The Changing of the Triumvirate
3/26/07
1:25 PM
"AW SHIT!"
I slam on my brakes. I mash the pedal as far into the floor as it will go. I feel the rapid, machine gun drumming of anti lock brakes. There is no screeching of tires on pavement. It's too wet. I'm sliding. I'm not going to be able to stop. I brace myself against the driver's seat...
3/25/07
3:30 PM
I have just deposited $616.02 in my checking account. This, along with what I make during the coming week, will be more than enough to cover rent and utilities. I am considering this a major victory after having blown all my "extra" money earlier in the month. I could have put a nice dent in my credit card bill and started trying to save up some money to actually make progress toward moving to Chicago rather than just talking about it...but I didn't. I spent it on dumb shit that I don't need.
Dumb shit like the hammock that is awkwardly rigged up on my non-hammock-sized balcony. It looks fairly ridiculous and is only about 60% as comfortable as a hammock ought to be, but I got in one of those moods where, come hell or high water, I was putting it up. When you live with mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, the first nice week of the year makes you want to do a lot of "summery" shit that you just don't need to do. You want things like a grill, a hammock, an ice cream cone, a motorcycle, rollerblades, a dog, pool supplies, etc. Anything that goes well with summer. When you live with a mild case of being an idiot, you get a couple of those things. I stopped the summer themed purchases at the hammock, but managed to knock out about $240 more of random purchases and gambling that left me feeling low on cash and good judgment. I had wasted more money than somebody who waits tables for a living ought to, but I was still doing ok.
3/27/07
1:25 PM
I'm still sliding, both literally and metaphorically. My eyes can see the back end of the blue minivan coming up fast. My mind's eye can see the brick wall of several more points on my insurance policy and a guaranteed rate hike. I crash into both. POP! There goes the all-too-familiar sound of fiberglass, plastic and aluminum colliding at a relatively low rate of speed. I miss the days of steel bumpers and soaring curb weights...
"FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!" I'm pounding my fist into the center console of my car. I am instantly furious with myself. I stop a little short of shattering my fifth metacarpal and slump onto the steering wheel in frustration and disbelief. I crashed precisely because I was looking over into the other lane, at the other rear-end collision, and thinking, "Wow, that poor girl. Sucks for her. OH SHIT!"
I get out expecting that my hood will probably be nice and arched up and that my bumper may or may not still be attached, as the front of my vehicle is pretty much designed to act like a soda can in an accident so that my rate of deceleration as the driver is reduced. If you've ever done the experiment where you throw an egg at a wall, then at a hanging bed sheet, you understand the physics and logic behind such automotive design. If you've ever seen what it costs to replace the front end of such a vehicle after a totally unspectacular crash, you think "Fuck, a mean case of whiplash and a bruise or two would have healed for free."
Maybe it's not as bad as I thought. While my Honda emblem and license plate are lying prostrate on the ground, nobody else is, and the bumper took all of the hit. It's pretty scratched and a little out of place, but nothing needs to be fixed. If you're not looking for it, you can't even tell that her car has been hit at all...but that doesn't mean it won't need to be fixed. My car looked mostly fine after I was rear-ended several months ago in almost precisely the same spot on precisely the same street. Upon further inspection, however, the whole bottom plate needed to be replaced in the trunk and the bumper was also replaced.
"Do you want to just exchange information or call the cops? This is gonna end up being my fault."
"No, I'm calling the polishe. Thish ish a leashed vehicle."
She has a lateral lisp that I'd find absolutely hilarious if I weren't furious right now. Not only will I get an accident at fault on my insurance, I'll also be receiving a ticket. In a later conversation, my friend who writes policies will inform me that, depending on my agency's policy on double penalizing, I'll get up to 8 points. That means a HUGE increase in premium, plus I get to pay the fine for the ticket because I'm a little less than two months away from being able to take defensive driving class.
When I got hit, I just took the guy's information and we got on our merry ways to go see Nebraska beat Missouri. He claimed fault, my car got fixed, everybody was peachy. No need to wait forever for the cops to prove that he did something wrong. We all knew it. This chick, however, is really would up about the condition of the bottom part of the rear bumper on her lovely Dodge Caravan. Why anyone would lease one of these things is beyond me. I pray that she doesn't have children enough to put in that thing, because the idea that somebody might have had sex with her on multiple occasions makes my stomach turn even further than it already has. I can't help but wonder what the dirty talk would sound like.
"Oh yeshhh, sherioushly thatsh amashing...shhhhcrew me!"
Gross.
Officer M. Muff arrives and gives us our respective, lengthy paperwork. He also gives me a $104 citation for negligent driving. I wonder how much he hates his job. I can't imagine driving around from accident to accident all day, dealing with pissed off people with sore necks and then trying to get them to not fuck up paperwork. Ugh. The comic value of Officer Muff issuing a citation to Mr. Beavers is not lost on me, but once again, giggling is a little beyond me right now.
I can already see that I'm not going to be able to afford to have any fun this month, and probably not the next, either. That's $104 on top of my $200+ phone bill, plus another $500 for rent at the end of the month and somewhere in the neighborhood of $150-200 for utilities. Then, when it's time to renew my car insurance in a month, it'll probably around $600 for the quarter. $2,400 a year just in case I get in bad wreck for once. I really wish I lived in a city with actual mass transit. Looks like I'll be taking a much more serious look at those MDS medical studies.
The more I think about it, I can't decide if I want to kick out my passenger side window from where I'm standing, or sit down on the curb and bawl. Ultimately, I do neither.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, that wise little voice that always knows better starts piping up.
"How do you like it? Huh? You were doing great in school, you remember that? You were on the dean's list and you could have gotten involved in some good research and gotten yourself some good references and made it into a decent grad school. You could be well on your way to your PhD by now. Doctors make six figures. But no, you got burned out and quit. You dropped out and decided that some time off feeling the grind of daily life in the lower class would build some character for you. Well, how are you doing? Got enough character in the tank yet, slick? Is it still funny to be only 2 classes shy of your degree and making your living on 15% of whatever you can convince people to eat? The list of people who think you're cool is shrinking, isn't it? I can tell your own name isn't on it any more."
Smug little fucker. He's always right.
Here I am, at 24 years old. I used to hang future on my voice, my ACT score and my six pack abs. They hand out Hollywood careers on the way into town to guys with all those, right? How stupid and shallow. The voice I still have, but it's a lot bigger struggle to sing in tune because I've had a sinus infection for the better part of a year now. I can't afford to go to the doctor at real world prices and get the prescription for the antibiotics I also can't afford that will make it go away. Even if I do, I'll get another one in a few months anyhow. I don't know why. My six pack still looks like it's there, but it's not because I'm muscular and toned anymore. It's because I'm so skinny that the almost complete absence of body fat makes me look "cut" even though I seldom, if ever, work out any more. As for my ACT score, it's funny, I have yet to have anyone ask when filling out my tip after their meal. Nobody ever says, "Boy, you really made that fish special sound good. I bet you got a 34 English, didn't you? You waited our table in such a methodical, logical manner! 32 science? I knew it! Now, I'm gonna guess that even though math wasn't your strongest subject, but I bet you could ballpark me ten percent pretty quickly couldn't you? Oh, good for you! Know what? Ballpark me fifteen percent. You earned it."
The realization hit me this month, as I really took stock of all the things I couldn't do as a result of my lifestyle: I'm just a waiter. In life, there is no prize for what you want to do or what you used to do. There is only the impact of what you are doing. You can try to set it up meticulously, but the unexpected will happen. You can be sure of that. You can be so sure of that, you might as well call it "the unwillingly expected." When it happens and you're a waiter, it sucks way more than it sucks when it happens and you're a physician's assistant. This is how credit cards get maxed out. This is how you get phone calls at 9:00 AM on your day off because you owe somebody money and the collectors had a much easier time finding you than the people who tried to send you your W-2 form.
This is why if you don't tip 20%, you're an asshole. I guess I'm letting my locus of control become externalized. This is why I'm really starting to think about grad school. This is why, for the first time, I'm jealous of my friend with the shitty job that pays him $50K a year. He's jealous of me because I have more fun. The grass is always greener...
I have to admit that while in the past tense that statement is true, I had more fun, I'm not so sure that this is fun anymore. I'm no longer in that phase of life where my parents take care of all the "real" stuff and my job is for the sake of earning me enough money to buy things like video games and beer. I'm in that phase where my job needs to cover everything. My parents have my back on health insurance and emergencies, and that's about it. There's nothing fun about thinking that I'm finally getting some money saved up and then somehow still ending up flat broke at the end of each month. There's nothing fun about pretending I don't want to go out when really I can't afford to go out. There's nothing fun about one meal a day, especially when it's potatoes.
This, evidently, is what I couldn't grasp in all my years growing up as a doctor's son. My dad has plenty of stories about spending long hours in sweltering heat and numbing cold alike, digging graves all through his youth. He grew up with a firsthand knowledge of what poor means. He grew up in the area and era of Omaha where you were as likely to hear German, Polish or Czech spoken as you were English. He grew up poor with the children of immigrants and built his whole world, brick by brick, and held it together with a metaphorical mortar made out of hard work and spite. His mother drank, and his father didn't believe in him. When he went to college, he had a son and he had a fire in his stomach. I grew up in the one neighborhood in Omaha where you could say the name of it and immediately people knew you were rich. My mother scratched my back until I fell asleep and my father supported me unconditionally even if he didn't understand what the hell I was thinking. When I went to college, I had a shiny car that had already been crashed twice and no idea about the value of a potato. The voice pipes up again.
"That's what this is about, isn't it? You didn't know what it is to want success. You wanted it, but you wanted it the way a kid wants some ice cream. You didn't want it the way a dying man wants a priest. You can operate within the social boundaries of the lifestyle you grew up with, but you can't appreciate what it takes to get there. This is you learning. This is you growing up. This is you eating macaroni and frozen pizza because you have to so that you can understand how good a steak really tastes when you eat it because you can."
Smug little fucker. He's right again.
This is me having a life changing experience. This is me realizing that whether or not I ever have a career in comedy, I need to have a career. I've got a great girl now, and if things were to work out in the long run, I damn sure couldn't let her marry a waiter. I'm going to have kids someday, and I can't feed them on $3 two-tops. It's time to finish school. Not tell people I finished so they stop asking, actually finish. It's time to have a degree and a reason why somebody should pay me a lot of money. It's time to have a reason why I should be proud of what I'm doing with my life. It's time to switch from emphasizing ACT score, abs and a voice to emphasizing a degree, a drive and the knowledge that I'm not going to go back to staring hungrily at an empty fridge. It's time to find a new application for my triumvirate of ACT, abs and voice. The ACT hopefully means that I'll be smart enough to do my job better than other people so that I can push for pay increases that run in the thousands per year, not the cents per hour. What do with the abs and the voice? You know, I just might use them on keeping that great girl...
1 Comments:
Beav-- sorry to hear about the accident, but I'm glad you can find some humor in it. Officer "Muff" wins, methinks. Its good you are serious about taking action to apply to PhD programs - even a PsyD program (which is easier to get into) would be good if you want to specialize in therapy (and I hear after you get out, in the right markets you can really bank). best of luck and drive faster so that you stop paying attention to other people on the road (no time to watch them!).
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