Thursday, January 15, 2015

Monthly Donation Reminder and semi-regularly scheduled utter panic

So, the point of these posts is to remind people who might be willing to give me money that they can, in fact, give me money.  There is a paypal donate button at the top of the sidebar you will find to the right of any page on the blog.

The reason for a regular reminder of that is to try to prevent things from reaching crisis points by building up savings through donations when things are not in a state of crisis.

In that capacity, these posts have undeniably failed.  Consider the posts about money in the past week (one, two, three.)  A lot of the problem is timing.  If I'd known that things would go wrong on the electronics front and the dental front then there are certain things I would have put off for a month or two.  Things that will pay themselves back given time.  I don't have that time.

I was looking toward the end of the semester and the $4,000-ish in tuition that I have to pay off by then and investing in a plan to pay that off.  It's a good plan, I'm confident it will work if, you know, my entire world doesn't come crashing down in the next fortnight.  It is not, however, a plan that I can magically change from a four month time table to a two week time table.

To deal with the expenses that had to be paid immediately I've gotten even deeper in debt.  That's a problem in the long run, but it also has a disturbing aspect in the short term: I am out of credit.  I never had that much to begin with (something about credit companies not liking it when you have almost no income) so it's not catastrophic in a massive dollar value way the way it would be for many people if they completely maxed out their credit.

No, the problem is simpler: without credit I have no stalling tactics left.  The bills that are due next month are due next fucking month and there is nothing I can do to delay or finance or what-have-you that.

So, basically, if I can't raise a couple thousand dollars between now and February I'm screwed.

Like I said, the donation reminder threads have failed at the whole crisis averting intention.

-

Another thing I've been doing in these threads is talking about the months in which they're posted because they usually have far less content than what you see above.

The Roman year was originally ten months starting in March.  There was a mushy period of days that weren't in any months between December and March.

January and February were added.  There weren't enough month-less days to make two months, so days were shaved off of other months.

January comes from Janus.  A Roman god who looks forward and back (he's got two faces) the name has roots in the Roman word for 'door'.  So it made a certain amount of sense to have it be the name of the gateway between the old year and the new.

January, when created, had 29 days, which makes it a short month.  Thus the ides are on the 13th.  Julius Caesar added two days to it.  Those days, like all days he added, were added after the ides.  It hasn't changed since then.

No comments:

Post a Comment