One for the Road

It's out July 31th!!!

(Not that I'm counting... [or budgeting])

Kick It

Got to class again last night, and signed up "for real" (which involved paying money! That I sort of had!).

Master T. asked about my med ID braclet, and I babbaled on about having type 1 and how I test before and after class, and I keep my emergency sugar right there by my water... I think some part of me was worried I was going to get the "I can't have you here and be responsible if you pass out," but you know, I already signed my wavier. Instead, he told me he has a student he does private lessons with who's also a type 1 diabetic, which is why he asked. Which was kind of neat in a weird way.

I guess it felt good not to be the spokesperson for my weirdness. It's like being "the feminist," "the black friend," "the gay friend," and etc. You can only represent for one aspect of what makes you you for so long before you want to start waving your arms and saying, "I'm more than this! Yes, I'm this too, but there's a huge load of things that go together! I don't want to be The Diabetic!"

Overall, class went a lot, lot, lot better than the first one. I had a partner who was also new, and we spent less time grappling and more time working on stance and punching technique than we did last time. It turns out that I'd so internalized the "keep your hands up" mantra that I'd been holding my arm incorrectly before I punched and losing a huge amount of power.

I need a lot of work. I'm out of shape and, as ever, uncoordinated. Even after all my time at the other gym, picking this stuff up, all this body stuff, it's not easy for me. It's been a weakness of mine my whole life, and it's one of those things I recognize but am really driven to making the best it can be. I may never be a tricky fighter, but I want to be better.

Physcially, I'm a lot more put together after this class than I was after the last one, too. Some of what's killing me is biking half an hour out there and half an hour back. Riding back is a bitch.

And... I'm wondering how much my inability to move for two solid days after class last week also had something to do with having low sugar all night. If you're at 45 for six hours after a 3 hour workout, your muscles aren't exactly getting much of anything to repair themselves.

My dosing strategy worked out really well this time around. Without the dinner insulin, I was able to come home at 150, which is high, but I knew from the week before that I was going to crash at least 50 points overnight, so I refrained from dosing and set my alarm. The low sugar woke me up at 1:30 am, before the alarm, and I tested at 61. I ate some jellybeans and tested four hours later when I got up for the day at 74 (80's a perfect number).

Not bad.

I'm feeling good enough that I think I'll be able to make it to class on Tuesday. Bare minimum, I can start with once a week if I have to, but I'm hoping to keep at two classes a week regularly and maybe add another one on occasion when I'm feeling up to it.

Felt good to be out and about.

Well, I Managed to Blow that Budget!

One of the things I'm working really hard on this year is managing my out-of-control finances. Sure, there was some bad luck in there, but there's also been a lot of careless spending on my part. I don't keep track of what I spend. I don't balance my checkbook. I just keep approximate ideas of what I have and what I've spent in my head and spend accordingly. I'm usually about sorta maybe around where I thought I've been.

And when I wasn't, I had a credit card.

Now the credit card debt is somewhere around 15K ($14,714.52).

I own nothing but my bicycle and I'm living off the good graces of friends. My goal for the year is to pay down this debt and learn how to budget properly. Luckily, I live with some people who are very good with money. Stephanie and the Old Man are my age - we went to high school together - and they own a house and two cars, have little to no credit card debt and live a very lean, budgeted life that's perfectly comfortable and manageable.

I already know I can't live as tightly as they do (I have a travel addiction and an SO who lives in another country; some extravagence is neccessary in order to live this sort of life), but I can live a lot better than I do.

So I came up with a budget of about what I should be spending in order to spend less than I make. It looks like this:

AK Student Loan: $55
CitiBank CC: $500
WAMU CC: $200
Transit: $35
MA Gym: $85
Groceries: $320
Fun: $195
Meds: $150
(my other two student loans have been deferred until September)

TOTAL PROPOSED MONTHLY BUDGET: $1540.00
WHAT I ACTUALLY MAKE PER MONTH: $1542.68

As you can see, I should have a whole $2.82 left over every month!

After logging all of my receipts for the last two weeks I decided to look at how I was doing for the month as far as variable costs ("fun" and "groceries"). I figured that made the math easy.

I should be at about half the total monthly cost for each of the variable bills, so:

"Groceries"

Groceries: $218.09
Snacks:$10.24

Actual Total: $228.23
Budgeted Total: $110.00

Difference: -118.23

"Fun"

Office supplies: $36.81
Dinner out: $30.13
Books: $7.43
Coffee: $37.24

Actual Total: $111.61
Budgeted Total: $97.50

Difference: -$14.11

Amount overbudget so far this month: $132.24

As you can see, I'm off to a fantastic start!

All snark aside, it does give me an idea of what I'm spending and areas where I can improve. I *do* spend a lot on food. Steph and the Old Man cook a lot with rice and noodles. If I live on rice and noodles I'll feel crappy and triple or quadruple the amount of insulin I use, which would probably result in an extra $80 a month in med costs.

But there are places I can cut back - I need to stop buying my coveted Diet Cherry Coke, which is $15 a week. And I've got to keep the coffee costs to $10 a week. That's one *regular* coffee a day, and if I skip a couple weekday coffee runs, that'll give me enough "leftover" for a foo-foo coffee when I write at the coffee shop on weekends.

I feel bad that the "fun" budget is so high, but because it includes office supplies and actual brain-stimulating activities like going out to new places to eat, movies, and plays... it's hard to cut that. I could probably get it down a lot further, though.

Budgeting is SO FUN!

I don't know why I didn't do this before!

Out the Door

About to head out the door to MA class. Had to adjust my dinner insulin to compensate. Last time, I tried subtracting 2 units, and had a low during class and another around 2am. So this time I'm subtracting 3 units and eating a graham cracker right before bed.

Thing is, when I went to go test, I was only at 83 tonight... which I'd usually take 2 units for.

So that means... no shot tonight. And maybe half a granola bar.

How odd not to shoot up before a meal.

It feels downright scandalous.

Guerrilla Feminism

It's a start.

No Wonder We Fight All the Time

An animated timeline of relgious conquests.

Ripping

You know, the first Matrix movie, in light of reading even more Gibson, is still pretty good. But the clusterfuck that was the second two is just even more obviously a derivative slapdash hackjob.

I Hate Being Poor

Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

The Half of the Human Race that's Not Smart

My roomies and I went out for dinner and a movie tonight, as Stephanie's old man will turn 27 on Monday.

As Steph and I waited for the show to start while the old man was in the bathroom, this commercial came up as a part of the pre-show show, and for a minute and a half, I learned that "the whole human race wants to be smart" but 98% of the human race was.... the *smart* people... were.... guess?

Mostly white, yes.

And completely male.

If you pay really close attention, you'll see what may be a feminine hand moving a chess piecs (denoted by the length of the nail) and if you don't blink, you might see two young girls practicing playing stringed instruments.

But the rest of the minute and a half?

Men.

The "human race."

Sometimes it hits me, these things we see and hear and soak up every day and take for granted; these things we see as so normalized that they become truth. And during those times when I'm able to step outside of it and critique it, it just fucking floors me.

Oh, the Joys of Female Fighting

In addition to having class knock the crap out of every muscle in my body on Tuesday, I also had a sparring partner knee me just below my bellybutton on my left hand side. This also happens to be the side where my IUD, when it does pinch, pinches.

If she'd kneed me full force, I'd probably have punctured something. As it was, there was no blood, and when I checked the string it was still in place, but the bump to my uterus got the thing all worked up again, and I've been having those occasional jittery sorts of cramps that I was still getting a couple months after it got put in. Once again, starts pinching at me when I sit for long periods (again, a common symptom during the first three months), and it's annoying enough that I'm considering going out and buying some Motrin.

I love my IUD cause there's no weight gain, no diminished sex drive, and no depression (all symptoms I experienced while on various Pills). But once a month there's seven days of blood and pain that used to just be five days of non-painful inconvienence.

What pisses me off is that when it comes to contraception, women get it coming and going. I've found that my contraceptive choices tend to be based on "which does me the least amount of pain, damage, and discomfort?" The IUD won.

One of the first things I looked into was, "What happens if I get hit during class?"
The answer really depends on how you get hit, best I've figured. Most women who end up with perforated uteruses have it happen on insertion, so if you can get through that OK, you'll be all right.

Still, as I continue with class, it's something I'll have to keep an eye on. As a woman who hasn't had a kid (and therefore has a smaller uterus), I'm not the ideal candidate for an IUD, and the problem of the tight fit has been an issue from the start.

But oh man does it beat depression and non-interest in sex.

And That's How I'm Going to Fix the Education System

Just like that.

Sometimes the Internets Leave Me Speechless

Cats sing "Independent Woman."

Really, I have no commentary.

My Workweek

As We'd Say Around Here: Must Be One of God's Foods!

Because it Doesn't Always Have to Be That Way

Whenever people start arguing about biological roles and restrictions and "that's just the way it's always been" and "it'll always be that way," it always pissed me the fuck off, not only because things could be really differet, but because sometimes, things are really different (fast foward to about minute 4 if you're impatient).

It'll just "always be that way" until a bunch of you decide that it isn't.

Snapshots of Dayton

At lunch today, a bunch of people in suits and skirts participated in a rubber duck race in the big fountain in the main square near the courthouse downtown. There was a big inflated duck on a stage. When the whistle blew, the desk jockeys leapt into the knee-high fountain with their ducks and were off. One woman tripped in the fountain and got soaked from hat brim to stockinged feet.

AFter work, while sitting on the courthouse steps waiting for the bus amid a congregation of likeminded travelers, I witnessed a young man with a bible in his hand take up his place in front of us and proceeded to preach to us of Satan and Jesus, and how if Satan had stolen our self respect, our job, our luck, that Jesus would break into Satan's kingdom and get all of those things back for us.

One woman yelled from the audience, "Satan rules!"

It occurred to me that I don't have any street preachers in God's War. I need to remedy this.

I think the rest of the day was just too surreal to process.

Take Me Out

I was looking at an ad for a play showing in Dayton tonight and saw this warning message attached to the ad in the local City Guide:

"WARNING: Contains strong lanauage and male nudity - not recommended for audiences under 17."

I don't think I've ever seen a rating system that specificed the sex that was baring all. I'm assuming that the assumption here is that audiences will find a flacid male member far more intimidating than a pair of breasts (the play is also about race and homosexuality - maybe the whole "male nudity" thing is code for that in case insecure het men decide to go and see a "play about baseball" and get freaked out that it's *also* about baseball...).

There's no reason why a naked woman couldn't be seen as powerful and sexually threatening and a naked man viewed as a docile object to be dominated. There are certainly *instances* of this, and much of the control of women and their bodies - what they show, to who, and when - is of course done because women *are* secretly seen as powerful. But it *is* a secret super power - the rest of the world doesn't want to code it that way.

It does make me wonder if the whole bluster about male nudity is just a big sham to cover up the fact that the naked man is just as vulnerable - if not more so - than the naked female.

Ever so fascinating.

The Shuffle

I held out the hope of hitting MA class tonight right up until about 4pm, when I discovered that I was still hobbling around the office like an old woman.

Stephanie saw me painfully shuffling around the kitchen this morning and said, "Boy, I bet you're sore."

"I hurt like hell."

"Didn't you take any anti-inflammatories?"

"Um... no?"

"Are you drinking a lot of water to rehydrate and help your muscles repair themselves?"

"Um... I'm just drinking the same amount of water."

"Are you doing anything that isn't bad so I don't feel like I have to nag you?"

"Um... look at my bicep, isn't it KEWL???!!!"

Saturday it is.

By the Numbers

So, I got my first paycheck for a full week of work yesterday, and did the math.

With what I'm making a week, after taxes, I'm making a grand total of:

20K a year.

I'm now working 40 hours a week to make $85 a week more than I was getting when I was on unemployment.

20K a year.

Wow.

What's the poverty line again? Half that, maybe. And the only reason I can make it on this is because I don't pay rent or utilities. Also: no health insurance, no benefits.

Boy, I sure am glad I got all that education just for shits and giggles, cause if I was expecting paychecks...

Fuck.

One for the Road