Finances and Follies

Countdown to 30th birthday: two days
Countdown to flight back home: three days

My day has been consumed largely with math. This is highly irregular on at least three fronts: 1) I hate math, 2) I am an English major, and 3) the semester is over now.

This afternoon I paid my car insurance (courtesy of my Citi Simplicity card), and am now insured through June 28, 2013. I could've paid it in installments, but that proved to be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. I paid off my Citi card a few months ago and haven't used it since -- now's as good a time as any to put a balance on it and pay it off again at my own pace. Six months of car insurance is $288.50, which upon telling Daisy, she called "cheap." She pays much more for insurance on her Hyundai.

It's cheap enough, I guess. It would be cheaper were my car a normal car. I've mentioned here before that my Monte Carlo is insured through Geico, who -- even though the car is seventeen years old and is rapidly approaching 230,000 miles -- still classifies it as a sports car, as it is the Z34 model and not the standard model. I also have a mid-level coverage plan, not a full-coverage or bare-minimum plan. Still, my insurance drops by about $5-10 every time I re-up it, so in about 2,000 months...

Anyway, that's done. I have the new insurance cards, which will go into my car the next time I drive it -- probably tonight, as I need to make a run to Walmart to get cat food, cat litter, and cigarettes, amongst other little things. I'm not going to get a bunch of food, as said food will just sit in the refrigerator while I'm gone. I only need the essentials until I get back home, which is good -- because the rest of my budget isn't going to be incredibly awesome for the next few weeks anyhow.

I get paid on Friday, the day I fly out. This is good, because I need to send my rent check a little earlier this month (probably on Friday, when I leave), since Christmas is coming, banks are closing, and I'll be out of town. While I could technically wait until I return, I'd rather not -- if something happens in the interim, such as my flight(s) home being delayed due to weather (or something along those lines), it would cause problems. Better to send it out now, before I leave, so that all of my proverbial ducks are in a row. Everything else has now been taken care of; the only bill that may arrive while I'm gone is my electric bill, and I'll have almost a full month to pay that once I return home anyhow. After Friday, I get my last paycheck for the fall semester on January 4th, which should tide me over until my student loans come in.

Oh, about those...

Sigh.

I got an email yesterday with updated policies detailing academic progress, and how students must complete 67% of the credit hours they attempt, etc etc. I have an incomplete this semester. This is not my fault; this is because my thesis hours, all six of them, count as one class split between two semesters. That means that even though I've successfully completed them for the fall, I'm only half-done with them, and the "I" for incomplete I will receive is nothing more than a placeholder grade. Because I have that "I" on my report card for the moment, however, with three classes this semester, that means I've only successfully completed 66% of them, not 67%. Yes, it's an automated thing, and yes, it's something that doesn't and shouldn't matter once everything is reviewed, but those little things that don't matter are the things that end up royally fucking you when it's time for your financial aid and student loans to re-up in the spring, if the financial aid people aren't made aware that they need attention to avoid catastrophe and/or for me to avoid financial ruin.

Mind you, I already sent them the exception form almost two weeks ago now that says why I won't be enrolled as full time in the spring, even though for the English department, six hours is classified as full time for graduate school. I wrote about this before, and sent the form over so that all of my bases would be covered and so that I shouldn't lose any of my financial aid eligibility. This afternoon, I sent a long email to the financial aid office explaining all of this (again), and got a reply that said the email I'd received about academic progress was a generic email sent to everyone to let them know that those policies had been updated. Okay. The other thing the reply said was that the financial aid office couldn't answer any specific questions or issues over email, since it would violate federal aid policies, and told me to either call or come in to talk to someone about it if I had any specific questions.

Hm, I thought, that's not gonna work right now. I leave town on Friday. The university's offices shut down on Christmas Eve, and stay closed until the 2nd. Also, my phone has been turned off for over two weeks now, as I have no minutes left on it. What am I supposed to do in this situation? I could, of course, waste the gas money driving down there and back to talk to them for five minutes or less...or, I could do what I actually did.

I sent a second reply stating that I understood they couldn't answer any specific questions or discuss my account info with me via email, and said that I'd be out of town until after Christmas. What I did request, however, was that my original email explaining everything be forwarded to the person who works on those sorts of things for student accounts, so said person would be made aware of my situation and would more than likely be able to fix it by the time I got back after the holidays are over.

Very smart of me, no? I thought so.

I got a confirmation about an hour later, CC'ed to me, that said email had been forwarded to said person so that she could work on it. I also got the name and email address of said person so that, in about a week and a half, I can either call or email that person directly (or she can contact me, conversely) and find out if there's anything else I need to do. But in the meantime, they are on the case, so to speak.

As I told Daisy, I don't know why it's so hard to simply graduate successfully -- just let me take the classes I need, get the financial aid I need, realize the situation when it comes to credit hours and the like (because every English graduate student does the same thing) and let me bow out of the university system peacefully with degree in hand come May. I am not the first, nor will I be the last case of my sort that they have to work on and fix things for. I shouldn't have to worry about this stuff or have to send emails reminding people that yes, I'm no different than any other grad student who is ready to graduate and must get an exception or two here and there so that they can keep teaching and surviving without becoming poor and destitute. All of this should be done behind the scenes without my involvement -- they should realize how this works for people like me by this point.

Also, I read some news story about the fiscal cliff drama (whatever that is) saying that if tax rates aren't fixed by some point, employers will be forced to cut paychecks during the week of Christmas instead of the first week of January, as they have no clue what 2013 tax rates will be or something like that. Okay. I'm fine with getting my paycheck a week early; bring it on, government. Just get it fixed before I get my first paycheck in the spring, and I won't care.

So that's what's going on right now. Bills are paid, money is a little tighter than expected (but not by a crazy amount), and I'm flying home in three days.

Oh, and there's a snowstorm set to smack Kansas tomorrow.

No, that's not a joke. The Wichita area isn't supposed to get much, but it'll snow just enough to snarl the roads and keep me on constant lookout for black ice on my entire drive to the airport very early on Friday morning, something I'm not necessarily looking forward to. Let it snow like hell after I get back from West Virginia, but in the meantime, weather, lighten up a bit, please? I mean, it was 60 degrees today. It's nice outside. Why you gotta ruin it, weather? I thought we were friends.