In which I ain’t got no money.
I knew my UI benefits were about to run out so I checked my post office box once a week. But then they didn’t run out, and I got complacent and blew off getting my mail for a few weeks.
Until today, when my deposit was uncharacteristically late.
I logged into the Employment Security Department website, and lo it did say these horrible words: Your claim for the week ending on Jun 26, 2010 was processed on Jun 28, 2010. No payment was made because your benefits are exhausted, or your benefit year has expired. Your remaining balance is $0.00.
Aw, FUCK.
I found and re-read the information about EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) and discovered that I am – oh crap – not eligible for EUC because my benefits weren’t exhausted between May 22, 2010 and June 2, 2010. They ran out on June 19, 2010: seventeen days too late. I also learned that I will have to apply anyway, if they send me an application.
(Congress may extend EUC benefits, but the bill’s currently stalled in the Senate. As of May 2010, Washington state’s unemployment rate is at 9.1%. If I don’t end up getting any EUC at all, I have only 20 weeks of benefits left and no idea how to accomplish the going-back-to-school plan: it depended on receiving the EUC I was assured I would be eligible for.)
(Christ! SEVENTEEN FUCKING DAYS. If my first claim had been exhausted seventeen days earlier, I would have gotten the damn EUC.)
Anyway. I assumed that I must have been sent an application, because otherwise wouldn’t my EB (extended benefits), for which I have already applied and for which I have already been approved, be paying out?
I went to the post office and yup, I had received an application. I brought it home and filled it out. I read the small print. Guess what’s awesome [where awesome equals utter crap]? What’s awesome is that the EUC processing office doesn’t accept faxes or online applications. I have to mail my application in, and of course everything’s closed on Monday for the holiday, and they’re going to deny me anyway. Still, I have to apply, because if I don’t Washington state won’t give me my EB. Even though they’ve already approved them.
Long boring story short, my total net worth is less than $1 in change and my next paying gig isn’t until July 10th.
Oh, and without EUC I have to see if I can either 1.) borrow five grand in student loans, or 2.) bag the whole school idea altogether and bail to ANY TOWN I CAN GET A STUPID JOB IN, ANY TOWN AT ALL.
Aw, fuck.
My rent is due tomorrow. I have maybe three or four days worth of food left before I have to start stealing from G’ma. It will probably be two weeks, minimum, before I get another deposit. My cell phone service will probably be suspended in the interim. Thank God the DSL is paid up for the next three weeks, at least.
Um. Yeah. So. Remember that one time a few years ago when my marriage failed spectacularly, leaving me homeless and jobless and broke, and how much that totally sucked? Well, this is kinda like that, except that now I’m about to start mooching off my 87-year-old grandmother.
Related: ApPROVED, bitches!
In which I wanna bitch about financial stuff.
As you may or may not know, I’m not a legitimate adult-type person. I’m actually one of those financially marginalized creatures who literally cannot cash a check on her own. Anywhere. Ever.
In fact, I’m so marginalized that I can’t use my own money without paying fees because I don’t have enough of it.
Below a certain point, poverty is inevitable because it just plain costs extra to be poor. If you don’t have a checking account, you cannot cash a check for free. Even if you walk into the bank with seven pieces of ID, they’ll charge you a non-customer cashing fee. If the bank the check was drawn on isn’t local, you have to go to a check cashing place, and their fees are as high as the state you’re in will allow.
If you don’t have a checking account, you have to pay fees in order to pay your bills: money orders cost $2 or more apiece these days, and even pre-paid debit cards’ BillPay services cost $1 per check.
If you don’t have a checking account, you pay transaction fees. Every single time you swipe your pre-paid debit card, it costs $2.
I can’t get a real account at a real bank because I’m listed on TeleCheck. My last checking account was literally seized by an unscrupulous collector, and the bank reported me for not paying overdraft fees or something.
I’m still really pissed off about all this, because putting a lien on my checking account wasn’t strictly legal, and my bank certainly wasn’t authorized to let some strange company take all of my money. By the time I discovered that the collector had done it all bass-ackwards (the judgement should have come first, you dickwad, and I hope you suffer a terrifying and painfully fatal heart attack quite soon for fucking up my life like this for six hundred dollars) and that my bank was probably culpable too and that I could, with sufficiently herculean effort, make them all undo what they’d done it was three years later and I didn’t even try.
Anyway.
The point is that I have a pre-paid debit card, because that’s all I can get.
Continue reading »
In which I keep you up-to-date.
I went to a Walla Walla Sweets baseball game last week. (Yeah, we have a new team. Fun!) It was FUCKING FREEZING, but I had a good time, especially after I was loaned a down parka. There was a wind you just would not believe. Cold June-uary is cold.
I spent a big fat chunk of time in front of the computer and edited the hell out of the story. (Y’all got a first draft. Sorry.) Then I formatted it properly (with Courier and no italics and everything) and went looking for somewhere to submit it. Decided on F&SF because I think I’d actually have a chance with them, but they only take paper manuscript submissions. I need printer access; the story’s 56 pages long.
I thought a lot (and wrote a little) about my relationship with petroleum:
There was some cooking of Indian food!
There has been knitting, because it’s still knitting weather around here. (I know the rest of you have already had your faces melt off, but I’ve been running around in socks and sweaters.) I’ve done, oh, maybe two rounds on the eternal socks.
I started and then abandoned a scarf-thing called Wisp (the yarn I was using didn’t show the stitches well enough). I decided the yarn would make a better poncho (particularly this one) and splurged on a set of size 13 needles (to match my Options set) and two skeins of lace weight yarn for Wisp and, you know, just to have. They were on clearance; 500 yards for $2.50 a skein.
I started and am nearly halfway through with a pair of toeless socks:
Went up and played with Rob and the fellas on the square at 1st & Main last Sunday. Have another gig in the winery next door on Friday night.
I went and hiked the Mill Creek trail again with my friend Toni.
This is the first week that I get to draw benefits without having to look for work. I’m officially a student! Yay!
My transcripts should be at WWCC this week; MIU shows I took a math class and I hope WWCC will let me opt out of their basic business math or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to take.
I have recently rediscovered water. It’s good shit, mang.
I watched three entire seasons of Absolutely Fabulous. And I’m totally on top of the whole eleventh Doctor thing, too. (Actually, when I noticed that my hard drive was nearly full and went to delete some media, I discovered that all of the TV series I have – except Firefly – are British.) I need some external storage.
Oh, except I’m POOR. Poor, poor, poor. I barely pay my bills, and I can’t really afford anything else. Maybe I can spend the occasional fifteen bucks on knitting supplies, but no hefty purchases. No external drives, or clothing sprees, or shoes, or iPods (one is full, the other is dying)… I haven’t had my hair done since October, and the only reason I go to the dentist is because they’ll let me carry a balance and I have no desire to sit through a third planing & scaling, thank you very much.
Now plz to excuse me while I go watch episode 12 of Doctor Who.
In which there’s a finale. (See chapter 4.)
25.
“Oh dude,” I said. “That would be awesome. I don’t know how to test the water, or if the soil will support earth seeds–”
“I can teach you,” the baby said. “I have knowledge that was supposed to be accessible to you.”
Someone on my comm yelled, “All that shit’s in the wiki, Jenny! Ask him what he is!”
I turned down my comm speakers. “So, giant alien baby. What are you? And why do you look like a giant human baby?”
“I didn’t know that these were many dead individuals. I thought it was one dead individual and asked it how to be an infant. This is what they showed me. I’ve never seen many dead individuals.”
“Whenever you encounter dead individual, you ask it how to be a baby?”
“Yes, and then we’re a baby, and we grow up, and we die. Until someone else asks us how to be a baby!” Giant baby was overwhelmed with happiness by this and clapped his hands.
We talked for an hour, and then I took pity on everyone else and set up a board and read their questions from it, and the giant baby answered them, and the visit spawned about seventeen Martianbaby wikis as he talked. He was really good at telling us the human knowledge he had absorbed, but was maddeningly vague about himself.
Before I left the dome, he let me take a sample of him. I approached with a sample collection pack he had located for me, and touched his fat knee with a swab I then sealed into a tube. I also made a couple of slides. He wasn’t smooth; he was dusty and pink. His skin looked more like something you’d find in your shop-vac than anything else, and I had the impression that he’d blow away in a strong wind.
“Would you blow away in a strong wind?” I asked him.
“Um, yeah. No? We’re not sure. We’re very big!” He clapped again, but he didn’t disintegrate, so maybe not.
“Well, when the dust storm comes, you’ll have to wait it out in here,” I said.
Continue reading »
In which there’s a fourth chapter. (Go to chapter 3.)
19.
“My dome? What?” I replied, grabbing my helmet so I could actually talk to the guy. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something wrong with the cameras, Fred,” someone said calmly.
“It’s a fucking Martian! Ye gods, even worse: some bastard child of human DNA and Mars!” someone else shouted.
“Can you see the video feed?” asked the man from Higher, who was apparently called Fred.
“Nope, I’m in the restaurant,” I said. I can just walk over there–”
“She can fix the cameras,” voice #2 said.
“No! Don’t go into the dome until we establish communication with it!” said voice #3.
“Restaurant?” said yet another voice.
“Listen, listen!” Fred said, and I could literally hear him flapping his arm for silence. “It looks like there’s a life form in the dome. We want audio. Can you manage that?”
“A life form,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“In the dome.”
“Yeah.”
“The dome is filled with dead people, Fred,” I said. “All my friends’ bodies are in there, Fred.”
“Get somewhere you can see the video feed and call back, okay, kid?”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then we’re totally gonna need audio,” Fred said.
“Whatever,” I said.
Continue reading »
In which there’s a third installment. (Back to chapter 2.)
13.
Every single day I cursed my wretched, useless public school education.
Why didn’t I know basic chemistry? Why didn’t I know how to test melted Martian ice for drinkability? Why didn’t I know what was poisonous and what wasn’t?
Why did I need a fucking calculator to find out how many years worth of water I had left?
Why didn’t I have better reference materials? I had my wiki copy, of course, but it was too broad to be an in-depth learning tool.
Why, if I was so damned smart, hadn’t I known to bring proper reference materials to a hostile goddamned planet? I had ten years worth of movies, but no basic chemistry classes. Typical idiot American, I thought, and gunned my little forklift as I made my daily commute to the dome.
14.
Not that it really mattered.
I had a lifetime’s worth of food and power and no way to have children. The settlement, such as it was, had already failed. I might see another human being eventually, but it wouldn’t be for years. Landing sites were spread out all over the planet, and only one had been equipped with vehicles capable of going long distances.
I turned away from my sustainability issues and focused on communications. Hours of research revealed instructions for blowing the comm right off the ship; when I armed the sequence and retreated the regulation ninety meters, there was a synchronized series of tiny explosions and a whole chunk of the ship fell off and landed on airbags on the regolith.
Pretty trick.
A day and a half of removing panels and airbags and I had the comm – a big rack filled with computer components. I built it a shelter between the ship and the dome, stocked with everything a data center would need: screens, boards and pointers, speakers, chairs with wheels, and a hot beverage dispenser.
Continue reading »
In which there is a second installment. (Back to chapter 1.)
7.
It took my stupid-tired self about fifty minutes to shut down the dome. I didn’t want the bodies exposed to air and heat; they’d just rot. Somebody would want this site preserved for forensics or something.
Maybe.
Plus it was a waste of resources, running an entire dome for a bunch of dead people. Life-long near-poverty had made me nothing if not frugal.
I’d walked around, still inside my suit, and looked at them – the people on my team, the people I’d applied with, trained with, and traveled through space with – for a morbidly long time. Some just looked like they were asleep, but many of them had done the sorts of things you’d expect during a real death. They were in weird positions, eyes open or half open, and I was glad I couldn’t smell the air in the dome. Once I realized that they were all actually, literally, and unequivocally deceased, it became important that I shut off the dome. I knew they were all filled with bacteria that wanted to turn them into puddles, but they were humans – from earth – and precious to me. I wanted them intact.
When the power whined down I realized I should have vented the air first. Now I’d have to operate the airlock manually. I sighed, and waddled over to the lock.
Continue reading »
In which I argue with our collective conscience.
Everyone’s pissed off at BP.
They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” (1)
The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net(2). They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.
I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.
What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:
BP is our fault.
A 42-gallon barrel of oil(3) only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.
Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.
Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.(4) I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life.
So this BP disaster is our fault, because BP exists to obtain the oil we need to make the items we buy every day. We buy a lot of toothbrushes and Crayons, because we’ve increased the world’s population by over two billion people in the last forty years(5). BP didn’t make us do that.
This event is not only a terrible environmental disaster, but it’s arguably the mother of all public relations problems. BP is losing money hand over fist, something I feel safe assuming they don’t like to do. This was an accident, not a calculated insult to the world’s ecology.
Most sadly, it’s simply one more accident in a long, long list of horrible accidents(6) that we’ve all ignored.
The reason us rich white folks are galvanized right now is because this disaster is in our rich, white backyard. We don’t even know that Nigeria is a toxic wasteland due to our endless need for oil(8).
The insult we’re perpetrating on the world, in my opinion, is that we’re not even smart enough to use our extensive education and wealth to do this indignant reaction thing right, we’re just slapping up toothless boycottbp.org websites and feeling smug about our FB groups and about how committed and pro-active we are, and then we go on using all the petroleum-based products we always use, and don’t even bother to learn that they ARE petroleum-based products or what they cost the rest of the world.
People are standing around in their clothes made of oil derivatives in their houses made of oil derivatives with their oil-derivative toothbrushes in their mouths screaming, “Fuck BP, those motherfuckers, look what they’ve done! They’re evil!”
Well, they’re not evil. Greedy, maybe, and lazy, and rich, but they hardly did this on purpose. They’re a big goddamned nasty clusterfuck of companies, sure, but what they’re doing is getting oil out of the earth so you can live the way you like. Your sputtering outrage and indignation makes you look foolish, don’t you see, because you choose not to understand that you’re culpable, you yourself. It’s not a them-versus-us issue here: BP is not the villain in some kind of thin little morality play. WE’RE ALL THE VILLAIN, everyone who buys pretty much anything, ever.
Of course we didn’t mean it, of course we didn’t mean to destroy 120 miles of gulf coast, but it happened. Of course we want to do something about it. But. Boycotting BP is a horrible idea because it lets people believe that they’re making a difference when they most assuredly are not. Boycotters will buy their gas across the street from their local BP franchise, and then they’ll go shopping at Walmart, not even knowing that most of what they’re buying has some oil-derivative component in it. Then they’ll go to bed at night feeling smug, while small franchise gas stations have to lay off their staff. What steps are we taking, with this boycott, to reduce or oil consumption? Um, none.
The salient point is that BP doesn’t even own the majority of its gas stations. They’re all franchises(7). Come on, people, you’re boycotting your community members and neighbors. During a recession. In what universe does this even make sense?
The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market. I’m all for that. If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.
I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how to fix it. I live as lightly as I possibly can: I don’t own a car; I consume less than the typical amount of resources most Americans do; I don’t eat 200 lbs. of animal flesh every year; I reuse my baggies and Ziplocs and even take-out containers… that’s what I do. That’s all I know how to do. But most people don’t live like me [seriously, I don’t blame them]. Most people need Crayons, and insulated boots, and refrigerant, and Glad Ware. Who the hell am I to take it away from them?
Nobody. That’s why I don’t try to. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have a netbook, and earphones, and CDs and DVDs and prescription glasses and contact lenses and toothbrushes myself.
Yes, it’s a mess. We all get that. Now: since we’re done with our silly “Boycott BP” thing, how do we fix it?
1 BP Oil Spill Protests
2 Boycott BP
3 Barrel
4 A partial list of products made from Petroleum
5 Total Population of the World by Decade, 1950–2050
6 Oil Spills and Disasters
7 Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations
8 Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
In which I share a little revelation I had last night.
While chatting with Mel over IM, I made an offhand comment containing that famous axiom from 80’s flick War Games: “The only winning move is not to play.”
And then I realized how very much I believe that.
If I find myself in a situation I do not like and that I think I can’t change, I just… stop playing. Quit. Move on.
This is why I didn’t finish my undergrad at MIU, and my only reason ever for quitting jobs or leaving relationships. Most of the time, the axiom protects me: if you’re married to someone you have nothing in common with, you can play for the rest of your life and never do anything but lose. Clearly, not playing is the only winning move. But sometimes, a more sticktoitive attitude would probably have served me better: it was hardly brilliant to drop out of college during my senior year just to make a political point that no one heard.
Is it possible that my very-low bullshit tolerance was fostered by a movie?
Eh, probably not. But maybe! I remember feeling such relief when Joshua realized that some shit was too stupid to waste one’s time (and/or processor cycles) on.
Today I live in a spare bedroom and can fit everything I own into the bed of a small pickup. I just plain don’t do or have what everyone else does. Is this because I’m a quitter, or because I simply have a different agenda than my peers?
The only person I know who has less property than I do is Corby; if his stuff is packed into his jeep he can actually see over it. (I should follow his example and get a tent and a 4WD vehicle, better to camp on your lawn with.) Everyone else, even my spiritually-inclined friends and my migrant father, have accumulations of belongings that indicate, to some degree, their stature. They own houses, furniture, Cuisinarts. They have deeds and titles and certificates. Most of them had a much higher bullshit tolerance than I ever did: they finished school, at least. Is that what enabled them to accumulate so much property? Or would they have done so anyway?
Even my father has a home full of objects, it just happens to be on wheels.
I can’t figure out what this means. I have no interest in buying a house and filling it with stuff. I remember really wanting to, once, but that desire is gone now, burned up. I don’t want to find a lover and build a life together anymore, either. It’s as if my brief stint as a married person absolutely finished any karma I had in those areas…
Oh. Hmm. Maybe I’ll be a renunciate in my next life. That’d be cool.
I wanted so terribly much to fall in love and get married. It was my primary goal as long as I can remember. I wanted to have the coolest house in the world. When someone finally proposed, I felt as if my life had finally done what it was supposed to!
Except being married and keeping house for yourself sucks. I didn’t like it. It’s like chaining yourself to the earth. Every new item that you acquire makes your soul heavier. I couldn’t find the desire to go into debt buying stuff to make my house nicer than functional. Who would that benefit?
But I have wonderful, inquisitive, spiritual friends who live in houses with spouses and possessions and it doesn’t fuck them up.
I don’t feel suited to the regular world any more, but at least I can pass. That’s something to be grateful for, yes?
In which there’s a short story, apropos of nothing.
1.
His name was Randy and he was a total pud, but he was so big and lurking and earnest that putting up with him had the advantage of keeping all the other jobless, vid-playing puds out of my personal orbit.
“I’m going because it’ll be like being a cowboy,” he enthused. “Like the wild West. Real men, real women. No fuckin’ rules!”
“I’m going because I can’t find a job,” I said for the hundredth time. “Just like you.” I studied his flat, bland face again. He looked like he lived in his mother’s basement and delivered pizzas for beer money, but he’d passed the tests which meant he had to be at least as competent as I was. “I’m telling you, it’s not a video game. It’s a planet where you can’t go outside without a space suit. It’s gonna be rough up there, man. And we’re never coming back. Do you know anything about Mars?”
“Yeah, I watch FoxComm,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity. We’re colonizing a whole new planet!” The guy was utterly sincere.
“Whatever, kiddo,” I said, and turned back around to face the front of the line. If it was such a great opportunity, I thought for the thousandth time, the rich would be going instead of us lower middle-class meat baffles.
I’d originally presented for emigration in Omaha, where I’d passed the primary entry with flying colors. It had consisted of three days of basic testing – reading comprehension, basic math, grade school science – with number two pencils, a lot like sitting through competencies in high school, and an afternoon of pushups and jogging that had neatly cut the obese who had made up well over half the applicants. Then I’d received about three pounds of paperwork on actual paper that I was admonished not to lose and spent three sticky, smelly days on a bus in a convoy of obviously retired Greyhound busses on the way to the south.
In Texas we’d been issued pup tents and MREs and directed to set up in orderly rows in an abandoned football stadium. I’d been taking PTA baths in a bathroom sink for 72 hours and was seriously thinking of renting a motel room with the last of my money just for a real shower. At night, they showed educational videos on the stadium’s screens so we’d know how to operate airlocks and what death by Martian exposure was really like.
Most of the males continued to look at the whole thing like a glorified video game. I don’t think they really understood that Mars was a real place, and that dying there didn’t include respawning back at the base for another run. Most of the women were like me: single, childless, squeezed out of various obsolete corners of the tech industry. We chatted amiably enough in the bathrooms, but it seemed none of us were really prone to networking. The men outnumbered us ten-to-one.
“Man, this line is long,” Randy said again.
Continue reading »
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4 random books from my Library!
