errare humanum est

Been gone for 1.5 weeks and it’s still haunting me! After 2 interviews at the same bank, I get a call today. They’re proceeding with my possible employment and checked my professional references. Well, reference, since I worked the same place from 16-25. Anyway, the previous HR manager left and took her old files with her, so the new HR lady only had records of me working there from February ‘08 until June ‘10. Sweet, I almost got fucked out of seven years of service… Anyway, I’m glad I was near my phone to get that cleared up and that they are now seriously pursuing me as a candidate for the position after two hour-long interviews…

Can’t be bothered to look at older posts, but the majority of my manga collection has been on half.com since December. I’ve slowly been getting rid of them for about 30 cents on the dollar — somehow sold about a dozen volumes this month, actually. I finally got around to checking on Amazon if some of my more eclectic items were there. Sure enough, all 9 Rozen Maiden drama CDs were there, a couple II Mix Delta CDs, and the terrible Evangelion “Remix” DVD. Also listed my OOP Votoms ammo tin collectors box (grabbed it at the end of the production run for $30), Xenogears Perfect Works book (bought in my tax spree this past Feb.) and Tsukihime manga volume 6 (typical $10 price that is somehow out of stock everywhere and listed for $250 on Amazon, lol). I need to play through some of my rarer PS1 games and then get those for sale too.

So I quit my job as mentioned in the last post. However, I’m still employed there until the end of this week and have 2 more paychecks owed to me.

That said, I moved back in with my parents about three years ago, just before they split up. Once we moved into this house about a year ago, my dad decided I needed to pay rent. Surefine, but this was right after I’d bought my Mustang and went to Otakon, so I had quite a bit of CC debt at the time. So in the space of about a month I went from having just CC+student loan payments to having CC+loans+rent+car. Needless to say, I’ve been slowly chipping away at it since then, which has been hard at times since I’m terrible with money to begin with. Now, he did say that I could stay here rent-free if I was in school full-time, but that’s hard to do when I can’t afford it.

Fast-forward to now. All I’ve bought (outside of several Japanese DVD/BDs) since March has been a used CPU ($20) and an owner’s manual for my truck ($15). All of the rest of my money has gone toward food or bills. I have enough cash to last two months while I look for a new job, plus I should be getting about a grand back from the extended warranty I had on the Mustang. My dad has always said that my financial and life choices are my own decisions, but he got all bent out of shape when he found out I quit. Let it be known that I had a shit, bottom-of-the-barrel job that was just above being a janitor — and in fact, some days I was just that. Yes it paid the bills, but I’ve worked there for more than nine years and seen a lot of folks who started after me and some I even trained get better/full-time positions. I’ve been getting fucked over there for the past couple years, working with the stupidest, laziest morons you’ve ever seen. Seriously, if you met most of them, you would wonder if they had some kind of mental retardation. Add to that a management staff that refuses to punish anyone severely enough to make an impact and it adds up to an unhappy me, especially when I was one of about three who were worth a shit.

So, yeah, I quit my shit job after 9 1/2 years and my dad throws a fit and calls me a lazy bastard because I’m not spending every waking moment filling out applications. He said I need to find a job that’ll pay for my own place, implying that he’s gonna throw me out. First off, what the fuck is he gonna do with himself when meals don’t cook themselves and the lawn isn’t emo enough to cut itself. Second, if he wanted me to move out, he should’ve set some sort of guidelines so I could get my CCs paid off, not charge me money and then not let me claim it on my taxes.

In the end, it seems I’m basically totally unable to ever get back into the groove of going to school. I don’t make enough now to afford it on top of everything else, and if I had a job that paid enough to pay for school too, the chances I would have enough motivation after working that much to take 12 credit hours a semester is fucking low.

tl;dr, my dad overreacted when he found out I quit even though he’ll still get his fucking rent money, and I’ve realized I’m never going back to school.

So, anyone who has read my “About Me” page knows that I’m a college dropout. I’ve completed 9 credit hours in the past three years at community college. Part of the problem has been money shortages. I’m terrible with money, first off, and I’ve been carrying CC debt since I was 18 that I’ve never been able to pay off totally. I had it close once, then I went to Otakon, then I bought a car, etc. Anyway, community college isn’t exactly expensive, but $400 for one class+book is a lot when you have bills like I do. That’s excuse number one. Number two would be my job, which is a shitty, shitty job where I’m the “lowest” rank of employee, but one who has been there long enough that I can do basically anyone else’s job. And they make me do everyone else’s job. On a daily basis. While denying my quarterly requests to go full-time, which means I’ve been at the company’s pay cap for part-timers for several years now.

So, I’m taking the dive and quitting. What am I doing about my monthly bills? Hoping to find a more decent job in the next two months before I run out of money. Even at a pay cut. I actually qualify for enough gov’t grants now that they will almost totally cover my costs of taking 12 credit hours for each of the next two semesters. I’m either fucking myself over by leaving a place where I have excellent job security or, (this is what I’m hoping) I’ll find a job that doesn’t make me want to murder everyone around me, thus raising my level of enthusiasm for attending class and actually doing well in my gov’t-sponsored classes.

So I ended up getting rid of my Mustang (/me pours some beer on the ground) and picked up an ‘01 Ranger. It’s basic transportation and is reliable enough to last me at least until I get out of CC debt. It’s saving me $130 a month and the loan is a whole year shorter, so I’m saving around $10.7K overall (minus the $3700 I spent to drive the Mustang for a year and the cost of my old Civic, technically).

I also decided to forgo convenience and get rid of one of my VPSs — the Windows box. So no more initial seeding at 9 MB/s and one XDCC bot gone, plus I won’t be able to browse 4chan anymore (big loss there). I also plan to drop my Linux box when the current contract runs out (the end of June maybe? dunno lol). Meltingice showed me a much better VPS for $70ish a while back that I may pick up then, but I dunno. Both of my current VPSs are $50 a month, but all I can do is host an XDCC bot and seed. It’d be nice to have one that has enough HDD space and RAM to do raw hunting and server-side encoding. It sucks enough that I’m buying all these DVDs and Blu-rays, rip them for fansub use, and then they sit on my shelf forevar. Plus they’re basically unsellable… uguu.

In any case, I have no car payment next month (first payment due July 2nd), so maybe I can make a little bigger dent in my payments.

I’ve decided that looking for cars in the $6,500 to $10,000 region is still too much. With as much credit card debt as I’m in and school expenses hopefully coming up, I need to be looking at beater cars only. There are even some cool cars to be had in this region, like the MR2 I mentioned in the previous post and an 85 Celica Supra that I found local for $1500. Unfortunately I don’t even have a chance to save up a couple grand because I’m still making car payments. I’ve been talking with my dad about trading my car in towards his new truck or selling it myself. I’d think I could pretty easily get a loan for a couple grand from my credit union once I don’t have a $17.5K auto loan hovering over my head.

Money is kind of tight for me lately, so if anyone happens to be interested in any of these, let me know. I only ship to the continental US though, sorry. All are opened and used at most once unless noted. Prices are pretty much in line w/ the used offerings on Amazon.co.jp.

Mushi-uta DVD Box ($75)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files the Movie (DVD) ($40)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files the Movie Limited Ed. (Blu-ray + OST) ($60)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Big Battle ($25)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder ($25)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files Volume 6 ($35)
Rozen Maiden Season 1 Volume 1 ($15)
Rozen Maiden Season 1 Volume 6 ($15)
Rozen Maiden Traumend Volume 6 ($20)
Rozen Maiden Ouverture Limited Ed. (w/ CD) OOP ($40)
Unicorn Gundam Volume 1 (Blu-ray, unopened) ($35)
Tales of Symphonia – Tethe’alla Episode 1 Limited Ed. ($50)
Casshern SINS DVD Boxes 1-4 (Box 3 and Box 4 are unopened) ($80 each)
Kara no Kyoukai Volumes 1-7 Limited Eds. (each one includes the OST and a bunch of extras) ($45 each)

I also have all seven Rozen Maiden Traumend drama CDs, $12 each.
Some more CDs at the same price:
Casshern SINS OST
Shin Mazinger OP1 Single
Shin Mazinger OST2
Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Pailsen Files OP/ED Single
Fate/another score
Tales of Symphonia OP1 Single

So I found three cars I wanted to test drive in my local area: ‘00 Civic Si, ‘03 Civic Si and ‘00 Celica GT-S (117K / $4950, 150K / $6900 and 60K / $9995 [miles, price], respectively). Go out to find them… NOWHERE. None of them seem to be around. The 03 Civic and 00 Celica were both in today’s paper, too. Uguu…

Edit: I totally forgot I listed all that info in the previous post. Anyway, contacted the dealers about the 03 and 00 Civics yesterday. Of course they were closed, but now I’m sitting here playing the waiting game waiting for one of them to get back to me. I might bite the bullet and take a look at an Accord Coupe which is probably outside of my price range…

Edit2: One dealership finally got a hold of me… the 00 Civic was sold last Friday. Motherfuckers, take it off your website when something sells! RAGE

Edit3: Another deal missed, this time an 04 WRX. I swear they put these cars on the website after they’ve been sold. Found several cars in my price/interest range that were sold 2-4 weeks ago according to Carfax STILL ON THE MOTHERFUCKING SITE. The dealership selling the 03 Civic has ignored two emails from me, so fuck them too. I did stop and look at a 00 MR-S last Sunday. The price was right but the convertible roof had 2 tears in it and the front bumper paint was all cracked. Not to mention it had an aftermarket exhaust which means a previous owner beat on it (plus Carfax says it had 5 previous owners o.o). I’ve sent an email about a 00 Impreza, not exactly my speed by it has a manual transmission and would be utilitarian (and cheap).

Edit4: Found a gem of a car, an ‘88 MR2 Supercharged with 88K miles… for $3500! That’s a deal if I’ve ever seen one. Shot them an email earlier today, no response 12 hours later. And this one wasn’t a big car dealership but a small operation selling used cars. Sure, everyone knows used car salesmen are the scum of the earth, but they don’t have enough decency to try and make money?! I don’t understand. Additionally, I found a neat payment calculator that’s helping me understand my price ceiling a little better.

So, I decided I can’t sustain living with no emergency money and barely paying my credit card minimums every month — in other words, I’m getting rid of the Mustang. I’ve known for a few months that I was skating on thin ice, but I’m suddenly living month-to-month for the first time ever.

Now, I don’t make much (under 1000USD a month), but I was managing about $500 a month in that car for the last nine months. I’m not sure what changed, but something did about four months ago, and I’ve had less and less money available with each passing month. I’ve only managed to pay my bills by selling a lot of stuff on eBay/Half.com.

So, dilemma. I’ve always been a car guy, so I have a pretty good idea of the kind of car I want to be seen in. For example, you would never find me driving a minivan. I’ve been looking for cars under $10K, enough to get my payments below $250 a month. A local dealership has a 2000 Civic Si for under $5K, which would be great, but it has 110K miles on it. Another has a 2000 Celica GT-S with 68K miles, but the price is probably around $12K. Considering there will be several thousand dollars added to whatever new loan I get to pay off the difference between the amount owed on my old car and the amount a dealership will give for it as a trade-in……… Ugh.