My money's funny...

Fuck pride, I'm broke.

Wallet-in-traction-broke. Not broke as in "Oh, I can't go to the club tonight," but broke as in putting oxygen on layaway. If not for the goodwill (?) of family (another story, another time), I'd be homeless. Seriously, I haven't worked in about 2 months, and had absolutely no savings when I quit, so right about now I'm financially on par with most crackheads and refugees. Stray cats and small children generally have more collateral. These aren't tears of joy - when my (7 year-old) daughters come to visit me, they inevitably have more money than I do, which isn't hard, because I'M BROKE!!

Why? Well, lemme tell ya. I was fed up with wasting my talent and potential working menial, ego-castrating jobs in the service industry, only to receive less money THAN I OWED every two weeks (that's not hyperbole). Arriving in the afternoon, clocking out when the birds were chirping, entering sporadic comatose states, waking up, and catatonically repeating the entire torturous process.

So, what'd my brilliant ass do? Quit. No job lined up, no money in my pocket or bank, no place of my own, no car, no deodorant, no clean clothes...

Now, to sum it up: I feel as if it's a crime to have an IQ of 160+ and be working with a gaggle of 16-year old, mentally Schiavo'd, spoiled brats at Pizza Hut for JUST over minimum wage, and an obviously drastic improvement is to be brilliantly talented with...absolutely nothing. Damn, I wonder if they're hiring?

Yes, quitting was irresponsible, foolish, and self-defeating, but I REFUSE to continue along the same road.

For four years I went to the lil' half-assed college in the backward, huckabuck town I live in, going to school full-time, maintaining a 4.0 for the majority of it, while also working full-time, being a father, assisting my disabled mother, and continuing to have some semblance of a "life." During this time period, myriad tragedies meandered into the scene, including serious baby-mama drama (didn't see my children for eight months when I got a new woman), a dislocated clavicle, a couple compressed discs, and my mother contracting a potentially fatal and incurable disease. Oh, yeah - and a very good friend was murdered.

But I stuck with it - I'm not a quitter (except the whole cigarettes thing, but it's not as if I could've afforded those anyway, now is it?). Anyway, I digress...

Mind you, this is a Technical College. Due to the complete ineptitude of the administration, I am now eight classes - yes, 8 - from graduating with THREE Associate's Degrees. Apparently, after the school canceling my FINAL course for my (first) major, "forgetting" to make me a double-major for a year, and losing records of my completed courses (until AFTER I'd retaken some), they inform me that I can no longer collect financial aid. Pell Grants have a time limit on two-year institutions, and there's a cap on student loans. But it's not as if I could have fulfilled the necessary full-time enrollment to qualify for either, what with the whole one class offered one time only, once a year (as a prerequisite to another class offered one time only, once a year...rinse and repeat) thing they got goin' on.

As I've received neither my degrees, nor any of the multiple certifications I was pursuing, and have no related experience in the field outside of school, obtaining relevant occupation is...um, "difficult." This situation is only exacerbated by my location - just past purgatory and short of hell - in a small service and manufacturing community, where the closest I can come to employment in the IT field is working in the electronics department at the local Walmart.

Yippee.