(the) Jebbica

Being broke is exhausting.

Job-hunting is exhausting.

Maybe it’s because I spent yesterday trimming trees and assembling brush burn piles, and so today I’m so sore my armpits hurt (who knew those could hurt?!), but I am just completely, 100% flat-out exhausted with life.

And I get to do it all over again today.

The past few weeks I’ve been MIA, trying to do what I could to get back into school, but it’s just never that easy. There are always road blocks. My particular initial roadblock was a doozy, the collection agency handling my defaulted student loan.  Here’s how the phone conversation with them went: Them:  “So, what kind of income do you have?” Me: “Well, I have a solid $250 that comes to me once a month.” Them: “So, do you think you could pay us $750 a month?”

Making $250 a month probably sounds like nothing to most people, but between The Boyfriend and I, we manage to pay our bills and do a little thrifting every now and then. We mangage. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but we manage.  We have decent clothes, more than will fit in our drawers, plenty of food, enough cleaning supplies and health/beauty products to last us for over a year, 2 laptops, a paid-off car, and a flat panel television.  We make a lot less than most of our friends but mangage to have a lot more. Which is saying something to our credit, I guess. But it’s still not enough.  So I’ve been looking to increase that $250 a month, by any means necessary.

I keep putting in resumes. Doing odd jobs. Trying to figure out how to do anything I can for an extra buck.  Pulling my hair out, because every place I put in for a job is either a scam, not interested in me once I give up my race/gender/ethnicity information (I thought it was illegal to discriminate! I guess it’s only okay if you’re white, now…arg), or they require so much experience for such a menial job, what’s the point? I mean, I need to have a Master’s degree to sweep floors these days?  Does this mean that’s what I have to look forward to once I’m out of school?  It just makes me feel so…depleted!

That said, I still feel blessed in many ways. But we all need to vent once in awhile, and that is where I am at present.  I think I’ll feel better once I trim some more trees.

Step One: Decide that you would like to make cupcakes for the first time in your life.

Step Two: Realize that you don’t have any cupcake liners, so you just Pam the pans instead.

Step Three: Remove 21 cupcake top-halves from pan because the bottom is still stuck-on, and set on tray.

Step Four: Frost cupcakes using the “artificial cream cheese icing” that has been sitting in your cabinet for about four years.

Step Five: Notice that said icing smells like Play-Doh, but continue to frost.

Step Six: Get nauseous from Play-Doh smell and lick the icing off your finger. Realize that it doesn’t actually taste like Play-Doh; it tastes like glue.

Step Seven: Make a giant mess scraping icing off the cupcakes and into the trash. You can clean the mess out of the floor by having a couple of Maltese who are anticipating every crumb you drop.

Step Eight: Look up some recipes for buttercream icing using the ingredients you already have in the kitchen.

Step NIne: Follow recipe exactly, only to have a curdled mess.

Step Ten: Heat up icing to melt curdles, then repeat.

Step Eleven: Realize that a project you started at 11:00 p.m. has kept you up until 5 in the morning and you still aren’t any closer to having a cupcake.

Step Twelve: Say some bad words, then throw in the towel and go to bed.