All I can think about is how much I want money.

Money so I can get a new Palm. Money so I can get Dave one too. Money for an engagement ring for him. Money for a larger bed, as Dave is complaining about the small size of mine every. single. night. Money so I can order a bunch of books I can't find here off of amazon.com. Money or a new scanner. I have a list of all the stuff I want to buy.

Heck, money so I don't have to go freaking out because I fucked up when buying Amtrak tickets yesterday and bought them for the wrong day and couldn't find a way to get my money back or change the date, thus wasting $28 that I was planning to use for a color printer cartridge.

Money so I can continue to eat well. Money so I can continue to feed Dave along with myself. I'm tired of having these inner freakouts every time Dave wants to eat dinner and I think "aw crap, there goes another $20 when I should be eating ramen." I like it when he pays, but then I freak out that he'll be out of money even faster if he does that. Money so I won't have to get into an argument with him when he very badly wants to subscribe me to some mp3 service. ("Can't we wait on that for a few months? Does it have to be now?")

Normally I do fairly well with money management. But having a long distance relationship, in which the fellow is now out of work and is trying to save money, and having moochy friends, AND not getting a full month's paycheck for the last two months, is sucking my savings away like a Hoover. By the end of this month, I will be (what I consider to be) very uncomfortably low in the bank account. It is giving me the willies, and that combined with the fierce desire to at least buy myself the Palm ("I wannnnnnnt it!") is not a good combination.

Adding to the money suckage, I had to sign up for health insurance and retirement benefits through work by the end of today. While so far health isn't costing me a whole lot out of my paycheck (it will cost more after January, but not right now), putting in for retirement even a little bit (by Mom's standards, she friendily helped me figure out this crap) is sucking out more of my paycheck than I am comfortable with doing. I'm getting broker the more benefits I get. I know I'm supposed to plan and care about retirement, but I really doubt financially I'd be able to afford to retire and at any rate, would rather not do so unless like Dad, I was forced into it. Sigh. It's hard for me to care.

I cannot WAIT until I start getting full paychecks again. Unfortunately, that won't be until the end of the first week of October. And then I get to wait out yet another month. Monthly paychecks suck ass.

Saving is just a bitch for me to do sometimes. Like I'll be sitting around at work, it's 9:15 a.m., and out of the blue I become STARVINGLY HUNGRY. Do I go use more change in the vending machine on a daily basis to tide me over so I can concentrate on work, or do I save my money for three more hours until lunch? At lunch, do I buy some chips to go along with my food (sandwich/salad alone isn't cutting it for me) or not? I know I should just bring my lunch every day, but I hate eating my own cooking and am still hungry afterwards, even if I brought both salad and a Cupanoodles (the easiest things to bring without much prep). Or I'm just BORED and want a new book to read. Or I'm depressed and um, want a Palm. The list goes on.

Ugh.

It doesn't help much that today I'm going back to Dave's town for the weekend again. While there is more to do there than there is here, there's not much else selling it. It's a place that reminds me every time I'm there that I'm a priveleged spoiled brat from another world.

The town I'm from and the one I'm in now aren't all that different, except for the big college and psycho city government and larger percentage of intellectuals here. There's not a whole lot of slummy areas or crime in either one. In the olde hometowne, there's Leahy Square, which my mother wouldn't let me hang out in. In this town, there's the east side of town and "Slatter's Court," the former of which I lived in for a year and the latter of which I hung out at for another year. And neither of those areas are bad for crime or anything like that, it's just that the houses tend to be cheap and run-down.

His town, however, is about 40 percent nice and 60 percent total slum, and the two types of areas are mixed together helter-skelter. Nice, well-kept up houses are often next to literal shitholes (like the people who live across the street from Dave's grandma, I've heard the entire inside is used as a litterbox.). It's nervewracking to walk around most places there in broad daylight, with company. At night, well... yikes.

Jeremy and Nikki's place may be the worst I've ever seen, but it seems to be fairly typical of the average home there. About half of the ones I've seen are nice and kept up- Dave's grandma goes on about the mess, but come on- and the rest are well, have dirty clothes strewn all over the floor and backyard, the plants are dead, and there's hardly any furniture. And everyone never seems to even have fifty cents on them. How they all manage to survive with literally NO money, I don't know.

Right now I may feel like I'm broke, but compared to all the folks there I feel like I'm a frigging millionaire. I always feel kind of obligated to shell out money (though Dave tells me not to) for everyone because it's so pathetic when eight people are hanging out and are trying to think of something to do and can't even manage to afford to play pool for an hour, and I seem to be the only one with more than change in her pocket. Dave makes me pretend I'm poor too so I don't end up being the wallet, and nobody ever asks how I can keep affording to come here, so I assume they're just used to nobody having any money.

The place is just sad. I know there's worse places out there, but I haven't had to hang out in them on a regular basis before. I honestly can't wait until Dave can someday get out of that town, just so I won't have to spend so dang much time there. Though as you can imagine, he has big culture shock every time he comes here and is shocked, shocked! that it all costs so much for rent. I don't much know what to say to that.

Hiatus ends on Monday, folks, as Dave will be back home indefinitely (sigh). It's going to be weird not having him around every day any more (sigh). But hey, at least I can distract myself by posting entries and hogging the net all night again, right?

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