Just a simple case of baby fever... it will pass

So back to my raise. Here's how you know you are on the verge of financial ruin:

You wake up with that familiar and debilitating throbbing sensation pounding the backs of your eyeballs. You open your eyes and immediately diagnose the root of this oncoming migraine: lack of caffeine. You jump out of bed, making a beeline straight for the coffee maker. This is much too serious to stop first for a visit with the toilet or to squirt some saline into the arid orifices you use to SEE the coffee maker. You don't need to see it anyway because you fucking know where it is. It's sitting right next to the can of coffee your mom brought over from your uncle's house after he died, since everybody else was too weirded out to accept food from a dead person's house. You can't figure out how you were the lucky relative of so many superstitious lily livered sissies, but their idiosyncrasies have made for many happy evenings of frenzied kitchen raids on your part. You still have a few boxes of his favorite brand of pirogi in the freezer in case you have special guests over.... anyway....

You reach the coffee maker and fill the reservoir to the very top with water. You swish a little bit of yesterday's leftover coffee around the pitcher and figure that it's probably still good. Then you pry the basket from its nest, observing with not-so-surprised terror that it holds an old "single" that you found convenient to take from the motel room during your trip "Up North." This coffee single happened to be one of two. The other one is sitting discreetly on the counter next to the empty can of your dead uncle's coffee, which you wasted no time depleting. It happens to be the decaffeinated single, the disdained ugly twin of the wasted first.

You know that you have zero funds in the bank. You are not so careless as to incur a $35 overdraft fee in order to get a cup of coffee down the street. You throw the ugly twin in along with the used first, and switch on the coffee maker, relieved to have somehow bought yourself one more morning of peace.

You head to the bathroom to squirt a couple drops of saline into those brilliant eyes of yours. You congratulate yourself for opting for the $49.99 room instead of the $38.99 room on that lonely night a few weeks ago when you just couldn't go any further. Ain't no way that other motel would have provided you with two extra days' worth of coffee! As you see it, your past extravagence has actually earned money for you, seeing as how you might have been forced to use your debit card yesterday, this morning AND tomorrow, thus digging yourself deeper into debt with each trip to the coffee shop. You wonder what you will do tomorrow, because surely you can't use them again... but you never know.

Broke, I tell ya, I'm BROKE

The healthy glow on my sun-touched nose has waned, now that I have been hard at work for over a week. Why couldn't I have won some sort of grand prize instead of reporting back to the office? Plus, now I'm bored. Word has gotten around that if anyone spends any length of time with MH, the only topic of conversation will be the "Trip Up North" or as I also like to term it: My Sister's House is So......

But that's okay. I'm buried in work anyway. I definitely found out which clients like me and which ones hate me. Some of them were asking, "What happened to MH? Is she alriiiiiight?" as if they indeed wished that I'd fallen off a cliff, preferably at the Grand Canyon. Yes, that first day back was a triumphant one. And it was also nice to see that there were actually people who missed me. Wow, now isn't that a blow for the ultimate pessimist?



But that does bring me to my main topic: my raise. Everyone in my department got a raise. It was based on our position and years of service. So of course my raise didn't hold a candle to most others my own age. Even many who are younger. Anyway. It was still a very good raise, but by the time it all came through, I had already made out a budget which told me that I still won't be making enough to pay my bills. The really sick part of it is that I spend exactly ZERO money on anything but necessities. You might say, "MH, didn't you just go on vacation?" Well, You. Yes I did. But I might point out that my sister was given a very large sum of money by my uncle, who had a point to prove about how much ass-kissing can help a poor brute in our family. I have formerly chosen not to kiss any uncle-ass, much to my bank account's disappointment. But nobody else in my family seems to have a problem kissing ass, so my sister was the happy recipient. She, in turn, decided that she wanted all of her brothers and sisters at her house for a weekend, and she sent me a few hundred to get there. I stayed at her house, and she paid for that too.

So back to my budget. I have budgeted myself down to the number of Morning star breakfast patties I can eat every day. I used to eat two patties, but seeing as how I can't afford to eat that many, I will now be eating one. That saves me about $6 per month. Plus, I eat less bread when I do that. So that will save me another $3 per month. See how that works? When you eat less, you really do save money. Next time you see an anorexic girl skulking around, looking in garbage cans, don't scoff at her for being a Type A personality with a perfection complex. Offer her a $10 bill. I can't even buy my coffee at the Quik Trip anymore. Every time I see a QT, especially if it's a TRAVEL CENTER QT, I almost convulse with joy. For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of picking out "gourmet" coffee from Quik Trip, I do feel for you. But then again, you have not been burdened with the $40-50 per month it costs to enjoy this luxury. BTW, if you are blessed with QT, but don't know about the "gourmet" coffees, see if they still have Rocky Road. If yours still has it, mix it with some of the Mighty Mocha with Caffeine, and splash a bit of whatever regular brew they have in there. You will thank yourself later when you need to quickly think of something devilishly witty to say to or about your fiercest rival....

I could go on and on listing the small pleasures I'll have to give up, but the point is, I probably would have merrily continued this unleashed spending spree if I would not have gotten this damned raise. I'd still be blissfully unaware of my impending pecuniary ruin, I'd be running free, gorging myself on Morning star breakfast patties and QT gourmet coffee with wild abandon. But I'd be happy, damn it. I'd be happy.