4 posts tagged with "Daily Life"

So it looks like my job search has failed. I had hoped to get a job early this year so I could save money up for traveling to events. After several rejection emails and never hearing back from several others, I decided it's time to throw in the towel.

I'll still be trying to look for a job, but that'll have to wait. My business partner told me he needs me to travel with him for about a month to work the booth at 6 tournaments. That's a tournament every week. We'll be going all across the US, and one time in Canada. Since I hadn't found a job yet, I decided to do it. After all, Rectangle Corner is one of my only sources of income. Even though I'm not making money yet, I believe the potential for the business is very high.

There is actually one tournament I'll be going to before that. I'm going to be setting up a booth there, but it's my first time doing it alone. My business partner will be getting ready for another tournament during that time. I'm really looking forward to it. We've been working on expanding our convention presence to other non-mainstream areas. We usually only go to gaming conventions like EVO or Genesis, but I've been applying to several Anime and comic conventions.

I'm definitely not gonna be spending any money on a hotel when I do this. My car is more than enough to handle a few day trip. I've been getting ready for about a week now. I used to drink Huel on these trips to save money and time, but now, I asked AI to help me create a more palatable and cheaper diet. I'll be using dry foods that won't need to be refrigerated. The photo below is almost everything I'll need.

Even though I couldn't find a job, it's not over for this year. I still have enough money to go to a few track meets and tournaments here and there. Maybe I can go to some around the area of the conventions I'll be going to. I'll need to do some research to see what's best. If things don't look affordable on paper, I'll just have to wait until next year to compete. I still need to save money, so I'm definitely going to be looking for jobs for Fall and Winter.

I went to the dentist yesterday. After examining my teeth (X-rays and poking around with that small sickle and mirror), they said they found 3 cavities. 2 that needed to be re-filled (re-filled?! I thought it was a 1 time thing!), and 1 that was new. The total for this procedure came out to be about $700. I just came in for a cleaning, but they wouldn't do it without the other things bundled in. They recommended I do a payment plan. Mind you, I'm paying for a dental plan (This is different from insurance, I'm not sure how though) to handle most of the costs, so the total is after the discount.

The evaluation they gave me was $87. I can't take this no more. How the heck am I supposed to afford anything? I never thought being an adult would be this hard. It seemed like my parents had everything under control growing up. They never really showed us how insanely expensive literally everything is in comparison to how much money they had. Well, for the most part.

I grew up in the suburbs for most of my life. When my parents divorced, my dad moved into some apartments. He later moved into a house, and my mom is currently living in an apartment (Where I'm living right now. I alternate between my dad's house and my mom's apartment). I often wonder why my mom decided to move out of the house she lived in initially. I feel like it's because of a lack of money management. There would be times when the cable would go out for a few weeks, or the times when she would go to a payday loan place on our way home from school. Just yesterday, I asked her about a letter on our door threatening to evict her if she didn't pay the rent in 3 days. She says it was because of a change in payment methods that they were unaware of. I don't believe it.

No matter how much I look at it, there's just no way I can keep living with these constant bills looming over me. It just doesn't seem feasible for me to achieve my goals without subtracting a huge portion of the things I'd like to have. My dad told me he had to stop collecting comic books when me and my siblings were born. This is one of the main reasons I don't plan on having a relationship or children. With the insane amount of bills that are thrown my way on the daily, there's just no way I can hope to accomplish anything without getting rid of unnecessary things.

Here's an example: The image below is an unpaid debt of mine:

When I lost that Wells Fargo job, I no longer had a way to pay off my credit card bills. This, along with another credit card adds up to about $15,000 in debt. If you add my student loans to the picture, that's about $45,000 of debt. Luckily, I'm not paying any student loans right now because I was able to get them deferred for a year. I might have to pay them later on this year if I'm unable to do that again. Before that happens, I gotta find me a job.

Mark my words, I'm not gonna make this money mistake again. As soon as these debts are paid off, I'm gonna start saving up. This is gonna be much easier to do now that I'm living with my parents again. But don't get it twisted, I will still be traveling to track meets and tournaments to compete. That's what I've prepared my car for.

My tax return came in, so I've got about $900 to spare at the moment. I've just been eating whatever my parents have in the kitchen, and restricting my driving to only going to my dad's house or sister's temporary apartment. Once I get a job, I'll start planning other travel ventures.

Yesterday I took my sister to her counseling session to help with her addiction. This is the same sister I talked about in this blog post. She's been communicating much better than before, but she still seems very out of it at times. I have trouble understanding what she's saying, and I feel bad having to ask her to repeat herself at times. However, I've always had that issue with the way some people talk, so it could just be a problem with myself.

I'm so glad she's willing to start making a change in her life. A few weeks ago, she voluntarily went to a rehab center, and stayed there for a few weeks. Unfortunately, they couldn't let her stay longer than that, so she was going to be let back onto the streets. Thankfully, my dad decided to rent a small room out for her to stay for a few months. We've been taking her to these counseling sessions, and I think it's been helping. She told me she wants to get a cosmetology license and start working on hair and makeup. This is the first time in years that she's told me any goals of hers.

She told me she wanted to play Resident Evil 5 with me (The greatest Co-Op game of all time in my opinion). We used to play that game all the time growing up. Because I'm broke, I decided to grab my PS3 and work on jailbreaking it to play downloaded games. While figuring out how to do that, I found old music that my sister put on the system. This music was copied to the PS3 back in 2012-2013. It really brought back memories of my sister playing Britney Spears songs for hours in the room we shared back in the day. I used to tolerate it when she played it, but it grew on me over the years. I'm now a big fan of pop music because of her.

There's also photos of her avatar in Play Station Home. I remember watching her run around the malls and clubs, and conversing with people with a plugged in keyboard. Man, those were the days!

I've been searching for a job since after my trip to San Jose, California in February. I left my job at Home Depot in October of last year when I came back to Houston, but I decided to not get a job immediately. I had to work on my bald buttons, which are sanded down Gamecube Controller buttons that people use when playing Smash Bros.

I would like a seasonal job, but since I haven't had any success with finding one, I've been expanding my search for full and part time jobs. Last week, I had an interview with Lowe's. It was for a stocker position, which was the same position I had at Home Depot. I was pretty confident I would get the job because of my experience. Unfortunately, the manager was not happy with my work history and college degree. He wanted someone who would stay with the company for years and strive to become a manager. I made it clear to the manager I was not the person they were looking for.

Looking back at that interview, maybe I should have lied and said I was willing to stay at the job for a prolonged period of time. I think I'll take my degree off of my resume. I've heard that helps people who are over-qualified find jobs. I don't like the idea of lying, but what else am I to do? I guess I could try to find a job in my field, but I've never had success with that. Applying to software engineer jobs feels like throwing my resume into the void. I either got no response or a decline 4 months later. I'd rather keep trying to find a job where I'll at least get a response once in a while.

Today I went to a hiring event for a school district in Houston. I wish I remembered to take some photos. I need to remember to take pictures when I go somewhere new without my camera. The event had all of the district's elementary, middle, and high schools (Well, idk if it was all of them. It seemed like a lot of them though. At least 30 different schools were there). My main goal was to try to get a substitute teaching role. My mom (She's a teacher) told me anyone with a degree can get a job as a substitute teacher. It seems like a good way to make some money without having to work most days of the week.

I think I mentioned it before, but I need most of my days free to train and travel to tournaments and track meets. I'm going to be saving a large quantity of my money by sleeping in my car to avoid hotels. My hope is that my other businesses (rectanglecorner.com, reflexpoint.com, and selling bald buttons) will take off in the future. But for now, I'll have to rely on the jobs I can find out here in this fast-paced maze of a world.