Tag: money-less

Stick in the Mud: Cha-Ching!

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My friends will tell you that sometimes I am just no fun. I’m not big on shopping or seeing movies or hitting up the bars. I’m not overly social, don’t mind being alone, and can go days without feeling the urge to leave the house. I’m a homebody, to be sure.

But there is no time I am more unfun than when I’m broke.

What going out I will do becomes non-existent and whatever money I do have goes directly to bills. Do not pass go, do not have a good time.

This frustrates my friends and some of my family to no end, particularly around holidays and my birthday in which I might receive cash as a gift. They get money as a gift and they use it that way. They buy themselves something fun, something they really want.

I get  money, I pay bills. Period.

This sort of practical, responsible behavior drives some people nuts but it makes perfect sense to me. I haven’t had a regular income in nearly three years. Writing hasn’t been half as lucretive as I’d hoped it’d be, and I didn’t think it’d be that lucretive to begin with. I’ve been living off of savings and a credit card. When the savings started to dry up, I turned to selling things on eBay (this is also serves the dual purpose of allowing me to purge some of my stuff as I have a tendency to be a packrat). I’ve had to ask my dad for monetary help several times this past year, several times more than I wanted to ask him. I keep track of all the money I’ve had to borrow off of him or tabs he’s covered for me. Trust me when I say that it’s a lot and I have every intention to completely pay him back. And trust me when I say that my credit card dangerously close to being maxed out, something I never thought would happen. I’ve been looking for work this past year, but haven’t had much luck. The only job I got an interview for turned out to be a bust.

I am broke. Every dollar counts. Every cent I have, I earn, I receive goes to paying bills.

And yet it still baffles people that I don’t spend the money I get as a Christmas gift or a birthday present on something for myself.

First of all, I can’t justify it. When my mom gave me money for tickets to a Cubs game, I only bought the tickets (the cheapest bleacher seats I could get on StubHub) after I made sure I could pay my bills for that month. I admit, I splurged on a twenty dollar shirt for the game. Again, the bills were paid before I did, but I know I could have put it toward the next month’s bills. I did feel guilty about that, but I figured I’d deserved a little something extra since I’d spent so little on the actual tickets. I chalked it up to being part of the gift from my mom.

It’d been months since I’d splurged quite like that and then do you know what I bought? Lunch at McDonald’s. Yep. When a value meal from a fast food joint is considered extravagant, you’re broke.

Secondly, those shiny things I could buy would be nice, but the relief I feel knowing that my bills are paid for another month, that I’ve bought myself some more time to scrape up the money for the next month, that I’ve got some more time to come up with a new plan, sell some more stuff, apply for some more jobs is so much better than any shiny new thing.

I know it’s just money. Eventually (hopefully sooner than later), I’ll be making more of it on a regular basis. I’m not kept from getting something I want for long. I will find a way. I will get my debt paid off and I won’t have to worry about getting my bills paid every month. I’ll return to being my semi-reclusive, frugal self rather than the totally reclusive, miserly self I am right now.

Until then, so long as my friends and family give me money as gifts, I’m going to continue to disappoint them by putting obligation before pleasure.

A Mess of My Own Making

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I have no problem admitting that the mess I currently find myself in is all my own fault. Of course it’s my fault.  To say otherwise would be to say that other people have been controlling me and that’s the last thing I’ll admit.

Okay, so it’s entirely possible that other people may have influenced the decisions that I made that led me to be in this mess. I know that I don’t operate in a vacuum. I know that I affect other people and they affect me. But the idea of blaming my life on my parents, or my family, or my friends, or the cruel, cruel Universe doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer to take the blame and the responsibility for my actions.

Ah, responsibility. For some people, money is the root of their problems (to be fair, money is a big part of mine right now, but that’s another post); for me it’s responsibility. It’s the root of my mess. Not that I don’t take responsibility for myself, but because I end up taking responsibilites that aren’t mine. Astrologers say that’s the lot of a Capricorn’s life. Well, it’s the bog of mine.

When my parents split when I was fifteen, I became responsible for myself in an adult sense for the first time in my life, which I admit was a rough transition for a late bloomer like me that had been somewhat sheltered from the grown-up world. I went from kid to adult in less than a month. What’s worse was that I found myself been put in the middle of my parents’ divorce as an adult, being made privvy to their bile and venom for each other like I was a friend to vent to and not the result of their combined DNA. It was also the beginning of my unpaid career as a messenger.

When my sister got pregnant the first time, it became my responsibility to see that my niece made it to family functions on my father’s side. My grandpa never emailed or tried to get a hold of my sister; he always got a hold of me and told me to bring the baby down. This doubled with the birth of my second niece and tripled with the birth of my third. Never once was it laid on my sister’s head to ferry her children down to see the family; it was me. And when my mom adopted the girls, I was held even more responsible for them in that way because my sister was off the hook. She removed herself from the responsibility pond entirely when she moved to Texas. 

My sister never had to hear about it from my father or his side of the family for her mistakes. I heard it all. My mother is spared the rants I have to endure from my father when it comes to the girls. I’m the one who bears the brunt of the disappointment from my grandfather when my nieces can’t make it to a family get together for whatever reason.

Honestly, all of THIS responsibility put me off of taking any grown-up responsibility for myself. I still live with my dad (and now a roommate) because the idea of moving out and trapping myself in a job that I hate just to make ends meet just so I could say that I was out on my own didn’t flip my skirt. Why would I want to take on all of THAT when I was already dealing with all of THIS? Then I quit my job and decided to become a writer and now I can’t move out even though now I want to because I’m flat broke because the only part of the starving artist stereotype I’ve mastered is the starving part (my bank account is definitely starving). So, once again I’m looking at taking a crap job to make money, which will require me adjusting my writing schedule to accomidate it and I’ll still end up stuck in this house and the only headway I’ll make is the satisfaction in not having to ask my dad for money.

That’s if I can get hired somewhere. The job hunt has not been positive up to this point.

So I’m broke, living at home, and struggling to turn an unsuccessful writing career into a successful one.

I take responsibility for that. I take credit for it. I had choices to make, I made them, and it led me to this point.

Now I have new choices to make. And I only hope I can make the right ones that get me out of this mess.

I’m ready to take responsibility for some victories now.

Suffering Seasons

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

The Cubs had a disappointing 2010 season and so did I. It has nothing to do with being a Cubs fan. It just so happens that we both had a similarly crappy year.

Like the Cubs going into Spring Training, I came into 30 so full of hope and ambition and promise. This was supposed to be my year, THE year, and I was going to make my waves and get things done and 30 was going to be a success. And like the Cubs getting hammered in their Opening Day game in Atlanta, it was very quickly apparent that was not going to be the case for me or them.

Very early on this year I realized that one of my worst fears had come true and that I had gained back most, if not all, of the weight I’d spent four years losing. I took a moment to berate myself and then I got myself a new exercise schedule, getting back into the moving groove that I had gotten out of the year before. It worked before; I was confident it would work again. Only it didn’t. Like Derrick Lee and Aramis Ramirez hitting 3rd and 4th in the line-up, my go to guys just weren’t producing. It wasn’t until August until I started seeing a change in my body and very tentitively thought that maybe I might have lost a few pounds, but because it took this long to lose so little, I’m not really encouraged about the long-term. I’d really rather not spend the next few years losing only ten pounds in 12 months. I need better production than that and it bugs me that I’m not getting it from my established methods.

The Cubs went into the season with four rookies, three of them in the bullpen and one of them on the bench. And they just kept adding them as the year dragged on.  I started off with a few rookies of my own; new short stories that I would send out. Success for all of us was pretty limited. “Land of the Voting Dead” was my Starlin Castro (it was the only story I sold); “Such a Pretty Face” is my Justin Berg (it had a little bit of success placing in a contest, but continues to struggle in getting properly published). But, I know that like rookies, you just keep sending them out there because they will benefit from the experience.  Meanwhile, I agonize for them and over them.

In July, Carlos Zambrano had a meltdown and ended up on the restricted list. My laptop beat him to the punch by a couple of weeks and my Internet beat him a few days. While Zambrano was off getting anger management therapy, I spent a month negotiating Christmas/birthday presents to get a new laptop, waiting on a hand-me-down desktop from my mother, and trying to wrangle an Internet service. After two false starts and nearly three weeks, we got it all straightened out. Unfortunately, as a result, I missed a couple of submission deadlines. The lack of computer also through a serious wrench in my writing mojo (though I did get caught up on my reading) that took me two months to reestablish. Zambrano made a much better comeback than I did.

Missing out on the deadlines hurt the worst because it meant I was missing out on potentially making some money. Like the Cubs with their expensive contracts, I got myself into my own monetary mess but not having a regular income since February of ’08. I know and accept that and I’m trying to work with what I have. The Cubs shed salary by trading Derrick Lee, Ryan Theriot, Mike Fontenot, and Ted Lilly (of all of these trades, losing Lilly broke my heart the most, even if we did get Blake DeWitt out of it). I ended up selling my action figures to make a buck, but still ended up borrowing money off of my dad more times than I’d like to make ends meet.

Without a doubt, the year has been rough and disappointing, but there were some bright spots. Where the Cubs had some promising rookies like Castro, Tyler Colvin, Andrew Cashner, Casey Coleman, and James Russell, surprisingly good returns from Carlos Silva and Marlon Byrd, and a strong finish to the season under Mike Quade, I got to meet up with family that I haven’t seen for a long time, spend lots of time with my young nieces, and cash in an early Christmas present from my mom: a trip to Wrigley to see the Cubs play.

Naturally, they lost 1-0 to the Giants.

But, that’s okay. It just further adds to my argument of how sympatico I was with my team. We suffered in different ways, but we suffered together. The 2010 Cubs will always have a special place in my heart because of that. Because of them, I didn’t have to suffer alone.

I appreciate that.

NaNoWriMo Update:

Total Word Count: 22,063

Chapter 1 Word Count: 2,239
Chapter 2 Word Count: 2,084
Chapter 3 Word Count: 2,163
Chapter 4 Word Count: 2,108
Chapter 5 Word Count: 2,100
Chapter 6 Word Count: 2,083
Chapter 7 Word Count: 2,032
Chapter 8 Word Count: 2,041
Chapter 9 Word Count: 2,342
Chapter 10 Word Count: 2,870