bloodygranuaile

Cash Flow: the name for the fact that if you have $1000 starting cash in your checking account, $2000 in savings, $3000 in income, $4000 in your PayPal account, a $5000 tax refund, $10000000000000000 from any other source in the world... and $1001 in expenditures, you WILL be desperately scrounging around under your couch cushions for loose change and hoping you can get to the bank early enough tomorrow morning, because otherwise you WILL overdraw and get hit with overdraft fees. Because while you have to pay your bills promptly (and perhaps automatically), any incoming money can just take its sweet-ass time.

Am extra annoyed because part of my extreme cash flow crunch right now is because I had to pay sales tax and registration fees on my car TWICE. I paid the dealer in NJ because in NJ they take care of that for you. Exactly nine days into the ten-day registration window for MA, I was told that they couldn't do it and I had to go to the DMV to do registration and pay the sales tax myself. Dealer said they would refund my fees. Well, I went to the DMV on Monday, and MassDOT has cashed the check I wrote them, and my check from the NJ dealer hasn't arrived yet.

What's got me worried is that my $10 for Netflix bills automatically tomorrow. If I don't deposit literally like five dollars into checking tomorrow before that bill arrives, then my rent check will bounce should my landlord decide to actually cash it before I get either my paycheck, my refund from Nissan, or my Elance payment. Since it has been almost two weeks since I actually wrote that check, it is conceivable he may cash it soon. Transfers from savings take 2 business days, timesheets at work get submitted tomorrow but I think they send you the actual check through the mail, transfers from Elance to PayPal take two business days, and transfers from PayPal to BOA take four business days, and also tomorrow is Friday. So while I should be able to to do the five dollars because I have that much in cash in my wallet, I can't avoid getting absolutely down to the wire until at least the middle of next week.

I don't want to be complaining, because I've been in worse spots and I know a lot of other people are in worse spots--I'm fully employed at a fairly generous wage, plus the side job; I was merely underemployed and for only about six weeks before that. I have money in savings. I am doing pretty well overall, it's just that what I have immediately ACCESSIBLE is less than what I need to be immediately accessible and I don't want to pay forty dollars in overdraft to those tax-evading vampires at BOA because the Nissan dealership is too unprofessional to take a look at their out-of-state registration policies before billing me for them. BOA paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in profits last year; they can leave me my $40 so I can keep futilely trying to pay off my student loans. (I think the Dept. of Ed. actually does not actually want my money, just to ruin my credit. Otherwise they would not make it so difficult to give them money. Also, I will never forgive them for unconsolidating my previously consolidated loans and thus tripling my monthly payment. Payments, plural, now. One of which cannot be done online, but has a website anyway just to waste your time trying to register.)

Also, I am still looking for housing for the summer. I need it to be less than $600/month and I need to be able to get into the Back Bay neighborhood in Boston via public transit in under an hour. That is all. When I get this squared away I will be much less stressed. If anyone knows of anything that fits that criteria, please let me know; Craigslist is a madhouse right now. Also when I get this sorted out I can stop spending the precious few hours I have in the evening looking for housing and can do some of my Elance assignments, so I don't have to spend all weekend doing it.

Blargh. I'm sorry I'm so stressed and angry and whiny, but I have been stressed all week, and when I started this week I thought "I only need to be stressed through this week!" and I assumed that by the end of the week, either the housing or at least one form of income would have gone through. But I end the week basically the same as I started it, except with even less cash on hand. So that is frustrating. And I haaaaate living on credit, but I did need to eat and buy train tickets this week.

*stresses and is frustrated*

In good news: I like my job! And they are test running free wi-fi on the commuter trains, so tomorrow I will experiment with bringing my netbook and seeing if I can't do some of my househunting or book-reviewing during the three hours a day I'm spending on trains these days. Because that would be awesome.

Taking a short break from movie reviews and dithering about YA fantasy to get out some IRL stuff. Sometimes real life manages to be heavy enough that I'd feel bad posting reviews for Mamma Mia or Breaking Dawn (that one might never get done, btw; it's seven pages already and I'm just not sure I can finish it). Often, I review things, sometimes at unnecessarily great length, because I have other things on my mind, and writing something long and opinionated has the cathartic effect of making me feel like I'm expressing myself, combined with the escapist effect of reading the book in the first place by focusing on something else, and also I don't feel like a whiny emo bitch since most of the shit I get upset about is the same stuff I'd been upset about the day/week/month before.

And then some days, your mother comes home from work and tells you that one of her co-workers, who she was supposed to hang out with that evening, is unavailable because her house burned down, her husband was killed, and she and her daughter are in the hospital for smoke inhalation, and in critical condition. And then you feel very guilty that the most important thing on your mind for that day was whether or not you'd have a big enough block of free time to watch Godfather II.

Oh, and if you're me, you also feel a little worried because the Ocho doesn't have working smoke detectors. Which I think is illegal. AND THIS WOULD BE WHY.

My little brother is off to UConn on Friday, and since he'd been kind of avoiding dealing with it, it is now crunch time. Today was go-out-and-buy-bedsheets-and-shit-day, which, being the day you finally have all sorts of tangible, concrete signs you're actually leaving for college that aren't paperwork, tends to be one of those times when it really hits you that you're actually leaving. I was mostly impatient to get the hell out when it was my turn, but I still remember getting very nervous when it was time to go buy all my shit, and I did it several weeks in advance. Tim has had a much better time in high school than I did, likes Madison a lot more than I do, and most importantly, has a much more fulfilling social life here than I ever did. He's very upset about leaving his friends. He's even more upset about leaving the kids he works with at Kirby. Mom is very upset about him leaving, and about him being upset. I feel kind of out-of-place for mostly just being impatient to get my ass back to Worcester and have the school year start again.

In the neverending battle between me and my brain (you knew this section would be coming), we have the following recent developments: 1. I have been running around like crazy lately and yesterday crashed, sleeping 13 hours last night and taking a really long nap this afternoon, 2. I skipped my dried frog pills yesterday and woke up this morning in a lovely bout of emo, 3. sometime in the past couple months I seem to have turned into a complete sap and music can now sometimes make me cry, which I'm rather embarrassed about, and 4. I've been having increasingly frequent problems with lucid dreams/sleep paralysis/general epic failure in the waking up department. Tuesday morning I woke up, went back into dreaming without falling into a normal sleep first, and spent what felt like hours in a series of very stressful attempts to will myself awake. I kept putting my dream-self through all sorts of tests to check if I was awake or asleep, and when I realized I was asleep, I kept making my dream-self do all sorts of things that ought to wake me up (like splashing cold water on myself, &c). I thought I was managing to do them in real life, because moving my dream-self was almost as difficult as moving when you're not completely out of muscle atonia, so I thought I'd managed to physically get out of bed and just hadn't shaken the hallucinations yet. I got very scared when I couldn't wake myself up even with the cold water, and despairing when I realized I was dreaming the cold water too and was actually still in bed. Then I tried to wake my real self up with sheer force of will, which took a bit of doing--first I managed to dispell most of the dreams and wake my consciousness up, but I still couldn't move and I felt like I kept starting to fall into the dreams again (actual falling sensation, btw). Then I managed to get one eye half open, but it was several minutes (or perhaps it felt like several minutes because I was panicking) before I could get it to *stay* half open, or move any other part of my body. I woke up literally gasping and shaking; feeling stressed, exhausted, and my muscles were stiff and sore like I'd really been straining them. I spent most of the day feeling similar to having tried an overambitious bout of weightlifting, except without feeling like it was good for me.

I should probably stop burying myself in Discworld books and craptacular vampire novels and just give my bloody doctor a call. I'm going to need more dried frog pills soon, anyway.

To end on a higher note (laaaaaa!) (sorry...), I got switched into the seminar I wanted (British Romanticism instead of Chaucer), and I'm writing, probably not as much as I should be, but there is definitely (non-LJ) writery activity going on. My car needs a new transmission, which will be expensive, but I still get to take it up on Saturday (!). Car is probably being named Rincewind until transmission is replaced, at which point there may be reconsideration. (Suggestions are welcome.) Also, this weekend I got to see my Jersey lovelies, and bought shiny things at Ren Faire. And tomorrow, I get to do nothing all day, which is very much needed.

And now to bed, and hoping I will wake up normally, and hoping everyone else will feel better by then.