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2004-04-20 - 9:15 p.m.
and you hate rap, I like that, girl
Well, in the past few days, the shit has hit the fan in a few minor but frustrating ways. The big one was that I’ve been having car trouble again, less than a month after I broke down on the side of the road and had to spend a few hundred to fix it up. I’d noticed some smoke under the hood and engine overheating a couple times in the past week, and it wasn’t quite like the problems I’d had before, and it was enough to make me worry, but not enough for me to get it looked at right away. I just kept crossing my fingers every time I drove more than a few miles at a time. On Sunday, though, I took my chances driving to band practice, and my luck ran out in the course of the hour it took to pick up my bandmate Nick and get to the practice space just south of the city. We were almost there, and then, just as we got off 95 and had to stop at a couple red lights to get there, my car started stalling out. We got stuck at a couple red lights for a minute or two at a time while I frantically tried to trick the car into running again. We managed to run the gauntlet of red lights and get down to the main road that the space is on, but by that point my nerves were so shattered that I didn’t even notice that I was about to miss our turn until Nick pointed it out. Since I was afraid of having to stop somewhere to turn around and it stalling out again, I started to panic and turned too hard too late, tires squealing, and slammed right into the curb. I was sure that I’d popped a tire or something, but they were amazingly ok. After the initial confusion, I got the car started and went down to the road to the practice space. Usually we practice at night, but we decided to try a daytime practice on Sunday, even though I had to go to work at 3pm, and we weren’t all awake and ready to go til about noon, so all in all we only had an hour to practice anyway. But we’ve only got a couple more weeks to get prepared for the big gig, so we don’t have a lot of time to waste, and we made the most of it. But I knew that as soon as we got done with practice, I’d have to worry about whether my car would be able to get me to work. Knowing that I have a coolant leak, I figured that maybe that was the cause of my engine overheating, so after practice Mike took me to find some coolant, and we picked some up at a Royal Farms down the road. I haven’t really gotten to hang out with Mike outside band practice since we stopped being roommates, so it was cool to catch up with him and it was awesome of him to help me out with that. After we filled up the coolant, Mike followed me up the beltway to make sure I didn’t break down or anything, since he was on his way up to Towson. Of course, all this shit took longer than I expected, so I used Mike’s cell phone to call into work and let them know I’d be late, and ended up getting there around 4 instead of 3. I got up to work without incident, but the engine temperature was still hovering up in the higher than normal range, and there was a little smoke coming from under the hood again toward the end of the drive. So I decided to take the car down into the city to get looked at the next morning, since Monday’s the one day of the week I can kind of afford to blow off work and the one class I have. The place I always take my car to is in my dad’s neighborhood, so I let him know I’d be around, and went and dropped off the car first thing in the morning, and went to dad’s to hang around and wait for word on the car. Usually they’re pretty fast, but I guess they had a lot of work to finish before getting to mine, because they hadn’t gotten to it yet when I called them in the afternoon, so I called out of my little 3 hour workshift on campus, and just stayed at dad’s for the rest of the day. It was kind of nice to just chill there, since my days off are usually few and far between, and getting homecooked meals and playing with the dogs is not a luxury I’m afforded at my apartment. On Tuesday morning my car was finally fixed, and it turned out to be a couple hoses and the thermostat that needed fixing. And I was pleasantly surprised that the bill was a fraction of what it was last time. I was bracing myself to drop way more than a hundred, but that’s all it was. The other main stress in my life lately is that a couple weeks ago when I paid the rent for April, I asked my new roommate, Jace, to give me a check for his cut a couple days ahead of time, but he didn’t get it to me until I reminded him a few days later, at which point I’d already dropped off my check at the rental office. In my experience, they usually take a week or two for the check to go through, so I wasn’t in any rush to get Jace’s check, so I just deposited it a couple days later and assumed everything was alright. Later that week, I got mail from my bank letting me know I was overdrawn. Usually if my account is overdrawn and it’s not by too much, they’ll cover it until I deposit enough to make up the difference. And I’d also written a half dozen other checks for assorted other bills and services rendered that week, so I figured odds are it wasn’t the rent check anyway. But I started to worry when I realized that the rent check still hadn’t been cashed last week. And then, on Friday, my fears were confirmed, when I got a letter in the mail saying that my rent check had bounced, and that I still owed rent, along with $80 in various fees. Now, I was stressed enough about money lately before all this, and now having over a hundred dollars in fees, including the bank’s $30 fee for being overdrawn, was really fucking my money up, and Jace’s tardiness was at least partly to blame in all this. So I left a terse note on the refrigerator, with all the official paperwork attached, and let him know that he owed me half the amount of the fees I now had to pay. I did it this way mainly because I wanted to let him know as soon as possible, and we’re not always at home at the same time so I didn’t know when I’d get a chance to talk to him about it. But in retrospect, it was kind of a dick move. My friends Kelly and Nick have a roommate they hate, and the guy is always leaving these bitchy notes on the dry-erase board about who needs to clean up this or that, instead of talking to anyone to their face, and I’m always on their side when they bitch to me about him. But here I was basically doing the same kind of thing. A couple days later, when I’d yet to see a check from Jace, I went ahead and taped the note to his door before leaving for the day, which was even more of a dick move, because I’m sure he saw it on the refrigerator door, but I was sick of him ignoring it. When I came home later that night, he wrote me a check, and this week I’m going to straighten out everything with the rental office. And because my finances have been thrown into further turmoil by more car repairs, I decided to take some more money out of savings, this time way more than I need, because I’m really just sick of cutting it so close. Basically since February, I’ve been living on a very tight budget, and I never seem to do any better than break even, even when I don’t indulge or splurge or anything, and it’s really pissing me off. I work hard, I have 2 jobs, and yet I’m still having trouble paying all my bills. I’ve been taking money out of savings when I need it, but I don’t want to live beyond my means, so I never really take more than I need. But fuck that, I’m tired of being broke. Today I bought groceries for the first time in weeks. -al
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