(no subject)

Today, I am working on my finances.

I used to really enjoy managing my money. I kept everything up to date in Quicken, and though I only had one actual checking account, I had money in four virtual accounts that I tracked separately on my computer, putting money aside for things like monthly expenses (a percentage of each paycheck went in there and it covered all recurring expenses without having to worry about them), general savings, and even a trip to Europe (that didn't happen due to being laid off). I shopped around for a bank with a good interest rate on a rewards checking account and considered buying things like CoDs (which I never did because the interst rate on my checking account was better then even a five year certificate!).

Since being laid off, I haven't been doing that sort of tracking. It always seemed kind of unnecessary. I was getting a severance payment and unemployment money, and then I worked part time for a friend from work on his computer resale business, but it was a much smaller income than I'd had in the past, and I just put it all in the same place and was quite the penny-pincher with it. I really missed watching the money in my savings slowly and steadily increase and feeling like I was being smart.

Now that I'm going into my second year of school, my income for the year prior is low enough for me to be eligible for more financial aid than last year. (That's fortunate, as without being able to stay at my parents' house for free, life would have been a lot harder last year.) I'm also working here at the help desk, and I hope to continue my employment at the art gallery too. I actually have something of a steady income that I can make plans and budget around again, and it's high time I did so.

I've been hesitant in the extreme about saying anything public about it, but I made a very large photo sale to a company that's going to be using one of my photos in advertising world-wide. I'll share more details about it later, but I received a significant amount of money from it, and I think I've been a little too ambitious in thinking about what I want to do with it. I've been a little more ready to eat out with my sweeties than I was before, or to take long trips, or to buy silly things like unicycles and rola-bola parts. Today, I'm creating a rational budget and will begin restraining myself a bit more.

I'm working 12 hours a week at Parkside at $7.50 an hour. Balancing that against recurring monthly expenses, I really only have in the neighborhood of $100 to spend freely in a given month. Out of that money, things like savings for potential car repairs or other unexpected things ought to be coming.

I'm considering applying for another part time job over the Summer. Part of me thinks I probably ought to. At the same time, I know I have enough money to get by to the start of school, and I have access to considerably more financial aid for this coming year than I did for last year, so things will be at least as comfortable for me as last year, and more so than this Summer, once September comes around.

For now, I'm going to start up Quicken again with a blank slate and start over tracking my money and what it's going toward. I'm going to create a budget for myself and start planning my visits to sweeties, photo trips, and other activities in such a way that I will stick to it. Though I'll still have to spend some money on gas for my trip to Detroit this weekend, I may have to cancel my tentative plans for a trip to Duluth later this Summer.

(no subject)

Yesterday, Housemate Phil and I took a drive out to Gary, Indiana for some abandoned building photography. He'd never been to the city before. For me, it'd been a year, maybe two. I was excited about showing someone new the area and having some time with my wide lens and more skill than I had the last time I was there.

I showed him City Methodist church, the Palace Theater, and the old post office, as well as the abandoned high school (now closed tight with doors welded together; definitely not getting in there again any time soon) and an apartment building that was new to me too. The apartments had a beautiful four floor courtyard with beautiful rusting metal balconies and stairways.

We met several people at various sites. In the post office, a couple of muscular guys in tank-tops followed us in. They said they'd seen people going in and out of these abandoned buildings and were curious about what was going on. We chatted with them for a bit while we wandered, and they left. At the apartments, a group of three muscular guys with bare arms (I'm seeing a pattern here in Gary) along with a little boy appeared in the courtyard while we were on the second floor. Turns out they were there to photograph too! And in the train station we visited briefly before leaving town, we met an older, not-so-muscular guy with covered arms who I think was living there. He seemed like a nice guy, but not particularly excited about chatting, so after making sure he didn't mind us being there, I left him alone. He did talk about the building a little bit, and said that he figured our car was probably safe from being ticketed or towed (It was pretty obvious we were in the building!) 'cause these places are like a tourist attraction for Gary.

Things had changed since I was there last. The gymnasium in the third floor of City Methodist has trellises of large wooden beams that once supported the roof. Sometime since last I was there, one of them had fallen down into the gym. It made me think about the transition from space to not-space that so fascinates me. A room is a well defined space with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. As it decays and falls apart, at some point it goes through a transformation to not-space; a memory. That process and that moment fascinate me aesthetically, conceptually, and philosophically. I wish I could do a time lapse series over twenty years or so of a building like that falling apart. One photo a day for decades compressed into a few minutes would be just amazing.

In the Palace Theater, not a lot had changed, though there was perhaps a little more daylight coming into the auditorium than there had been. The grand fire-curtain, covered with a painted exotic cityscape, now bears a large tear in the stage-right side. In the post office, the parquet floor is further deteriorated and there are large patches of moss growing here and there, where water drips in the rain. A large tree in the middle of the sorting floor has grown a lot and is nearly peeking out one of the large sawtooth skylights now.

It makes me sad seeing entropy take it's slow, steady toll on these structures, but I'm also glad to have the chance to see them. As they always have, they can't help but make me think about the impermanence of the things we build and create and of the stories they'll have to tell, and the mysteries they'll hide, in the future.

Once I looked at my pictures on my monitor at home, I realized that they came out better than I was expecting. I'm really happy with some of them, and will post more of them when I have time. But for now, here's a more personally indulgent one that Phil made at my request. I wanted a shot of me juggling on stage at the Palace. More than any other type of building, abandoned theatres call out to me like visiting ghosts. Even as I acknowledge the irrationality of the feelings, I feel like performing onstage is offering some kind of respect to the place and its history, even as I get to be a part of the magic and spectacle that happened on that great stage.


Live On Stage!

© Stormdog 2012