2001-07-21 - 3:48 a.m.

Well, life has gotten rather interesting lately. Imagine what it felt like to be that drummer guy from Def Leppard. You're in this band that's going incredibly well (YAY!) but you get in a car accident (booooo!) but you survive (YAY!) but your arm has to be amputated (BOOO!). That's kind of how I feel now. Not *quite* to those extremes, but man have I been getting jerked around lately.

Some of you may recall me struggling with my morals and the idea of whether or not I should steal a newspaper to get the Rooms For Rent ads before anyone else the other day. Well, I didn't, and it doesn't matter that I didn't because 1) the one room ad that I found that was worth answering wasn't in the paper, even though it was in the online classifieds section, and 2) it was *still* gone by the time I called this morning.

Guh. I am feeling screwed on so many levels right now. I'm too tired and have too little time to go looking for places during the week, but if I wait until the weekend, not only will most of the places already be gone, but I'm not in the town where I'd be most likely to find them anyway.

I feel perpetually low on money because I'm not only paying rent but $13 a day for bus fare, which is beating the hell out of me both financially and… um, time…ly.

Hypothetically, if I don't find a place in Rockport to live, I can stay in Belfast for a bit, except on August 1st my mother moves out, meaning 1) I'd be paying *all* of the rent, and 2) I'd have to come up with a security deposit, because my mom is relying on getting hers back when she leaves. And I can't afford to do that. Even if I weren't paying for rent and bus fare and food and income tax and and and and I *still* wouldn't have saved enough money since I started this job to make the security deposit.

I'm waiting on one more possible place to live that probably won't be gone in a matter of hours, but I'm getting the info on it through an email from Sarah, and—of course—that particular email service went down today. I have three email addresses. One for getting email from stuff on Diaryland and eBay, but it's messed up and doesn't send messages back out, so I have to use another email address to respond to anything anyone sends. One is a Hotmail address that I only check to clear out the junk mail that made it past the bulk mail filters each day, because almost no one has that address, but because of those few who do, I still check it each day. The last one is my email address from the University of Maine. Which is great because I get very little junk mail in it that I didn't sign up for a while ago and then just forget to un-sign up for, it consistently actually sends out the messages I send, rather than just telling me it sent them out. It gets the ones people send to me without wantonly deleting them. And that's the one I use for important stuff like, say, getting information about a place to live that I need to find in the next week and a half.

And so, as should be expected at this point, the server went down some time this morning, so I couldn't check it when I really thought I might need it.

The final kick in the teeth I get every time the server goes down? It's the same server I put my pictures for this site on. So I know that if my email is down, then all anyone sees on this site is red x's for links.

And that really pisses me off.

You think maybe I'm a bit obsessive? It's currently 1:30 PM. I started my lunch hour at 1:05, put on my sunglasses, walked a little ways down Route 1 to the Market Basket to pick up something to eat, and walked back here with it. Then I took it outside to sit on the picnic tables outside at work and eat in the peace of the sun, surrounded by a pretty wooden and brick building with green trim, a lush green field, and a forested area full of white birches and some gray trees the names of which, for the moment, I can't remember, but they offset the birches perfectly. And what do I do, surrounded with this beautiful scenery, blue sky above my head and warm sun beating down on me, the possibility of the mother deer and her fawn that live near here and graze on the field showing up not 60 feet away always a possibility? I take out my laptop and start writing.

You know, my better judgment has been taking a real blow to its ego lately. First it lost out to morals, now it's losing out to something else.

The Market Basket.

This place is kind of place you expect to see in a fairly high income nature-y Maine coastal tourist area like this. It's full of a mix of healthy foods, gourmet foods, and desserts. Fresh Samantha smoothies and Nantucket Nectars all natural fruit drinks (with labels printed with a planet friendly soy based ink and bottle made of up to 50% recycled glass) have a huge block of the drinks section. They have freshly cooked free range chicken and all kinds of special meals out all the time, and they charge it by the pound. Today I was considering the flank steak marinated in something that I've never heard of and served with something else I've never heard of, but decided against it when I noticed it 1) wasn't in the display thing and 2) cost 12.95 a pound.

And that's where my better judgement comes in. I don't have a lot of money to spare here right now, so I shouldn't be eating here. I should be bringing my lunch in for now, being thrifty and all that. But then, I really like going to the Market Basket. Normally I'd eat there if the prices were lower, but choose against it because it cost too much if not for the one thing they have that other similar places don't.

Three *really* cute girls who work up front.

And for that, I'm willing to pay the few extra dollars each day. For the hope that one of them will wait on me, and I can make a silly innocent comment that will make them laugh or smile, just like I would with any other person. And because of that, one of them will fall madly in love with me, and the extra money I put in there each day will be justified.

I know what you're thinking, and don't call me pathetic.

I've done that enough for the both of us.