I apologize for not writing here more often, my friends; I've been really busy as of late and have been taking care of a lot of important things one after another. This includes paying the rent and what bills I can as they come in, all the while budgeting very hard so that I'm not completely out of money before I get paid again (something that may be a distinct possibility anyhow), talking/writing to Lady, working on my thesis, and working on stuff for my students in my summer class.
I suppose I should start with the summer class stuff first, as for the moment, it's one of the biggest issues I have to deal with. My summer class meets once a week, on Tuesday nights, from 6:30 to 9:20. If you think that a class that meets once a week really wouldn't require a lot of work or prep from the instructor before he teaches it, you would be sadly mistaken. The convenience of teaching one night a week creates many more inconveniences around it, including the fact that it's not on the main campus, but the west campus (as mentioned before), meaning that anything I need to print/make copies of before class must be done before I teach. Today (as it's almost 2AM), this will entail me getting to my office on the main campus in about twelve hours or so, printing/making copies of all this stuff, and then getting back in my car to drive to the west campus for class tonight before I can come home. While that's not necessarily difficult, of course, it's just another added layer to the stuff I have to do in order to teach this class.
As I've not written here since before I taught my first night class last week, I will say that for the most part, the students seem engaged and happy to be there (well, I don't know about happy, but they're ready to work), and they realize that this will be an accelerated course with an accelerated schedule, with a paper due every two or three weeks. Their first one is due on June 12, and I'm giving them the literature/the assignment for it tonight, as well as taking them to the library for next week's class. However, and this is interesting to note -- only 13 or my 25 enrolled students showed up to class last Tuesday night. I'm guessing the rest either forgot they'd enrolled in a summer course, or will end up dropping it (because if they don't, they'll fail, obviously). It should be interesting to see, as the summer progresses, how many of them stick around.
As for other things going on? Well...
There are a lot of private matters I don't write about on the blog for obvious reasons, most of them involving myself or my friends and family. While I am an open book to most people in my life I really care about (so, all like, fifteen of you), on my blog here I am a fairly private person if I can be. I don't gossip or tell other people's stories or anything like that here -- I just write about me. And even if there are things going on around me at times, I won't write about them here until I have the benefit of hindsight, if at all. Because of that, this summer I've found that I've become a fairly reclusive person, though it's not as much by choice as it is by circumstance, summer heat (already, yes) and being very, very poor. Also, when I'm home, poor, and it's very quiet, I tend to think about lots of things that keep me awake in the middle of the night, as I actually have time to think about all of those things. As much as I like the majority of my time being free, those things and the fact that I have no money constantly eat at me during the summer, and therefore make my summer really, really suck.
Not to mention the fact that it's almost 100 degrees every day, too. Ahem. Yes.
I haven't gotten to talk to Lady much over the past week or so, and I was worried about her because she'd been quiet. I did talk to her on Saturday and yesterday, though, and she's fine. Back home with her family, taking care of the household stuff there, about to start work in two weeks or so. I was hoping we'd be able to see each other again before she started work, but at this juncture that appears to be not only time-prohibitive, but cost-prohibitive as well. I wanted to order her train tickets or Moneygram her some gas money for her car -- which I could and may still do, I don't know -- but the window for her to be able to visit me this summer shortens with each passing day, and is complicated by my teaching and her being able to get back in time to start work. This obviously dismays each of us to a large extent, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot that can be done about it at this point. She'll be working from the middle of June to the middle of August with no real breaks, so we'll have to deal with whatever happens (or doesn't happen), I suppose.
Jay sent me a text yesterday afternoon saying that Rae is catching a train out of Newton on Thursday night, and wanted to know if I was up for hanging out and shootin' the shit with them that afternoon and evening. While I am totally up for it, there are so many background variables going on right now that I don't know exactly if I'll be able to do it. Most of these are, again, things that I can't exactly write about here, but I will say that for the most part, it's nothing bad. It's just stuff I have to take care of and stuff that needs to be done. Because of this, I've not yet replied to his text and probably won't until at least this evening. Also, it's not like I have the money to go out and do anything fun, really. I barely have money for groceries at this point.
I should probably go into that too, a little bit anyway. I'm pretty much broke, folks. The entirety of my paycheck on Friday -- the last paycheck of the spring semester -- went into my rent, as did about $100 more. My groceries two nights ago were purchased on my Amazon credit card, as I don't have enough money in my bank account now to buy groceries or put gas in my car and pay the bills as they come in. I still have a credit card with a $500 limit that I've never used -- I've saved it for emergencies like if the car blows a major part, or if I have to very quickly get back home on a flight or train (or if Lady has to do the same), which, if I have no alternative and don't get help from my parents, will probably have to go towards paying my car insurance at the end of June. Even when it's incredibly hot outside (and it has been, already), I can't run my air conditioner more than an hour or two per night, and only when I absolutely need to, like when it's 95 upstairs in the house, because I can't afford the electric bill it creates. My life right now sucks, folks. I can't afford anything and I can't even go out and have any fun (like to see a movie or to go to McDonald's for dinner for something different) because I don't even have the spare cash for that. Two bags of food for the cats, which will feed them for about two months or so, was $19, and I almost cried at that. Yeah. That's how bad my money situation is. I have no idea how I'm going to make it through the rest of the summer, folks. I can't charge my rent to a credit card, and even if I could, my credit card wouldn't cover all of it. I have about 75 days to go before I get my fall student loans -- money that I desperately, desperately need right now, not 75 days from now. I don't need more credit cards or gift cards or even actual cash -- I need to find a way to somehow get more money into my bank account, and soon. I don't know when the first summer pay will clear for us summer GTAs -- I've been told that it's June 8, and that there will be no interruption in our normal pay cycles, but who knows if that will actually be true or if it will clear on time. I guess, really, for the most part I am just really nervous, not only about that but about a lot of different things.
In the meantime, in the rest of my overnight and morning hours, I need to continue to drink coffee and ready my lesson plans for my students this evening, take a shower, and try not to think too much about the troubling things. That's about all I can really do right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment