Fusion (Part 1) -- Another KP writing challenge.

The challange was to write a story about a fusion of Ron and Shego created by DNAmy using her genetic zipper.  Her what?  Well it's a machine with three chambers.  Put a cat in the right one, a snake in the left one, and you get a cat-snake in the middle chamber (and empty side chambers.)  She also made a bunny-rhino, a chicken-man, a pig-man, and a naked mole man.

I'm putting an, unfortunately low quality, picture of what the genetic zipper looks like when operating normally at the bottom of the page.

Amy got her inspiration from cuddle bunnies.  Stuffed animals that combine two different animals (Kim's cuddle buddy was a pandaroo.)  Serious cuddle buddy fans are called "cuddlers".

Do note that even on the challenge page I described what follows as a quick and rough beginning.

- - -

"Kidnapping is pretty low, Amy," Kim said. "I thought you were a nice villain."

"Don't be absurd, fellow cuddler," Amy said, cheerful as ever. "I've always taken meanies and made them better. Stevie didn't volunteer to to become half molerat, you know?"

Kim didn't even notice what she was saying, in one chamber was the person she came for --Ron was conscious but strapped down and unable to do anything-- and in the other chamber of the genetic zipper, where Kim had expected to see an animal, was another person --an unconscious woman with dark hair and light skin it was hard to make much more out through the chamber's window, but it kind of looked like...

"Is that Shego!?" Kim asked.

"Of course it is dearie," Amy said.

"Time out," Kim said. "Time for a villainous monologue. Why would you want to combine Ron and Shego?"

"I suppose I could tell you," Amy said, though her voice was clearly uncertain.

"Please?" Kim asked. "I'd really like to know."

"Well, it all started when I recovered Monty from those nasty ninjas," Amy said. "I tried everything to turn him back to my flesh and blood Monty but eventually I was forced to admit that no power on earth could free him from the curse of the Yono.

"Now there are only so many powers available that aren't from earth," Amy said.

"You wanted the Team Go comet powers," Kim said.

"Exactly," Amy said. "You've always been a smart one, but then you'd have to be to be a cuddler like me."

"But why Ron and Shego?" Kim asked.

"I need to test the process," Amy said. "I can't try it on my Monty until all of the little bugs are worked out. I've never combined mystical monkey power with comet power before. And obviously I had to use Shego because if one of the heroes on Team Go disappeared then the others would be on their guard. Once I have the data from my newest creation I'll be ready to save my Monty."

It did make a twisted sort of sense, Kim had to admit. Well most of it did, at any rate.

"How did you even capture Shego?" Kim asked.

"Oh that was easy," Amy said. "I just drugged her drink.

"I think that covers everything," Amy said, "and this has been a nice chat --do feel free to drop by over tea if you'd like another-- so it's time for my test. Toodles."

Amy pushed the lever into the "on" position and things went very, very wrong. In addition to the arcing electricity that meant her equipment clearly wasn't up to code, a blue glow emanated from Ron's chamber while Shego's seemed to burst into green flames. Things started to explode on both sides. Amy started screaming.

The glow and the fire combined into a sort of cyan smolder that covered all three chambers of the genetic zipper.

Kim vaguely noticed when Amy shouted at the melted remains of a bank of computers, "My data is gone!" and was happy to be rid of Amy when she shouted, "My beautiful lair is collapsing!" and ran.

But Kim didn't know what she could do. The equipment was fried. If the two had been combined there was no way to split them again right now. She just had to watch the smoldering cyan chambers and wait to see what came out.

The central chamber opened, an almost-white green hand grabbed one of the chambers "teeth" and Kim's heart dropped. They'd been combined.

A woman stumbled into view. She had Shego's colors. Green hair so dark it looked black, green skin so light it looked white. But there was Ron there too. The freckles had become darker green skin instead of brown, the eyes were somewhere between Ron and Shego's color, a sort of yellowish brown, the hair was Shego's length but it was messy in an "essential Ronness" way. She was wearing Ron's jersey and a black and green skirt of Shego's.

After a long moment of Kim and this new woman just looking at each other as bits of the lair collapsed around them, the woman spoke:

"So, Princess, we still on for Bueno Nacho tonight?"

-

[Kim Possible Index][Next]

-

The genetic zipper, as it usually opperates:

Regularly scheduled once monthly Finances update and donation begging

So remember how I looked into to the slim, slim chance I might be able to get a loan that I could use to pay off my credit cards?  Remember how just talking about it resulted in a hard inquiry that knocked my credit score down a bit?

Well I didn't notice it at the time, but all of my minimum monthly payments went up.  As in, I can't cover them with my income up.  That's not unusual, every month has involved things getting worse since my SSI got cut.  It is, however, worse than it was before.

At standard rates if I got a five year loan large enough to pay off my credit card debt the monthly payment would be approximately $185ish.  The minimum payments on two cards that I never use anymore are in the $160 range.  There are more than two cards I never use anymore.

So the loan idea is in fact really really good as it would involve paying less, getting the debt paid off much, much faster and having freedom on the horizon.

But I can't get the loan.

I asked my mom, who has collateral and a decent retirement income, if she could get the loan for me.  My mom has had bad experiences with debt in the past and isn't willing to add any debt in her name so she said no.  However, she's letting me slide on the insurance payment ($267.50 that I can't afford right now) and she's loaned me $1,500 of her own money so I can completely pay off a couple of middling cards.

There's a decent chance that paying that much of my remaining debt (remember that I used passed donations to pay off debt instead of saving them for filling later holes in my finances) off would cause my credit score to actually rocket out of the poor range into the vaguely passable range which I hope would mean my minimum monthly payments going back down.

It's a loan, not a gift, but it's a loan with an interest rate of zero and no set time for repayment, so that's good.  Mind you she doesn't have that much money so fifteen hundred is a big deal and I'd really like to be able to pay the $267.50 insurance because that's my job not hers.

And I'm hoping that the SSA will reconsider my SSI amount when they see that I'm not raking in the $4,000 dollars a semester that it looked like I was when people were helping me be a full time student.

So everything's a muddled mess and it's hard to pin down exactly how things are going.  A lot more than I'd like is in the "wait and see" category.

* * *

As always the donate button is in the upper right-hand corner.  Or, and I think this actually gets me more of the money you send, you can use Paypal to send money to me via my email address: cpw (at) maine (dot) rr (dot) com.

Also as always, do not under any circumstances give me anything if you really need it for yourself.  I estimate that about half of my high interest debt (so not the student loan) is a result of me doing stupid things.*  I don't want my stupidity to hurt anyone.  Don't give me a cent if doing so would put you in a markedly worse place.

* * *

Yes, the schedule says that I should have posted this on the ides of March.  I fucked up.  Oops.

-

* Technically the things themselves weren't stupid.  In fact, they still might pay for themselves and then some if I can just manage to actually fucking do shit.  The stupid part was thinking that I'd be able to actually fucking do shit.

So far the only thing where I spent money to make money that actually worked was buying The Princess Who Saved Herself in bulk and selling it for cheaper than you could buy the individual book but more than the bulk cost.

Custom Legos - If I had world enough and ... actually world enough would be enough

There are competing positive and negative developments in my financial situation.  I'm sure everyone really, really wants to hear about that so ... Legos.

I'm part of the Lego Club.  I was buying something for, as I recall, the elder weasel (as opposed to the muchkin weasel that I think I mention more often) and they asked if I wanted to do a free sign up deal and I thought, "What the fuck, why not?"  Now they send me catalogs composed of solid awesome and I realize that if I were rich I'd have more Legos than the dad from The Lego Movie because solid fucking awesome.

Two of these catalogs (one on top of the other) are on my floor.  Just as a phone call was ending, I happened to look down and saw the Joker running away from he '60s full camp TV series Batmobile.  I started to talk about something that I'd do if I had money, and then was reminded that the phone call was ending and if it was more than a couple of sentences it might be worth talking about.

So, here's the thing.  The batmobile from the '60s TV show looks awesome as do various other things.  The Joker does not.  Why?  Because he's a standard old fashioned patent-expired mini-figure.

You know what would look awesome?  If they did him Lego-Friends/Princess/Elves style.  Then he'd look like the motherfucking Joker.

It's the same with so many things.  You know the only things that don't look awesome in Lego Star Wars?  The damned characters.  Ditto for Lego Ghostbusters, Lego DC Heroes, Lego Marvel heroes (exception for the Hulk, semi-exception for Groot), Lego City (cops and robbers, general, vehicles, ocean exploration), Lego Doctor Who, Ninjago (only exists as lego), Lego creator, and everything that isn't in the unofficial "For Girls" segregated area.

As you flip through the catalog you eventually reach the stuff for girls at the end and you discover that Lego is fully capable of making characters that are awesome looking too.

Other sets look amazing except for the (humanoid) characters, Lego Friends, Disney Princess, and Elves look fucking awesome throughout.

There are, however, problems with the Friends mini-figures,  Since their legs don't end at the knees (with feet attached directly to the knees) like the other mini-figures, they can't fit into some of the places the traditional mini-figures can.  Note that it's completely absurd that the ordinary minifigures can fit into such spots, but that's another story.

Friends figures legs lack individual articulation.  Their wrists can't rotate the way traditional mini-figures wrists can.

None of these problems are insurmountable.  Customizers have already dealt with some of them.

So, if I had world enough . . .

* * *

Friends themselves, being a new invention, are still patent protected but everything that makes them Lego compatible (right down to the ability to decapitate them and put their heads on pikes) is based on things that are now public domain.

So, what I'd do is design Friends-esque figures from the ground up so that they didn't have the drawbacks, and I'd make them have more body shape diversity, probably more head shape diversity as well, obviously more skin color diversity, and, basically, I'd make Friends-but-better figures.

One thing that I'd definitely add in is the capability of having people with fewer than four complete limbs.

Consider that currently Lego Furiosa (why doesn't this exist? by the way) with prosthetic could be done by painting part of the arm metallic colors, but Lego Furiosa without her prosthetic limb would require taking a saw to a Lego figure.  [Added: oh, wait.  She does exist.  Customizers, I love you people.]  Why should one need a saw?  The arms are interchangeable parts, how hard would it be to produce some that end at the elbow?  Or ones that have the full arm, but don't have a hand at the end?

And what about runners?  I can believe that a Lego figure in pants might not have two full biological legs because the leg prosthetics I've encountered in my life are the kinds of things you only realize are prosthetics if the user is wearing shorts.  But for competitive running a different shape of prosthetic entirely is used.  No current Lego figure could be believed to have running legs on.

[Giant time gap here, I'd almost forgotten this post was in progress.]

It is surprising how strong tiny plastic parts can be.  Not are; can be.  Lego uses good plastic and thus has the surprisingly strong tiny plastic parts.  Whoever in China is making clones of the Friends mini-figures does not use plastic that good.  Their tiny parts are frail and easily broken.

So making better Friends-esque figures doesn't just mean having enough money to do injection molding (which is not fucking cheap) but also having enough money to do it with the good plastic.

Hence needing world enough.  The design element is no big deal, though I'm currently without any CAD software.  Manufacturing requires more world than I've got.

* * *

Once the better-than-Friends figures exist, though, that's when we really take a lesson from the customizers.  We can swap out that ugly doesn't-look-like-the-Joker Joker with one that does.  Lego has done the hair and accessories for us.  We just need to paint the figure in the right colors.

Ditto for Batman and Robin, Black Widow, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner if he ever actually shows up in Lego sets, Storm Troopers, Rey and Fin, and, basically, everyone everywhere in Lego sets.

If I had world enough.

How I think, re:being better in outside but having the problem of cold winters

My interlocutor brought up the problem, and it really is one.  If you're not fully functional without spending time outside in the sun and, possibly, with the nature, then times when its could, or just dreary and raining and whatnot so event though the sun filtered by clouds might be enough, there's a significant effort investment in getting outside, are a problem.  Because the general result is that you aren't fully functional.

Interloutor talked about the possibility of moving somewhere where going outside was a less involved process for more of the year.  That is a rational response.  It is not, however, a me response.

No, this is where my mind went:

Build a greenhouse, a big greenhouse, underground.  The only part that is at ground level is the glass(?)* roof that the sun comes through.

While there are obvious things to put in from  a productive standpoint (grow flowers in the winter, have tomatoes on hand at all times of year) the point is to have nature to be available to you.  So there will be grass and trees and bushes and such.

Whether glass or plastic the roof will be double paned.  Ideally as much air as possible would be sucked out of the space between the panes because while air is actually a decent insulator vacuum is better.

Part of the draw of being underground is that the earth itself serves as the insulation on all sides except the roof that the light comes through, but there is a downside.

You can't have massive south facing windows if the south face is dirt and/or rock.

A possible solution to this would be a giant above ground mirror (are there full spectrum mirrors? there should be) or a giant array of smaller ones, that reflected the low sunlight (which would mostly go over the greenhouse) into the greenhouse.

Regardless, there would likely need to be artificial lighting because come winter there's just not as much light and there's a need to compensate for that.

And that's where my mind goes.  "Move to a place with a climate more in tune with your psychological needs?  Surely you jest. Build a massive underground complex that brings that climate to you here."

Actually building a massive underground complex is something that comes up in my mind a lot because I feel that we are woefully neglecting all of the underground space available to us.

When I went to and returned from dropping off my primary computer so that it could be fixed I walked through some of the Maine Mall's massive, mostly empty, parking lots.  They're a waste of space.  Don't get me wrong, the Mall has such massive parking lots because at some times of year they're needed, but why do they exist purely to park cars in?

Above ground I would recommend too many changes.  Maybe have a park (with fences or some such so you don't risk falling out) or arrays of solar panels built over the parking lots, but it's below ground where I see the real potential.  Parking garages have demonstrated beyond all doubt that supporting cars above a mostly empty space is a solved problem.

How solved?  We could fit ten stories of shit under the parking lot without putting much effort into the design.  Mind you that would require digging a hole ten stories deep so I'm not really recommending that, but I'm just saying, the fact that there are cars on the ground does not in any way imply that there couldn't be stuff under the ground because we've got suporting the weight of cars over a majority empty space pretty well covered.

The Maine Mall is 1.2 million square feet.  It's mostly one story.  The lot is approximately (back of the envelope math) five million square feet.  If it were entirely one story then we could simply subtract and say that the parking lot is 3.8 million square feet.  At this point it gets tricky because I don't know if the figure for the mall is just the contiguous mall or if it also includes the out building.  In the first case the parking lot is somewhat smaller than that figure, in the second case it's somewhat bigger (because of the multistory stores.)

Regardless, over three million square feet that could be used for all sorts of things, but is wasted because we don't do enough shit underground.

You know who does do shit underground?  Disney World.  Disney Land taught Walt Disney that it would be really useful to have a massive staff accessible underground complex.  Mind you, the ground Disney World is built on didn't allow for underground complexes.  So he just built the underground complex and then raised the ground level to roof level so that most of the time you're walking about at Disney World you're actually walking on the roof of a one story building.

But why doesn't the Mall do stuff underground?  That parking lot is just begging to be used for more than just parking cars, and there are plenty of times of year when the excavation and construction could be done without fucking with customer parking, and the mall would end up with at least four times as much space as it has now.  And sure, maybe the Mall couldn't find that many people willing to pay their regular prices, but they could rent it out to anyone.  Or use it as non-comercial ventures to draw in potential customers.  Put a skate park there to draw in skaters, put a really cool playground there to draw in kids and their parents (do you know how much consumers pay on stuff for kids?  Kids are a gold mine.)

Whatever.

And that's how I think.

- - -

*I grew up in and around a glass greenhouse, so I tend to think of them as things of glass.  I think, though, that plastics have become favored.  Whatever it is, it needs to be strong.  It will get snowed on an while the snow will be cleared (otherwise it would block out the light), and presumably melted into water for the plants, the process cannot be counted on to be instantaneous.  Point being, those flimsy plastics are not going to be involved.  If it's plastic then it'll be hard core strong as all fuck plastic.

While the words of the prophets may be written on the subway walls, what's said in the subway is not mentioned in the song

At Downtown Crossing they said that the Orange Line was experiencing slight delays due to a disabled train at Sullivan.  That's what they say when the wait is soul crushingly long and the train won't arrive until ten minutes after the Rapture (plus side: no RTCs in your way.)  Also something about a train at Sullivan.

The Rapture didn't come, but here's the thing about delays: the people who would have gotten on earlier trains didn't because there weren't earlier trains.  The platform was filled with at least ... ok, I was going to go for hyperbole but... no.  Imagine the most full subway platform in the history of the Boston T.  That was merely the Red Line at South Station.  It didn't hold a candle to the crowd waiting for the Orange Line.

Here's the other thing about delays: the stops before your stop were waiting a long time too and every single fucking one of the people at those stops tried to get into the first train to come through after the interruption in service changed into delays in service.

So the train is already packed when it shows up at the packed platform and I didn't even get near the damned thing.

Next train, same general conditions apply because you just can't fit enough people one one train to make a dent, but I got on.

Now I'm at the ass end of the train because:
a) That's the closest to where the stairs and escalator come up
b) That's closest to where I want to be when I get off the train at the end of the line.

We're crammed in tight.  We're packed like sardines, or rather like the Orange Line at rush hour when it's experiencing "slight" delays which is actually more tightly than sardine packers can even imagine conceiving or conceive imagining.  But we're not sardines.  We're people.  Real live people -- not sardines in a can.  Which is to say: we're fucking mammals whose respiration is in effect.

It's cold and rainy, it doesn't matter, our collective body heat has raised the temperature to the point that we could easily jump-start a small star.

After North Station we switch to above ground.  The Orange Line doesn't know what it wants to do, it runs as a ground train, it experiments with being an El between stops, goes full elevated for Malden Center, before returning to being a ground level train at Oak Grove.

Being at the ass end of the train means we can hear the rain that collected on the train while it was at a stop go sploosh off the roof when it starts up again.  The water does not cool the train.  It cannot.  We are too hot.  To touch us is to burn.  The splooshing water must be superheated by the time it actually goes sploosh.  It was on the roof, the metal roof, for long enough to gather into splooshable quantities.  Perhaps the hydrogen atoms have started to fuse into helium.  Who knows?  The point is that the forces of nature cannot compete with that many people packed that tightly.  The train does not cool.

We have surpassed mundane thermal dynamics and reached the platonic ideal of, "Oh my fucking god, it's hot!"

But that's not the worst part.  No.  We've got a preacher among us.  A loud preacher man.  But I can't hear him that well.

I'm at the back, the ass end of the ass end.  You know that door that you're not supposed to lean on?  I don't have a choice.  The sheer volume of people in the car pushes out in all directions and I am pushed against the door.  This is beyond leaning.  The pressure is such that if not for that door and the counter pressure it provides I'd likely be sent flying backwards into the compartment the door protects, and never be seen again.  If I were to succumb to the force of so many people in so small a space I would doubtless never be able to crawl back to whence I came, much less reach an exit.

So there I am, pressed against the rear wall, and the door in that wall.  My arm rests on the emergency call button case because otherwise it would have been pushed into the button itself and god only knows what would happen then.  What god?  Which god?  I do not know.  The god of compressed commuters I supposed.

The preacher is in the middle of the car.

For the longest time he repeats the same phrase over and over again.  I can't make out the first word.

"[---] is not in the bible."

What?  What is not in the bible?

Overcrowded subways?

At one point it sounds like "Porn is not in the bible."

I roll to disbelieve.  First off, it's full of porn, second: we're experiencing compression force unheard of even at the greatest ocean depths and temperatures that even the cores of stars cannot reproduce, who gives a fuck about what's in Saint Luke's browser cache?

From when I get on at Downtown Crossing he does not stop.  The same phrase again and again.  No rest or respite.  I think I finally hear him when we're above ground and have set off three separate early warning systems designed to detect the the temperature spike of a nuclear detonation.

"Pope is not in the bible!" he says.

Pope?  Alexander Pope?  My brain has melted and I think, "But he was in Deus Ex."  No.  He wasn't.  That was Bob Page.

Pope and Page don't sound much alike.  Sure, they share their first and last letters, but so do the words "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "am".  Truly, I say unto you, you cannot comprehend what happens to a brain at those temperatures.  Why can you not?  Because if your brain reaches those temperatures then you cannot comprehend.  Period.  Thus you are left without a frame of reference even after it cools down.

As we journey from the depths to the surface world, and as I finally hear his full message, he begins to expand.  Pope is not in the bible.  [something] is devil.  Roman Catholicism is not in the bible.  Catholicism is Antichrist.  Generally uninteresting drivel.  What about Moses' porn collection?  Damn it, I though that this might be interest-- no.  No, I didn't.

There's a certain kind of preacher where you know that even if you can fully comprehend all that they say, it still won't be interesting.

But back to being at the ass end of the train.  He was in the middle of the car.  Once I finally figured out what he was going on about not being in the bible, a point that he always returned to at least once every three sentences, I wanted to respond with, "You know what else isn't in the bible?  English.  So either make your argument in Hebrew or Koine Greek or Tace!"  ("Tace!" is "Shut up!" in the Latin.  If he's not going to stick to biblical language, why should I?)

So εν νω εχω this response but he's half a car away from me and I'd have to really yell for him to hear me clearly, and that would be rude to the other people in the subway car, and thus I never use it.

He gets off before the end of the line.  I get my first good look at him out the window.  Before I could only see the top of his head, and that just barely.

You know what else wasn't in the bible?  Subway preacher with a sign for Jesus around his neck.

Take your body heat and your bullshit and go somewhere else.  If not being in the bible makes you the Antichrist, then you are too, loud dude.

By the time we reach the end of the line the announcements over the PA are closer to true.

"We are experiencing moderate delays due to a disabled train at Sullivan."

"Moderate" means something like, "Really, really, soul crushingly, hope snuffingly, body wreckingly long" right?

"Save the World" is a bit vague

" I see you shiver, with antici"

Janet leaned forward, waiting for the word to end and then--

"Why did you pause it?" I asked.

Bella hadn't come through the door, she hadn't come through the window.  She'd somehow just appeared in the house.  Bella was like that.  She hadn't paused it with her sonic pressure gauge, I noted, but instead with the remote that I'd lost a year and a half ago.

"We need to save the world," she said.

"I'm in the middle of a movie."

"That's why I paused it," she could be infuriating when she was calm and pseudo-rational.

"Which world is in need of saving?" I asked.

"This one."

Earth.  Earth was always in need of saving.  It hardly seemed worth stopping the movie for.

"When?" I asked.

"Twenty years from now."

"Then why can't I finish watching the movie first?"

"There's a temporal thingamajig that's caused that part of the future and this part of the ... well this is still the future from my frame of reference.  Anyway, they're temporally phase locked."

I finally got up off the couch.  "I hate phase locks!  Except for the moon, the fact that the same side always faces the earth is actually pretty cool, but apart from that and various other examples I'm not going to currently elaborate on, I hate phase locks."

"So, you in?"

"Yeah, I'm in, where's the truck?"

"It's currently in a helocentric orbit with a radius of about a hundred and seventeen million miles trying to catch a dropped teapot," she said as if that were a perfectly normal place for a '53 Chevy to be.

"So how do we get there?"

"Transmat,"

"Damn."

"We transmat to the truck, pick up the teapot, and then make the rest of our trip the usual way."

I sighed.  "Ok, let's go."

"You don't need to grab anything first?" She asked, looking specifically at my bare feet.

"You're better stocked than I am," I said, "plus the wardrobe wing is actually sorted so I know where to find socks and shoes, unlike here--"

"Your own home," she said.

"-- where I just look around the likely spots and hope some of the socks are clean," I finished.  "Let's go."

And so we did.

Finances

So a while ago, maybe not that long.  Could it have been a mere week?  Time has lost all meaning.  Let's try again.

So at some point I decided to take steps to try to not have life suck.  Part of that involved going to the bank and dropping off some cash so that I'd be able to make a payment on time.  Or, less late.  Or something.  I don't even remember.

While I was there it seemed like a good idea to do two other things.  One was getting records of my account for the past year to show that, no, I'm not raking in $4,000 dollars or (whatever the fuck you think I make) a semester so could you please stop fucking treating me like I am SSA?  Another was to find out if there was any chance of converting some of my credit card debt to a non-predatory loan.  I figured the answer was no, but I also figured it was worth asking because nearly 10,000 dollars of debt gathering a high interest is not a good thing.

The answer was no, and I ended up feeling sorry for the loan lady because she looked at my debt, my income, and really, really wanted to help but, like I figured, it was impossible.  Perhaps I should feel sorry for myself that my situation is pathetic enough that someone who gets asked about loans all the time was visibly affected by my pathos and to the point that she felt bad that no matter how hard she tried she could not find a single thing she could do that would help.  I mean, things have got to be pretty bad when it isn't, "Let me tell you what we can do for you," but instead, "Oh my fucking god, let me see if there's something I can do to help you."

But the fact is, I'm used to it.  She, obviously, wasn't.  It's not really surprising, most people with no collateral and extremely low income don't go to the credit union (I called it a bank, didn't I?  fuck it, I'm not going to figure out where and fix it) to see if they can get a loan to refinance their big fucking credit card debt, now do they?  Maybe she's not used to seeing people in my situation.

Anyway, that's not my point.  This is the point.  I figured it didn't hurt to ask.  I was wrong.  Her doomed to fail attempt to help involved going through the motions on the off chance it would work.  Result: hard inquiry, my credit scores take an automatic hit.

Now it's not huge, and my credit scores sucked anyway, but fuck was that rubbing salt in.

Actually, I've been getting surprised by my credit scores resilience of late.  I keep on fucking up and missing payments by days or hours or even less.  (After 8pm EST same day payments are disallowed, I got a $35 dollar late fee for being 30 minutes late on a payment four days ago,)  This string of late payments, which has cost god knows how much in late fees, has not changed that fact that every time I check my score for getting payments in on time goes infinitesimally higher.

How much higher?  Not a damned clue.  Infinitesimal.  It's been stuck at 99.5% forever but it keeps on saying that it's improved since last time, so all I know is that the cumulative improvement has never been enough to kick it up to the next tenth of a percent.

One of February's missed payments (there's only been one in March so far, don't remember January) means that I'm expected to pay more this month so I'm going to have to find some cash (or withdraw some, I've still got a bit of money online having not used all of it to pay down debt) and get it into my bank stat and I'll still be cutting other payments dangerously close.

So it fucking goes.

-

You know what I worry about?  That I'll send in the information to the SSA and they'll somehow find some screwed up way of interpreting it that means they'll pay me even less.  Shouldn't be possible, and I need to fucking send it first, but I worry.

And oh shit I haven't sent out that copy of The Princess Who Saved Herself yet.  I'm a bad person.  Yes, Lonespark, we should send one of the ones I left with you.  I demonstrably suck at getting to the post office.

-

I need a loan.  I haven't run the calculations this month, but it was a bit over $9,000 in credit card debt.  Credit card interest is the interest of loan-sharks who other lone-sharks derisively call "usurers."  If I could pay that fucking mess off, even if I needed to pay the money used back (hence "loan" not "large gift of enough free money to start a small business") maybe I'd have a bright future.

-

I don't want to worry about this shit anymore.  I want to write stories.

It's like gravity though, it keeps on pulling me back to it.

(In part because there are 11 different days each month on which I need to get this bill or that paid, and it fucking matters which days they are because if I had to pay them all at once I couldn't.  And then I have quarterly and trimester bills that come around too, and oil that depends on the weather.)