Stupid May
May was no good.
This is seriously long. Sorry.
My job ended at the end of April, and while I’m glad I am no longer employed by MRT, being unemployed in early May posed some interesting challenges. Mostly, having no job, I was challenged to try to find something to do with my life. As some of my other friends have expressed on this site in recent posts, this is no easy task. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that my specific skills are difficult to market to non-theatre people, and we’re certainly moving to Denver in the fall. I thought, perhaps, that I would get a job at some crappy retail outfit and earn minimum wage for the summer while Carolyn and I feasted on a diet of cheap macaroni and cheese until the time seemed right to move out west and find ourselves real, grown-up jobs.
But during my last week of work, a fantastic opportunity presented itself. A co-worker at MRT wanted his basement refinished, turning one large empty room with short ceilings into 4 distinctly smaller rooms with even shorter ceilings. Having just built a set out of actual drywall and with a real drop ceiling (most pointless scenic design ever!) I had the skills and the know how to complete such a project. Plus, it would be the kind of work where I could take the time off that I needed in order to vacation, spend some time of with my sweetie, plan for an upcoming wedding, and so on. And, I figured I could make it lucrative enough so that I could only work part of the summer and earn enough money so I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the summer. Seemed like a good situation to me.
But I should have known.
As soon as John and I started having more serious discussions about the project, I started to get a really bad feeling in my belly. First, he said he had $500 dollars put away and he wasn’t sure if that was going to be enough for materials, or enough for materials and my labor. Um, $500. That’s less than I make in a week working at this godforsaken craphole. Yeah, John, that’s not going to be enough money.
So I took Justin over to do a site survey with me. We talked a bit. Justin ballparked the project at about $10,000. John swallowed hard, but he’s been wanting this project done for a while and decided he was going to come up with the money to do it this summer, come hell or high water. So I went home and whipped together a more substantial price out. I did it quickly because I wanted to get started goddamnit. I didn’t have a job anymore and trying to pay bills when you are broke is hard to do.
So I came up with a number of $9500 and presented the quickly done priceout to him. He was in a very, very bad mood that day, so I figured he was going to see the number, melt down and say, “um, nevermind.” But he looked at it, thought it was okay, and said he wanted to pass it by his wife first. After a week of waiting he called said that it was a go, made an offhand comment about wanting to do it for less money (another ominous sign) and then said he wouldn’t have the money until June 1st. Well, crap! That might be a problem. No income for a month would make it really tight around here, because we’d only have Carolyn’s income to live off of. I’m not sure we could do it for a whole month.
So Carolyn got home that day and we discussed options. We decided that as long as the money was there on June 1st, we’d be alright. Carolyn could cover groceries and such for the month, and then when rent and bills came due, I’d take care of them with my sudden influx of cash. Putting off work until June wasn’t going to be easy, but it was going to be doable, and there really wasn’t any other option that was going to give me that kind of money with that kind of flexibility, short of maybe selling my body on the streets. It’s hard to say. I’m not sure what kind of market there would be for that here in Lowell.
So I was forced into a month of vacation, but I couldn’t shake the bad feeling from my belly. I sat at home because I didn’t have any money to do anything fun. I didn’t even have money to pay my bills. So I sat at home and stressed myself out over money and convinced myself that the bottom was going to fall out of this project. And then the high water actually came, and it was dark and gloomy and rainy for a week. Lowell flooded and it was miserable. And my belly continued to get worse. I became more stressed out each and every day.
I tried as best as I could to distract myself for the month. This involved a lot of guitar playing, a lot of poker playing, and a lot of watching the Cubs. Carolyn and I got MLB.TV at the beginning of the summer because we’re both out of market fans who love to watch baseball, but miss watching out team. Couple that with the fact that Red Sox fans, like the Massholes that they are, are really, REALLY fucking annoying so we’d rather not associate ourselves with such a crowd,and Carolyn is a Yankees fan to boot. (She comes by it honestly, having grown up in a home in Connecticut with Yankee fans for parents who had grown up as a Yankee fan and a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. It’s in her blood, so I find it charming rather than “fucking annoying” which is the feeling that I’ve always associated with Midwestern Yankee fans.) But the Cubs offered no solace during May. They only served to make things worse by going an embarrassing 7 - 22 and losing games in the most devastating ways possible. The starting pitching sucked, the bullpen broke down and lost leads. Dempster who saved 30 some odd games in a row blew three saves in one week. The bats were dead. Everyone pitched like poo.
And the Cubs lost and lost and lost. And my stress went up and up and up.
Then one day, Carolyn and I went to see The DaVinci Code. And as we were getting back on the highway to get home, some asshole ran us off the road because he didn’t want me getting in between him and the car in front of him, even though there was about 7 car lengths between the two cars as I approached on the ramp. I mean, really, this guy was so far back when I looked I didn’t even consider it a possibility that it was going to be a problem. I sped up to match the speed of the car in front of him, and he sped way up and got right on that guys ass, leaving me with no open road in which to put my car. I had to slam on my breaks, which they actually think is an okay thing to do on the highways here. Man, I was pissed. I had never seen someone go so far out of their way to put another driver in such a dangerous situation. I’ve seen people do stupid things that were dangerous, because they weren’t paying attention or they really thought they could get away with something that dumb. But I’ve never had anyone maliciously try to run me off the road before, especially when there was no reason whatsoever to do so. Had Carolyn not been in the passenger seat, I probably would have smashed into the fucker and then beat his ass. He would have been the recipient of all the pent up road rage I’ve amassed since moving to this state where getting into a car feels like playing russian roulette. I sincerely hope that guy has gotten into a car accident by now and has smashed his precious truck to smithereens because I was already stressed about all sorts of shit before he did that, and afterwards I could hardly even think straight. Just one more thing on the pile, ya know.
So the last week of May I called John again to finalize things. He said the project was still a go, and that we should get together in the next week to sign a contract and get all of the details finalized. Things seemed to be going well and I was looking forward to having something to do during the days again, as well as looking forward to having money to pay bills.
But then last week, I was gearing up to get started, John called and said that we needed to talk. He had gone to visit some friends the week before and they were discussing the basement project that they were getting ready to undertake when their friends told them a horror story. Apparently these friends had done a similar thing. They hired a friend of theirs to so some work on their house. This guy happened to fall off a ladder and then ended up suing them because he fucked up his back and now they have a lien against their home. Well, John’s wife wasn’t too thrilled with the project anyway, and this was just the last straw. She freaked out and called the project off just days before we were set to start. Just days before we were going to get together to sign a contract which would have made it impossible to back out. Just days before I was going to get the money that was going to allow us to pay rent this month. So, no work in May for Ryan, and no money coming in June, either. Ryan is screwed.
But my belly feels better. I spent an entire month waiting for the shit to hit the fan, and so when it did, I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s over now, and now there are new problems to deal with.
So there might be some other work at MRT this summer, and hopefully I can get in on that action so I’ll get some money coming in. And Carolyn (the saint) is cashing out some money to get us caught up and make sure we get through the next couple few months without any more money stress. She is planning on leaving her job in mid July so that we can focus our energies toward the upcoming move, the upcoming wedding, and becoming the shiny happy people we love being. Leaving her job will be good for the both of us, because it stresses her out so, and then, even if I am not working, she can be home with me to distract my brain from all the imagined disasters that are coming to get me.
It’s June now. I am broke. I don’t have a plan, really. But things are looking up.
The Cubs are playing like they belong in the Major Leagues again. D Lee will be back soon, as will Prior. Woody’s looking better and even if they are not at full strength, at least they might be more consistent than the string of rookies that have been inserted in the rotation this year (except for Sean Marshall, he’s been pretty good).
And I’ve had a really good month playing online poker. I’ve been playing a lot of freerolls at UB for their ultimate points. These tourneys are big between 3500 on the weekdays and 5000 on the weekends, but I’ve placed 28th, 83rd, 52nd, and 3rd over the last month. And I’ve had great success in large cash multi’s over the last week. UB tries to run a 100 player $1.00 + 0.10 sit ‘n go, but I had never seen it fill up. Usually there are 5 or 6 people waiting for another 90 some to sign up. But it actually filled on Memorial Day, and I busted in third place, for a very reasonable return on my money. Then I noticed that they were running a $100 dollar added $1.00 + 0.10 tourney everyday last week. About 45 minutes prior to the start there were only 30 or so people signed up. With $100 extra dollars in the pot there was a chance for a serious cashout seemingly without having a whole lot of people to go through. So I signed up. And then more and more people signed up. When all was said and done there were about 550 players so I felt my odds had been reduced dramatically. I was hoping to make it into the top 50 and at least get my money back plus a little more. But it looked like I wasn’t even going to be able to do that. By the time half the players had been eliminated I had gained about 200 extra chips and was sitting about 15 people from the bottom. And really I was only above the people who had just gotten rocked for almost all their chips. It looked hopeless, so I started pushing, hoping to drive most people out of hands and get lucky against someone’s weak ace and double up. So I started pushing with all kinds of crap, KJo, J10o, baby ace, 45s, 23o. I just started pot betting, didn’t matter the position, and man, people folded like it was their job. No body would look me up. Nobody would even see a flop. By the time I finally had someone call a preflop pot bet from me, I had won 8% of the total hands preflop. And it was the perfect call, too, because it was someone with a large chip stack who called my AJ with a weak ace. I doubled up when an ace hit on the flop, which put me in a position to money. Yay! But it got better. I started getting decent cards. Made plays for the blinds at good times. Got the chip lead and got pushy. Lost the chip lead, but coasted to the final table, and then watched the play get crazy because the blinds and antes were eating people up and so they got impatient. I ended up heads up against a guy who had me outchipped 4 to 1, but I wore him down slowly and ended up busting him. So, I took 1st out of 550 or so and ended up making $140 for my $1.10 and 5 hours worth of work. Kickass.
And next week Carolyn has the week off so, assuming I don’t get any offers for work that week, we’re going to go loose ourselves in the woods and go to Six Flags, and generally just have a good time without having to worry about anything.
So June is looking better than May. I’m glad May is gone and I never want to speak of it again. It probably would have been easier to post updates as the month went along so I wouldn’t have to make you all read such a long ass post, but I can’t write when I’m stressed, and I can’t write when I’m pissed and I spent most of last month stressed AND pissed.
But, June. June will be better.
This is seriously long. Sorry.
My job ended at the end of April, and while I’m glad I am no longer employed by MRT, being unemployed in early May posed some interesting challenges. Mostly, having no job, I was challenged to try to find something to do with my life. As some of my other friends have expressed on this site in recent posts, this is no easy task. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that my specific skills are difficult to market to non-theatre people, and we’re certainly moving to Denver in the fall. I thought, perhaps, that I would get a job at some crappy retail outfit and earn minimum wage for the summer while Carolyn and I feasted on a diet of cheap macaroni and cheese until the time seemed right to move out west and find ourselves real, grown-up jobs.
But during my last week of work, a fantastic opportunity presented itself. A co-worker at MRT wanted his basement refinished, turning one large empty room with short ceilings into 4 distinctly smaller rooms with even shorter ceilings. Having just built a set out of actual drywall and with a real drop ceiling (most pointless scenic design ever!) I had the skills and the know how to complete such a project. Plus, it would be the kind of work where I could take the time off that I needed in order to vacation, spend some time of with my sweetie, plan for an upcoming wedding, and so on. And, I figured I could make it lucrative enough so that I could only work part of the summer and earn enough money so I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the summer. Seemed like a good situation to me.
But I should have known.
As soon as John and I started having more serious discussions about the project, I started to get a really bad feeling in my belly. First, he said he had $500 dollars put away and he wasn’t sure if that was going to be enough for materials, or enough for materials and my labor. Um, $500. That’s less than I make in a week working at this godforsaken craphole. Yeah, John, that’s not going to be enough money.
So I took Justin over to do a site survey with me. We talked a bit. Justin ballparked the project at about $10,000. John swallowed hard, but he’s been wanting this project done for a while and decided he was going to come up with the money to do it this summer, come hell or high water. So I went home and whipped together a more substantial price out. I did it quickly because I wanted to get started goddamnit. I didn’t have a job anymore and trying to pay bills when you are broke is hard to do.
So I came up with a number of $9500 and presented the quickly done priceout to him. He was in a very, very bad mood that day, so I figured he was going to see the number, melt down and say, “um, nevermind.” But he looked at it, thought it was okay, and said he wanted to pass it by his wife first. After a week of waiting he called said that it was a go, made an offhand comment about wanting to do it for less money (another ominous sign) and then said he wouldn’t have the money until June 1st. Well, crap! That might be a problem. No income for a month would make it really tight around here, because we’d only have Carolyn’s income to live off of. I’m not sure we could do it for a whole month.
So Carolyn got home that day and we discussed options. We decided that as long as the money was there on June 1st, we’d be alright. Carolyn could cover groceries and such for the month, and then when rent and bills came due, I’d take care of them with my sudden influx of cash. Putting off work until June wasn’t going to be easy, but it was going to be doable, and there really wasn’t any other option that was going to give me that kind of money with that kind of flexibility, short of maybe selling my body on the streets. It’s hard to say. I’m not sure what kind of market there would be for that here in Lowell.
So I was forced into a month of vacation, but I couldn’t shake the bad feeling from my belly. I sat at home because I didn’t have any money to do anything fun. I didn’t even have money to pay my bills. So I sat at home and stressed myself out over money and convinced myself that the bottom was going to fall out of this project. And then the high water actually came, and it was dark and gloomy and rainy for a week. Lowell flooded and it was miserable. And my belly continued to get worse. I became more stressed out each and every day.
I tried as best as I could to distract myself for the month. This involved a lot of guitar playing, a lot of poker playing, and a lot of watching the Cubs. Carolyn and I got MLB.TV at the beginning of the summer because we’re both out of market fans who love to watch baseball, but miss watching out team. Couple that with the fact that Red Sox fans, like the Massholes that they are, are really, REALLY fucking annoying so we’d rather not associate ourselves with such a crowd,and Carolyn is a Yankees fan to boot. (She comes by it honestly, having grown up in a home in Connecticut with Yankee fans for parents who had grown up as a Yankee fan and a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. It’s in her blood, so I find it charming rather than “fucking annoying” which is the feeling that I’ve always associated with Midwestern Yankee fans.) But the Cubs offered no solace during May. They only served to make things worse by going an embarrassing 7 - 22 and losing games in the most devastating ways possible. The starting pitching sucked, the bullpen broke down and lost leads. Dempster who saved 30 some odd games in a row blew three saves in one week. The bats were dead. Everyone pitched like poo.
And the Cubs lost and lost and lost. And my stress went up and up and up.
Then one day, Carolyn and I went to see The DaVinci Code. And as we were getting back on the highway to get home, some asshole ran us off the road because he didn’t want me getting in between him and the car in front of him, even though there was about 7 car lengths between the two cars as I approached on the ramp. I mean, really, this guy was so far back when I looked I didn’t even consider it a possibility that it was going to be a problem. I sped up to match the speed of the car in front of him, and he sped way up and got right on that guys ass, leaving me with no open road in which to put my car. I had to slam on my breaks, which they actually think is an okay thing to do on the highways here. Man, I was pissed. I had never seen someone go so far out of their way to put another driver in such a dangerous situation. I’ve seen people do stupid things that were dangerous, because they weren’t paying attention or they really thought they could get away with something that dumb. But I’ve never had anyone maliciously try to run me off the road before, especially when there was no reason whatsoever to do so. Had Carolyn not been in the passenger seat, I probably would have smashed into the fucker and then beat his ass. He would have been the recipient of all the pent up road rage I’ve amassed since moving to this state where getting into a car feels like playing russian roulette. I sincerely hope that guy has gotten into a car accident by now and has smashed his precious truck to smithereens because I was already stressed about all sorts of shit before he did that, and afterwards I could hardly even think straight. Just one more thing on the pile, ya know.
So the last week of May I called John again to finalize things. He said the project was still a go, and that we should get together in the next week to sign a contract and get all of the details finalized. Things seemed to be going well and I was looking forward to having something to do during the days again, as well as looking forward to having money to pay bills.
But then last week, I was gearing up to get started, John called and said that we needed to talk. He had gone to visit some friends the week before and they were discussing the basement project that they were getting ready to undertake when their friends told them a horror story. Apparently these friends had done a similar thing. They hired a friend of theirs to so some work on their house. This guy happened to fall off a ladder and then ended up suing them because he fucked up his back and now they have a lien against their home. Well, John’s wife wasn’t too thrilled with the project anyway, and this was just the last straw. She freaked out and called the project off just days before we were set to start. Just days before we were going to get together to sign a contract which would have made it impossible to back out. Just days before I was going to get the money that was going to allow us to pay rent this month. So, no work in May for Ryan, and no money coming in June, either. Ryan is screwed.
But my belly feels better. I spent an entire month waiting for the shit to hit the fan, and so when it did, I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s over now, and now there are new problems to deal with.
So there might be some other work at MRT this summer, and hopefully I can get in on that action so I’ll get some money coming in. And Carolyn (the saint) is cashing out some money to get us caught up and make sure we get through the next couple few months without any more money stress. She is planning on leaving her job in mid July so that we can focus our energies toward the upcoming move, the upcoming wedding, and becoming the shiny happy people we love being. Leaving her job will be good for the both of us, because it stresses her out so, and then, even if I am not working, she can be home with me to distract my brain from all the imagined disasters that are coming to get me.
It’s June now. I am broke. I don’t have a plan, really. But things are looking up.
The Cubs are playing like they belong in the Major Leagues again. D Lee will be back soon, as will Prior. Woody’s looking better and even if they are not at full strength, at least they might be more consistent than the string of rookies that have been inserted in the rotation this year (except for Sean Marshall, he’s been pretty good).
And I’ve had a really good month playing online poker. I’ve been playing a lot of freerolls at UB for their ultimate points. These tourneys are big between 3500 on the weekdays and 5000 on the weekends, but I’ve placed 28th, 83rd, 52nd, and 3rd over the last month. And I’ve had great success in large cash multi’s over the last week. UB tries to run a 100 player $1.00 + 0.10 sit ‘n go, but I had never seen it fill up. Usually there are 5 or 6 people waiting for another 90 some to sign up. But it actually filled on Memorial Day, and I busted in third place, for a very reasonable return on my money. Then I noticed that they were running a $100 dollar added $1.00 + 0.10 tourney everyday last week. About 45 minutes prior to the start there were only 30 or so people signed up. With $100 extra dollars in the pot there was a chance for a serious cashout seemingly without having a whole lot of people to go through. So I signed up. And then more and more people signed up. When all was said and done there were about 550 players so I felt my odds had been reduced dramatically. I was hoping to make it into the top 50 and at least get my money back plus a little more. But it looked like I wasn’t even going to be able to do that. By the time half the players had been eliminated I had gained about 200 extra chips and was sitting about 15 people from the bottom. And really I was only above the people who had just gotten rocked for almost all their chips. It looked hopeless, so I started pushing, hoping to drive most people out of hands and get lucky against someone’s weak ace and double up. So I started pushing with all kinds of crap, KJo, J10o, baby ace, 45s, 23o. I just started pot betting, didn’t matter the position, and man, people folded like it was their job. No body would look me up. Nobody would even see a flop. By the time I finally had someone call a preflop pot bet from me, I had won 8% of the total hands preflop. And it was the perfect call, too, because it was someone with a large chip stack who called my AJ with a weak ace. I doubled up when an ace hit on the flop, which put me in a position to money. Yay! But it got better. I started getting decent cards. Made plays for the blinds at good times. Got the chip lead and got pushy. Lost the chip lead, but coasted to the final table, and then watched the play get crazy because the blinds and antes were eating people up and so they got impatient. I ended up heads up against a guy who had me outchipped 4 to 1, but I wore him down slowly and ended up busting him. So, I took 1st out of 550 or so and ended up making $140 for my $1.10 and 5 hours worth of work. Kickass.
And next week Carolyn has the week off so, assuming I don’t get any offers for work that week, we’re going to go loose ourselves in the woods and go to Six Flags, and generally just have a good time without having to worry about anything.
So June is looking better than May. I’m glad May is gone and I never want to speak of it again. It probably would have been easier to post updates as the month went along so I wouldn’t have to make you all read such a long ass post, but I can’t write when I’m stressed, and I can’t write when I’m pissed and I spent most of last month stressed AND pissed.
But, June. June will be better.