Cinco?!?

I've been feeling depressed lately. Comes from a weird place, I can't always put my finger on it.
I really think I might have obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm pretty sure my father has it, and the more I grow up the more I feel like I tie emotions to things more than normal people do, and I lose the ability to stop myself from thinking/worrying about something, no matter how little control I have over it, or how hard I try to focus on other things. Maybe it's not obsessive compulsive disorder. What the fuck do I know? Something's wrong up here though. I know that.
I need to feel "set". For me to be comfortable, I really feel like I have to have all my ducks in a row. I've got all these ducks (one would be called "Friendships", one would be called "Monetary Situation", one would be called "Romantic Relationship", etc. etc.). In that sense, I think I have like 8 or 9 ducks. I think three or four are "in a row". That's a lot of wandering ducks.
I bought about 200 DVD's in the past two weeks. Isn't that odd? I found a great deal, and I think I ended up paying an average of $1.50 per DVD. Yeah, I spent about $350. I don't feel too bad. I haven't bought DVD's in five years, and I don't spend money in general.
So even though no-one asked, here's the rundown of my financial deal.
My job is the Online Manager for Staton's Landscaping - I designed/built/set-up our website, and I also deal with all email and any online-related transactions regarding the company (quotes, bids, questions, pictures, etc.). I make a very small amount of money, as the job does not require much work.
The thing is, obviously, I want to focus on my music and my film. So I do this web job as a side thing, and I make about $220 a week. BUT through it, I have full health and dental benefits. Health insurance is important to me, and I have bills to pay.
My bills are this: my phone bill is about $75 a month, my car insurance is $100 a month (and I paid for it all at the same time, so no car payments), and I also pay for my blockbuster.com membership, which is another $17 a month. So my bills are about $190 a month.
The thing is, I also do odd filming jobs on the side (very rarely), as well as save every penny I get, ever. Meaning when I got a few thousand dollars for my graduation party this past summer, it went straight to the bank and stayed there. I also had some coinage saved up because of some "illegitimate" jobs I had during college (and, again, the fact that I save all the money I get).
So I bought 200 DVD's for $350 in the past two weeks. I can live with that. I can comfortably say it did not make a dent in my bank account. I'm not saying that to brag, but to justify (to myself) that it was okay to spend that money.
I constantly scam for things that I want(I easily own over a thousand dollars in video game merchandise that I have gotten for free. I also sold my car, a 1994 Nissan 240SX convertible with 185,000 miles on it for $3,100, and the very same week, bought a 2001 Chrysler Sebring convertible with 70,000 miles on it for $500 more.) The scams are all legal. Does that make them no longer scams? Let's look up "scam". "Scam - a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation."
Still unclear. I guess I do deceive certain people. Anyway, I don't often pay for things, or pay what I should for things, or I get the money in an odd way. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how I'll acquire something before I get it, and do a ton of research on it, even it will only save me a small amount of money.
I just glanced at the TV and saw a commercial that starred a girl I went to high school with. She's fairly attractive. I'm more interested in how crisp the cameras are, considering it must be local commercial.
Anyway, every purchase I make is thought over laboriously, and this is why I have money. I also never buy alcohol or marijuana. I'm sure that drains alot of people in their early twenties.
Finances are one of my "ducks" (for those of you who remember the first three paragraphs) and that duck is right behind me. But many of the other ducks are misaligned.
For a long while I've felt very unhappy with such changes. I used to have many friends and now I have very few. And almost every friend has gotten less and less close over time. It's a very very difficult thing. Apparently not for some but for me. I'm sure this proves something negative about me to those people who have gotten farther away from me but I certainly can't see it.
School is one of my ducks gone astray. A professor of mine assured me last April that I was all set in my graduation (short explanation: I have my Film Major, Communications Minor, and General Education courses 100% complete - I am lacking exactly 3 elective credits. Elective means ANY FUCKING CLASS/CREDIT AT ALL), hence the graduation party. But, that professor, albeit well-meaning and very helpful, was wrong.
I'm submitting a project for the final three credits, for the class Digital Media Production. It's about producing digital shorts films (specifically, for the internet). WAY out of my league, right?
So anyway, I submitted four S*D videos and the film to get this credit, and the school is now trying to deny me the credit. I'm going to write the entire fucking ordeal down as soon as I get my hands on the diploma, but they are try to deny me this class, which means denying me three elective credits, which means I am technically still a student.
Right now, I am getting them to look at the real project (the Film Department head knew I was submitting a project, so she looked online and found a trailer for the film and rejected that, as if it was my project, even though it never was) and am waiting on their response.
There's WAY WAY WAY more to the story, which, like I said, I will document when I'm done with the school.
One of the things about me, that I started saying before, is that I really need things to be "set". I need things to be organized. Wanting to be an entertainer (be it musician, writer, director, actor, etc) for a living is NOT on the "set" path.
I'm really into the new stuff Senior Discount is doing and I love the direction we're going in. The truth is that I feel like we are the best we've ever been, and that our writing and performance is 100% above things we've done before. But I also feel that I am doing more of the work than ever before and it's extremely, extremely difficult.
Right now is a hard time because I feel like since Kevin left the band, a lot of negativity went with him. Negative attitudes, habits, shortsightedness....lots of stuff. So now we've sort of reinvented ourselves, and in doing so, and in preparation for all the new material we're going to release, I want to do all new web design for us, new ways of interacting with the fans, new promo material, and completely new merch, as well as the new song, and the free demo we'll be recording in October.
But, this also coincides with two other (very positive) things for the band that unfortunately put more of a financial strain than we've ever dealt with: our practice space and our van. We have to make money to sustain both (we still have $4,000 to pay off on the van).
So basically, the deal is that we should be focusing on booking shows and making money, but we're focusing on creating new material and it's very very difficult to do both at the same time.
So, I guess the problem is that I feel like there's so much on my plate under the same subject, and although there's four people involved, I'm the one making all the actions on everything. It's just difficult.
So yeah. No real updates on S*D stuff this week, because I was sort of out of commission all last week. This is the news:
- We may have to push back our 5 song demo recording a little bit
- We got an initial mix of the new song and it sounds awesome. Mixing soon.
- New show in MA, and new show in RI. Posting them soon with more details.
- "Acoustic show/S*D Fan Appreciation Night" PROBABLY will not be happenning soon - LLTS and Someday Prov are both unavailable at the proposed time, Midnight Renewal did not answer our email and Tom still has not gotten in touch with WBRU about it
- Any show offers are WELCOME!
- Talking/designing of the website has become. Our new web designer, Steve, is an awesome guy, and I've started sketching stuff out
In fact here - these are two of my sketches for the new S*D site:
Click for the sketch of the Enter Page
Click for the sketch of the Main Content Page
If you can't understand them, that's kind of expected. I don't want to give it all away - guessing is half the fun.
- Chuck Staton