that is due to the medicine I am on, or the fact that all of the moving is completely taken care of, I don't know. Probably both.
I'm just glad to be able to think about things that are not problems and when problems come up, they are no longer automatically world-threatening crises.
It does mean that I'll probably fall back into my old habit of not posting reliably, mainly because I have nothing particularly crucial to tell the world most of the time (what stuff I need to tell my friends, I usually post to one of the bazillion email lists we have set up).
I posted my Christmas List for anyone who wants to buy me stuff. :)
Every night I hope and pray
A dream lover will come my way
A girl to hold in my arms
And know the magic of her charms
Because I want
A girl
To call
My own
I want a dream lover
So I don't have to
Dream alone
Dream lover, where are you?
With a love, oh so true
And a hand that I can hold
To be near as I grow old
Because I want
A girl
To call
My own
I want a dream lover
So I don't have to
Dream alone
Someday, I don't know how
I hope she'll hear my plea
Someway, I don't know how
She'll bring her love to me
Dream lover, until then
I'll go to sleep and dream again
That's the only thing to do
'Til all my lover's dreams come true
Because I want
A girl
To call
My own
I want a dream lover
So I don't have to
Dream alone
Dream lover, until then
I'll go to sleep and dream again
That's the only thing to do
'Til all my lover's dreams come true
Because I want
A girl
To call
My own
I want a dream lover
So I don't have to
Dream alone
Please, don't make me dream
Alone
- Bobby Darin
A random bit of philosophical introspection from me.
What I want is, at the end of my life, to be able to look back and say,
“That was pretty good.
There were good times, and I had someone there to share them with.
There were bad times, but I didn't have to face them by myself.
I made mistakes, but things worked out alright in the end.
And I even did a few things right along the way.
I was not invisible. People will remember that I was here, and remember it fondly.”
I'm not there yet.
Meh.
Meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh meh.
:(
So, for roughly three weeks, I've been sick with the cold. It's mostly gone; just some coughing, but it's annoying. Several days after getting sick, I started feeling down.
As in, “obsess over your problems, think too much, want to curl up and stay that way” down. I'm not full-fledged depressed — having been there, I can tell the difference. But it's not that far off, either. If you know me, you know that this isn't the first time I've been like this, but it's sticking around a bit longer than it usually does.
There are several reasons that I get this way, I think. Being sick, is of course, an obvious one. Also, I'm back in school again to finish off my degree … Since I work full time (and third shift) my sleeping schedule is utterly disrupted by this. It's only two classes, but given my major, that still means I'm on campus for six hours, not counting driving time. Only 45 minutes of that isn't a class. I get two hours of sleep after work, at best, then I go to class, come home and get (at best) six more. In practice, I'll probably get more like one hour before and four hours after, if that.
I'm also a nontraditional student. I'm surrounded by people fifteen years younger than me, so I've always felt somewhat disconnected from social life … which is worse now that I'm only going part time. And even if I wanted to go do something with anyone I might make friends with, I'm usually too tired.
And too broke, at the moment. Money is a persistent issue. This is the worst time of the year for me, financially. I like my job well enough … if I wasn't carrying debt, the only serious problem with it would be that it's somewhat boring at times, and I can usually cope with that.
But I do, and I don't make a lot where I work … just enough to scrape by, really. My tax return provides the cushion that prevents me from having to live purely check-to-check. Counting groceries and gas and such, my income is actually a bit lower than my expenses, so that cushion gradually declines over the course of the year. About the only good aspect of this time of year is that it works out to be right before the next tax return. If my cushion ran out sooner, I'd be screwed.
Naturally, this means that I have pretty much no wiggle room in my budget for such niceties as “paying more than the minimum payment” or “health insurance” (my cushion would run out a hell of a lot faster if I carried that). I make little progress on paying off debt and such, and if anything major happens healthwise, I'm going to be very, very, very screwed.
Basically, what all this boils down to is, my current lifestyle is untenable. The problems that I have now are, at this rate, not going to get better faster than they will get worse.
I need a higher paying job. Ideally, a significantly higher-paying job. With that, I could get out of debt on a timescale that feels achievable, and start building a life that doesn't consist of living hand-to-mouth. I could carry a sane level of insurance. I could make progress on my retirement and some savings. I could eat more healthy things (healthy food is more expensive than junk food) to ensure that I live long enough to care about retirement. Get a better place. Get a better car.
Maybe even meet some girl who is actually interested in me.
How do I make the pain stop? I tire of this.
“When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't crawl…”
Yeah, you know the rest.