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Jan 12, 2006

I can't believe screaming Oprah didn't elicit any comments!

I've finalized my schedule, and this just in: the might of my drop/add kung fu is awesome to behold. I've still got no Tuesday/Thursday classes, and for electives I'm taking Creative Writing for upper div elective credit, and Drawing I, which is just something I thought would be edifying. Mondays and Fridays are All Afternoon All The Time (Except In The Morning But That's When I'll Be Sleeping), thanks to the weird three-hour-period-one-day-a-week format of the writing class. Wednesdays are going to be a little rough, because classes run straight from 9:20am to 5:30 pm and then I go to the Red & Black, but there's an hour-long lunch break in there. I'll survive.

Besides, we're talking about workshopping poetry and drawing chairs. How stressful can it be?

Every day I become more certain that I need to drop this ridiculous night job. You remember that Wednesday I was talking about? Now try adding work 4-8am on both sides of the fucker. Ugh. I got an e-mail from the career center, and some of the jobs listed in it sounded awesome. And unlike in my current occupation, 12-4am would not be considered the cushy shift.

I mean, I understand that as a page designer, I'm going to be working late nights for pretty much the rest of my life. But there is a vast psychological divide between staying up into the wee hours to finish a project and actually getting up at three in the morning to head for work. I would need some seriously bizarre photographic effects to express this fully, but I'll say it anyway:

That shit fucks you up.

I go to bed just after the sun rises, people! I walk to work in the foggy depths of the night, and pass homeless people and a glowing neon cross twenty feet high! I should either be avenging the deaths of my parents by punishing the wicked, or sucking people's blood to sustain my accursed existence! It is 7:55 in the AM and it is just now turning time for me to skulk off back to my lair!

Completely unacceptable.
Nick ::: 7:29 AM ::: 2 comments

Jan 10, 2006

I am here to preach the gospel of having money to spare.

I was doing some budgeting the other day, a task I dread, but one that I feel obligated to endure at the beginning of every semester. Generally for me "budgeting" consists of doing some highly sketchy math problems: work hours times hours per week times four, round down generously to compensate for taxes, that's about your monthly income, subtract rent and about $100 for bills, and you get your margin of survival. Last semester this totaled $70 every month.

This semester I was taking a cut in hours at my breadwinner job, but I was actually going to be able to cash my Red & Black checks and I was working there four nights a week. Now, I'm fond of telling people that the R&B likes to straddle the border between paying you and insulting you, and I'm not backing down from that position by any means. But it turns out that this new arrangement of the two jobs nets me around $250 in excess of rent, food, and bills every month.

I'M RICH BEYOTCH!!

That may not sound like much, particularly if you're an Alpharetta kid, but it is more than triple what I'm used to. I literally have no idea how to spend all of that cash. I mean, OK, vet visits for the cat, maybe get some central heating going, save 10% of my income so I end up with a million dollars when I'm 60...these things don't even make an appreciable dent!

Suddenly, far from hating all financial planning, I have become addicted to spreadsheets. I keep refining and expanding the equations that I use to show myself how unbelievably rich I am. I have little counters that show me how much I earn at each job every day, based on the number of pages or hours that I enter. Those both drain into a column that tallies how much I've earned in total, and when I get a check the money vanishes from that total and reappears on the side of the sheet I like to call "real money" or "bling bling, fo'sho!" There, my concrete earnings are itemized, along with my expenditures, and in a big orange column I get to watch the money piling higher, ever higher!

I blame all of this on Duck Tales. Before long I'll try to take a swan dive into a pile of gold coins and end up like Terry Shiavo. But in the meantime, this sense that I can actually spend money is turning me into a veritable ray of sunshine. I am full of hope and vibrance and ideas. I want to discover a new band or draw funny cartoons or get really hammered and sing Karaoke. I sat through a bunch of layout today training a guy and loved every moment of it, listening to him comment on the same stuff that got me excited about design in the first place.

My 21st is coming up in February and I'm thrilled about that, too. I'm going to see my dad's band and my sister's band and then I'm coming home and spending some of that moolah on a serious fukkn party. Life is beautiful for me right now.

COME SEE ME! We will make beautiful music together!
Nick ::: 7:43 AM ::: 0 comments

Jan 8, 2006

Tonight I listened to Garbage's "Bleed Like Me" -- just the song -- and reacted really strongly to it. Something about that pure expression of unity in loneliness reached into me and went twist. Or maybe it was the leftovers...who knows. Anyway, shitty couple of days in Athens. I think classes starting will improve things. The highlight of my weekend was when I showed up for an eight hour shift I didn't think I'd have to pull and found a half-full box of Hot Tamales. The delicious cinnamon goodness lasted me all night.

"Hello, Loathsome" sounds great, "Maraschino" needs a little work. I'm working on something new but it has yet to take a real form. One of these days I'm actually going to play these songs in public and you all will be astounded.
Nick ::: 10:02 PM ::: 0 comments