July 6th, 2005
112064917125017218
Another world
Today is the first day I’ve come home from work before eleven in a number of weeks. However, I don’t think it really means anything because coming home early this afternoon was my return trip from going to work on Tuesday (after getting home at 2:30 and 6:30 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday, respectively). So yesterday was just your standard run-of-the-mill twenty six hour workday, nothing to write home about. Though presumedly quite tired (the level of tired when you don’t notice it and you just drift for hours completely unaware that your mouth is hanging open), of course my thinking was not, “God, I should get a shower and to bed ASAP, I haven’t eaten in sixteen hours,” but “this is the first day I’ve had the freedom to be someplace other than a job-related function in what seems like forever; I should get some chores done.” So, having ten hours of sleep across four nights, I fumbled my way through Yoyogi after passing Hachiman, so I could get to Takashimaya and southern Shinjuku in hopes of finding a long-anticipated tent and some AA batteries.
After about forty-five minutes of zombielike shambling through Oshman’s, Tokyu Hands, and L-Breath (twice), I began to slowly realize the looks I was getting from all the healthy, clean shaven floor girls in the department stores. My skin is pallid, taut, and full of lines, my cheeks concave, my hair a shriveled, greasy mess, and my aura most undoubtedly quite disturbing. Being this tired and under unrelenting stress for so long has made me quite irritable, and quite prone to rage (I severly damaged my right hand on Saturday night and have come a hair’s breadth away from getting into half a dozen fights in the last week, cursing out loud to myself and at strangers who get in my way almost constantly). As such, it makes me all the more incensed that I honestly look like I’m on the wrong side of a drug addiction at 40. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say if my mother saw me now she would start crying. My eyes are sunken in and watery, crows feet stretch like razor blades creased across my face. I swear that this is doing permanent and irreversible damage to my health in every sense of the word.
In most stories one’s constitution and sanity are forsaken for vast amounts of material wealth and financial security, exemplifying the age-old wisdom of tradeoffs and balance. You work hard, you get compensated well and don’t have to worry so much about money. However, my situtation is really so pitiful it doesn’t contain such palatable entertainment. I live in the most expensive city in the world (really), and my mother makes more than I do working part-time without a college degree. I have a masters, and (after two years of monthly installments of 600 dollars) still over seventy thousand dollars of debt, half of which is a variable-interest loan, and with the Fed hiking the prime rate to the sky, my budget continues to degrade from cabbage and water to water and cabbage. A semi-cheap Ocean Pacific bathing suit can be purchased here for forty-five dollars. A nice Salomon or Rusty one is ninety. That’s about how much money I have for food over a two-week period. I have no savings, and somewhere on the order of 400 dollars a month for everything non-bill (gas, electric, water, rent, telecom, health insurance) related. How does anyone live here? It used to be that I wore everything until it fell apart because I liked dated fashion, but now it’s because I have no alternative. Half of my socks (all purchased at the dollar store) have had holes in them for at least the last year. What the hell is the guy at the office one year my junior going to do when his wife has a kid in November? Feeding a family of three while I mix mayonnaise with newspaper?
It’s just as well that I don’t have any money to buy things unessential for sustaining “life”, I don’t have any time to use it anyway. But just the smell of being in a store and actually being able to buy something you’ve wanted for six months and not worry about what happens if you lost your job or got hurt… this is a far, far cry from my affluent, fat (155 lbs) days in Seattle.
I hate myself even more for writing this, because it just reminds me that no matter who you tell, how angry it makes you, or how long you endure the strain, things don’t change. They can’t, and they won’t, and there are no feasible alternatives, just endless lines of code outstripping my youth.
