Your World Is Killing Me

Bored and lonely. The weather today and yesterday has been bad. Really bad, especially yesterday (note: if you live in some part of the world that actually has real storms, you're going to laugh at me. But this is California. We don't have real storms here). The wind blew trees and telephone poles down all over the place, roads were closed, and pretty much the only part of town that still had power was the part I live in. Lucky me. There are still people without electricity.

Thanks to the lovely weather, my boss canceled work yesterday. Making me miss out on 3 or 4 houses (a full day, in other words), so my next check will be for only 2 days, as have been every check for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I've been clearing less than $100 a check, and I'm pretty much screwed.

Next week I have Monday off because I have 3 appointments that I made before I started working at Merry Maids, and we are supposed to be having fewer houses each week now that the holidays are over. This sucks. This really sucks. I love my job. My bosses are fantastic, and so are all the girls I work with. But I need to essentially make double what I'm making now just to break even.

On top of that, I start school on the 22nd and will be going to school from about 8am until 10pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then from 11am until 5pm on Saturdays. Which leaves me 3 days to work, as I refuse to work on Sundays. I have worked 2 jobs before without any days off, and it was sheer hell. There is no way for me to make it if I don't have one day off a week. I will self-destruct, as I did before. So I can either get a second job working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the evenings, or I can find another job that somehow magically pays more and lets me work those days during the day.

Now, while it would suck, I could do it-- if I didn't have Chase. How can I work two jobs, go to school full time, and still take care of Chase? He'll never get to see me. I'll be gone from 8am until 11 or 12pm every day except Saturday and Sunday. That's got to be detrimental to the kid's mental health, right? What should I do? I am swiftly running out of time to figure out how to make it all work. Fuck. Yep. Bad words, even.

--Dragon Read more!

From Dwelling to Home

Been feeling like crap. Things around here have been sucking incredibly hard lately-- broke, sleepless, stressed out, effing moronic me forgetting to take my meds every day so I've been feeling even more crappy, and worse, the running is in my head again. Sometimes I feel stifled, like my skin is too tight and I can't breathe, and I just want to run. When everything is a mess and I feel like there's no use cleaning it, and I just want to start over with a clean canvas. Those times where I feel like grabbing my CDs, some clothes, and my journal and just driving until the gas runs out. This has been one of those times.

But today there is hope. Finally we got some good news- today we heard from the people at the apartment complex we applied to. It's a brand new complex (only a few people living in it right now), it's absolutely gorgeous and feels blank, no impressions or leftover unpleasantness from previous owners (I get impressions in places. I've turned down more than a few awesome apartments because they made me feel sad or creeped out. Wierd, I know.). We have to turn in a few things and we are pretty much guaranteed to get the place.

It's CHIP (Cali's low income housing program, for those who don't know), so the rent will be about the same or less than we are paying now for a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment. It's a really unique design, too: it's in a three story building and occupies the top two floors in a building with 8 units, 4 3 bedrooms and 4 2 bedrooms that are located on the bottom floor. The upstairs is accessed by a door leading to an internal staircase that is part of the upstairs apartment.

There are 2 bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor and one bedroom and one bathroom on the lower floor. The bottom room would be mine, and I'd have my own bathroom (OMG YAY!). It is awesome. Filled with light, all energy star appliances, a kitchen with a fantastic work triangle, and lots of storage space. It also has a large storage closet on the ground floor for things like barbeque equipment and the like.

I am so excited. I love moving, it makes me feel new and satisfies the nagging urge to run. Best of all, my mom will finally have her own room (right now she sleeps in the living room), so we will have a real living room and won't have to retreat to our rooms after about 9pm. Yay! Late night movies and all that when I can't sleep!

Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

--Dragon Read more!

Hell is a Goverment Waiting Room

5 hours in a waiting room filled with small, LOUD children and crazy homeless people who think that you shouldn't talk to homeless old ladies because they are wearing bandanas of a specific color, and so they are "flying the rag" or some such crap. Not that I was particularly interested in striking up a conversation with her anyways, but that's a pretty stupid reason not to. Is it just me, or do poor people tend to have really badly behaved children? Don't shoot me for that comment. I have just never seen such a conglomoration of children under the age of 8 who were so incredibly ill-behaved. And most of their parents didn't even make a token effort to do anything about it. Ooh yeah. Fantastic combination, that. Oh, and I forgot my damn CD player (no, I'm not that lame, I used to have a friggin awesome 60 gig Ipod, but it was stolen... the day I paid it off.) I had a notebook and some happy colored gel pens to amuse me. Not even a pamphlet to read or draw devil horns and other middle-school type graffiti on. What a great way to spend my day.

So if you haven't guessed, I waltzed my little (yeah, that's a lie) self down to the department of social services today and applied for food stamps. Because although I am somehow able to sort of pay my bills each month, and sort of have enough food, it's mostly due to luck, sympathy from my friends and family, and some seriously precarious financial footwork. Today I did the math and found that with what I am making, I can pay my rent, car insurance, phone, electricity, and keep enough gas in my car to get to work and back with about $44 dollars to spare. Keep in mind that this is before buying any food. Obviously something needed to happen there.

So yeah. I finally qualified (this would be my 3rd or 4th time applying this year) because I didn't have to file with Erik (apparently, we made $100 a month too much). All I have to do is get a written statement from my "roommate" (i.e. my mom) saying that we split the rent and utilities in half and don't buy or prepare our food together. The payment part is true, but it's a complete lie that we don't purchase or prepare our food together. Yeah. But you know what? I don't care. I am flat-ass broke. I can't even afford to save up to get my kid circumscised. I'm pretty much screwed. I imagine that now that I am in the third trimester, I can probably qualify for cash aid, but applying for that is a whole 'nother headache.

The best part is, I have to go back tomorrow. Someone shoot me.

--dragon

(Has anyone else noticed that I use an excessive amount of parenthesis?) Read more!