Underwater

I'm beginning to think that the creation of this blog was the act of some deeper lever in my psche. It's as if something deep inside said to me that I was going through a very tough time and needed to publicly document the process because that a blog worked for you the last time you went through a real crisis of self.

These past couple of weeks I've felt like I was trying to climb to some height so that when I looked down everything would make sense. Instead, it seems I've been tunneling. I hit rock bottom, and then it gave way and I fell into an underground pool. All I have left to do is look up and see the light above. So what I've been doing is looking and documenting the light above.

But the trouble is that I have to look away from the light so my eyes can adjust to my surroundings. I have to figure out how to get out of the pool and back up to the hole so I can climb out. I need to let my eyes adjust to the darkness so I can see what is around me right now to help me.

What now?

The ignored messes in my life have been competing for attention. Yesterday, my financial problems surfaced and informed me that if I do not start planning for the future right now, I will have to make some very hard decisions in the future. Whatever I can do to cushion that blow is going to help me out. I have enough money (and credit remaining, which I'm loath to dig into at the moment) to continue to live the way I am for approximately another three months. If, after one month I cannot honestly say my financial prospects are looking up (i.e. I have steady income), I am going to put my motorcycle up for sale.

That will signal the end of a lot of things for me. The end of my 20s (about 3 years too early) and the end of a my youth. That bike has the wild part of my soul in it, a part of myself I'm trying to understand and get a hold of before it destroys me.

Wild Thang

My wild side... it's the part of me that wants to go out and have lots of sex. It wants to flaunt what it has. It wants to do drugs to get high and experience the chace. It's self-destructive in pretty stereotypical ways. Luckily, I'm a wimp in a lot of ways, so it hasn't been able to convince me to do that much.

Honestly though, this is a side of me that has rarely steered me wrong. I legitimately enjoy the thrills, am still functional, and have never been in jail. I want to take big risks, and I do sometimes. Unprotected sex (very rarely, less than once a year now), experimenting with controlled substances (fun, but could land me in jail some day), the motorcycle (accident == death | severe injury), and plenty of other things I'm probably not aware of.

Where did all the money go?

You see, I'm in severe money problems right now. Well, not right now, right now I'm just in bad straights. Severe problems happens in September, when, if nothing turns around, I'll have sold the bike and will need to move on a budget to a cheaper apartment in L.A. god knows where.

I'm not entirely sure where these problems came from. Grad school attributes to them in a major way. But I have general credit card problems too; a significant amount of debt actually. For most months for the past three years I have spent more money than I have made. I'm not sure where it goes.

I'm looking around to see what I spent the money on. I have a MacBook Pro that I'm using right now, and there's an iPhone to my left. I have a Wii and about 12 games, most of which were purchased from half.com or Gamestop used. I have a motorcycle. I have a lot of software. I own a car, but it was 75% purchased with the equity of my old car. I have an MFA from an art institute. I have some expensive clothes that don't fit anymore.

I have a lot of software. I buy all the software I use for work because I want to make sure the companies I like don't go under. I also want to make sure I can ask for support when things go off the rails (since there will be a record of me as a paying customer for now multiple generations of each software title, for what it's worth). I have some expensive plug-ins for my music work. I think a large portion of the money over the past three years was software expenses to make sure I was well set up and had good tools. I recognized early on that the better the tools were, the better my result was. Better tools seem to help someone with good skills more than someone with bad skills. So in those respects, I think my software purchases are a bit excessive, but mostly valid. Since graduating I have significantly scaled back my software purchases to upgrades only, and now I can't even afford that.

Then there are the intangibles: I went without making my own meals too often. I've probably smoked around $1-2k. Then there are the gym memberships I didn't use. Oh, and the expensive car and motorcycle insurance. The brief period I shopped at Whole Foods. Going out to movies every once in a while. Gasoline expenses for travel. Oh, the road trip. Lots of alcohol (but we're drinking at home! think of how much we're actually saving -- HA). Lots of months I paid for all household expenses for my boyfriend, including rent.

But it's not like I wasn't working at all. I was. But every month almost without fair I spent more than I made. So by definition I was living in excess of my means. I'm looking back and it all seems so stupid and such a waste. I'm going to run through my quicken data and see if I can get a more exact breakdown of where my money has gone.

I've got to stop living outside my means, and I know that's going to mean a contraction of what I'm spending as well as an increase in what I'm bringing in and less leisure while I'm at it. I'm going to have to work harder on all levels. Or else I'm going to have to make more sacrifices than I'm prepared to; and we may end up leaving L.A. even sooner than we're expecting.

Whatever happens in the future, it's going to be a long climb upward, and I'm going to have to keep focused on the work and not look up to see how far I have to climb.

Best,

j