I've lived on my own, at least in part for one or two years now and I thought i'd share a bit on the trials and tribulations of independence. I use the term loosely mind you, because up until a couple of months ago my grandma paid my cell phone bill among other expenses. Let me back track some though to paint a better picture. I moved to LA in October 2008 (pretty sure anyway) lived there, going to school for music, for 8 months living solely off of whatever my grandma and mom could muster up. It didnt take too long for a lot of money to go with the high cost of living (in total rent was almost 3 times higher than here and my portion was over 5 times more than my portion here.)
So suffice it to say that times got hard. Eventually, I literally went days without being able to eat, I had to pay rent extremely late and the stress definitely affected my grades in school. The first couple quarters I was a beast in almost all categories. I had nice gpa and was doing better than I ever had in school in my entire life but oh how the mighty can fall. After failing some finals from not being able to pay attention in class since all i could think about was if id be able to eat that day or how i'm gunna pay overdue rent. I decided that school was just stress on top of stress and took a leave of absence.
I just tried to survive for awhile then, looking for a job but still not feeling like it could happen because i had pretty much never had a job before. So of course since we're poor my grandma couldn't pay my phone and I had no way of contacting her since shes was a bit computer illiterate, she gets down on msn and yahoo though. I guess through word of mouth my best friend jacob's mom heard enough about my predicament to make a myspace page solely to contact me so she could bring me home. and thats just what happened. At the time I could not have been happier seeing as how i was starving and in emotional ruins.
I moved back in where I left off. living with jake and his parents! since they're some of the greatest most hospitable people in all time it was just as awesome as before only this time I hung out with a particular girl pretty much every night and eventually we started dating but thats another story. One night me and Jake were hanging in the city, as we did often if not everyday and our great friend Dustin mention that his apt. neighbor was moving out. Since he's related to the landlord we figured we could give moving in a shot and sure enough under the condition that we all have a job, me, jake, our great friend James and my sweet leigh moved into a three bedroom 1 bath on the south siiiiiide!
It goes something like this: Me and my sweet shacked up of course, jakes got a room, james too, and then our other close friend got tired of his moms boyfriend being a piece of shit and so eventually we converted the basement into his bedroom. So that means currently there are five mugs living here and its all good. My gf is happy to live with four boys because bitches are caddy and evil. and of course us guys are just fine.
And now the dirt: here's the dirt... what little dirt there is.
the only ACTUAL complaint I have about our living situation is that we have both a washer and dryer that work and all we have to do is call the gas company to hook up the dryer because we dont have the proper fittings however, for some reason everybody seems to think its stupid. i am literally the only one that doesn't think its more convenient to either drive home (bout 25 miles for jake, 4 or so for james) or get a ride to the laundromat (for me, mike, and leigh).
heres the thing, the time between washings, because of the lack of transportation, is ungodly.
I go through all of my 6 shirts or so in about a week and then i'm just wearing a filthy shirt for about one or two months. don't get me wrong i'm a man so i can definitely deal with it but there's a limit i've come to learn. after awhile it just brings my mood down DRASTICALLY to put on dirty clothes EVERYDAY for two months. it's pretty fucking gay. it easy to see that my clothes are dirty and as much as i've tried to steer clear of being the dirty kid, it seems to have thrust itself upon me and i gotta say it can knock anybody off their high horse. anybody.
if you're saying to yourself "not a big deal to me you little bitch" then fuck you because you're dirty anyway and dont have the exceptions I have for myself. not everybody think being filthy is cool.
So there's that... Any other inconvenience is fine with me. We could use more food more often but we're all broke so its no biggie, we do what we can, help each other out and we get by.
The dishes, as with many a household, could be done more often but we're getting there. Mike holds them down most of the time. I stopped because these mofos tried to make it out like I never did them a couple of times so I showed what never doing them looks like and that shit got baaaaaaad. the dishes were a mile high and smelled terrible. since then mike has been the bigger man and cleaned them so i'll help keep them up.
Anyway we've lived here for 276 days as of today and there has never been a real argument or anything like that. Back to my specific situation, long story short, my mom has a problem with spending money. she cant stop. ever. regardless of what's available. so she stop being able to support me around the time I moved back here i think and now that she cant possibly ruin her bank account anymore she's set her sights on my granny's so i decided that i can no longer rely on anybody but me. I get paid weekly but i'm lucky to make over 110 bucks a check. I buy food when I can, took over my cell phone bill (about 100 a month), and it's awful, haha. i've always paid rent myself because thats the only thing I could afford and I wreck my car in April so I no longer have one. The silver lining is not that I dont have to pay anymore, but that I don't pay anyway because A) I couldn't if I wanted to (its 255.66 a month.) and B) because it probably need over 1,000 dollars worth of repairs. No I didn't have insurance! remember that whole "poor" thing. i couldn't afford it, nor could i afford to lose my car (or so I thought). So the situation is that i dont have a car, my credit is plummeting everyday because I cant pay a thing on what's left of it (about $2,000), I cant get another one since i'm poor and now have terrible credit anyway, and though I need another job I can't really look for one without a reliable way to get there. I trying to stay up though, i plan to move back to LA within the year with my girlfriend leigh (shes got stacks cuh) and there id live close enough to hollywood blvd to land a decent job or two. Things will hopefully get better for me so leighmur and I can chase our dreams together like we want so badly.
theirs a little bit about living independently. i'll be sure to mention more details as they unravel.
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