So, I’m a little bit grouchy today.  Grouchy because it’s a national holiday and I don’t have a day off.  Not that everyone has a day off today–even my roommate, a professor at a state-run university–has to work today.  But the thing is I don’t have a day on, either.

In fact, I haven’t been working all that much lately, and it’s getting kind of tiresome.  If I were independently wealthy, this would be fine:  a good time to travel, to work on a novel, or to better myself by taking classes or something.  But no.  All of those things require money, to some degree, and that is one thing I don’t have at all.

The job hunt has been dreary, dehumanizing and just plain shitty.  I have gone from “holding out for the perfect job,” something I’ve applied for no less than ten times now, to keeping an eye out for decent-seeming jobs while doing some freelance things here and there, to just praying that someone, anyone, will give me a few dollars an hour to do absolutely anything.  Desperate?  Probably.  But there comes a point when a little desperation doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

Why am I so unemployable?  That I can’t say.  I could blame it on my sordid past, I guess, although I don’t think it’s that, really.  I could also blame it on my own laziness, although I’m not entirely sure it’s that, either.  The awful job market?  My lack of experience in anything besides retail?  My frosty demeanor?  My beard?  I don’t know.  Probably all of those things.

Unfortunately, I’m not really in a position to move anywhere, which means that I’m stuck looking for jobs in bleak, bleak Providence or Boston, which actually has some jobs in it, but also has a huge pool of recent college graduates with better pedigrees than my own.  Then there’s the internet, though I’ve yet to figure out a way to consistently make any money there, either.

Until I get this sorted out, I’ve decided to put some other things on hold.  I’ll keep blogging here, for my own sanity more than anything else, but I’m planning to scale back on my internet time in other places unless it’s specifically job-hunt related.  So, my Tumblr queue may run out now and then, and I won’t be posting videos on Facebook so much.  Not the worst thing in the world, really.

Hopefully I’ll be back soon, though.  (And, of course, let me know if you hear of anything job-wise that you think I might be interested in…)

Salon’s Hipsters On Food Stamps article seems to have caused something of an internet furor; I’m not totally sure why.  As a Hipster On Food Stamps, I think I can pretty safely say for sure that a) EBT purchases are still something of a rarity at Whole Foods, at least the one I go to; b) since the state actively encourages people to eat healthy food, I’m not sure why people eating healthy food is a bad thing for some people; and c) I definitely would not publicly announce how much money I had remaining the way the two people at the beginning of the article do; it’s bad enough that I live in a small city and half the time recognize the person in line behind me.  Also, on my visit to the (very busy) food stamp office, the only other people in my age bracket had kids with them, so I don’t think this phenomenon is quite as widespread as people are suggesting.

And, oh yeah, more about hipsters.

In non-hipster news…

“As the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.“

Universal health care might actually cut the abortion rate.

For some reason this list of uncircumcised celebrities is hilarious to me.

Nominees for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards have been announced.  I haven’t read any of them, but I will say that I checked out the gayest library books ever this week:  some Alan Hollinghurst, a history of disco, and a book about mod fashion.  Oh, and a cultural studies approach to Dusty Springfield.

The first round is over in the Dallas Morning News Tournament of Books.  Judges for upcoming rounds include book blogger Carolyn Kellogg and, uh, Andrew WK.

Farmers calling for the survival of rural America.

Finally, I’m not nominated for Providence’s Best Blog because, you know, I’m chopped liver.  But that other blog I write for is.  We’ve won the past two years, maybe with your help we can make it a threepeat?

[image: The new issue of Geil, via Hard Print]

Remember that.

When you’re underemployed you have a lot of free time to do other exciting, cool stuff.  Like, you know, making maps of the country’s unemployment rates.

Lighter colors mean higher unemployment.  The darkest states have under 6.5%, the lightest colors have over 12% unemployment.

According to the latest stats, North Dakota’s faring the best by far, with 4.2% unemployment.  Michigan’s the worst, with 15.1%.  Rhode Island has dropped to #3 in unemployment; apparently Nevada passed us at some point.  (Of course, these numbers count people who aren’t working but qualify for unemployment benefits.  Self-employed people without work and people that gave up don’t figure in to the numbers, meaning that real unemployment’s a whole lot higher.)

Unfortunately, none of the states with really low unemployment, except maybe Vermont, seem appealing at all for a job hunter like myself.  (Although have I ever mentioned that I’ve never actually been to Vermont?)  Somehow I can’t see myself living in either one of the Dakotas…

So, I think I may be about to break one of the main rules of polite and interesting blogging.  I’m going to have a little pledge drive.  For myself.

Here’s the thing:  I’m basically facing financial ruin.  Or, I’m not even facing it.  It already happened.  I’m doomed.

About a year ago I left my job.  I quit, under duress, with few prospects, and in a way that was wonderful.  Since I quit I put photo and video work in a couple of gallery shows, and I curated three others.  I fought for public libraries, testified against throwing prostitutes in jail, and dedicated a lot of my summer to raising money for a prison book program.  This Thursday I’m hosting a reading event that I organized, and next month I’ll be reading in public for the first time at an event in New York (about which more later.)  Oh, and I get regularly paid to write now.  All of these things are great, and none of them would have happened were I still working at a full-time desk job surrounded by bitter old ladies.

But.

I also haven’t been making money steadily.  Part-time blogging covers the rent, more or less, but it doesn’t pay the utilities and certainly doesn’t cover anything beyond that, like food.  And getting another job seems very unlikely right now.  I live in a state with 14% unemployment and over 21% real unemployment.  I can’t move anywhere, because moving costs money and anyway I have a boyfriend and a family here.  Blogging for about two hours a day actually means I’m better off than one-fifth of the population.

So.

I have a proposal:

Mail me your gold.

No, ha, just kidding.

Really.  I don’t know how many people read this blog, but I’m thinking that some of you might be in a better financial position than I am.  Probably a lot of you aren’t, but I bet some of you nice people are.  So I’ve decided to put a donation button on the site.  If it’s possible, I’d like to raise $1,000 in the next couple of weeks.  That’s kind of a big goal for a low-traffic personal blog that doesn’t sell any ads.  But it’s a nice round number and would help me immensely.  A thousand dollars won’t won’t save the world, and it won’t even solve a lot of my problems, but it will get me out of the hole I’m in right now, and it means I’ll be able to pay my rent and that my electricity won’t be shut off.

As a perk, I have a couple of small projects coming up.  One of them is mixtape-related, and one of them is book-related.  Both of them are very small and homemade, but I think they’re both going to be pretty cool. I’m not ready to go into more detail about either one of them, but if you donate at least $20 I’ll give you first crack at both of them, as a little thank you.

I don’t want to be annoying, and I know this is tacky, but I’m at a loss about what else to do.  Being broke is really stressful, but being broke with no hope of getting paid soon is kind of incapaciting.  I spend a good six to eight hours of my day worrying about money and spend much of that time feeling literally queasy.

I’m putting a PayPal button on the side of the site here, and if/once I make the money I need I’m going to take it down.  Should anyone choose to accept this mission, thanks in advance.

RIRepublican on our prostitution situation.

Andrea Ritchie calls criminalization of prostitutes in Rhode Island “the wrong solution to the wrong problem.”

Low-wage workers are even more fucked than previously suspected.

Blackwater’s contract in Iraq was extended, despite widespread allegations of murder and rape of Iraqi children, and despite the fact that the company was banned from operating by the Iraqi government.

Uncut Rainbow is an amazing relic of gay internet porn history, down to the slow loading times.  The vintsge section has a lot of fun stuff.

Speaking of the nineties, here’s a little bit of musical nostalgia: Liquido’s Narkotic, a song that–despite its title–I thought was about Michael Caine for many, many years.

Barry Scott, a local-ish oldies DJ, was apparently beat up by cops in Provincetown (which, for those of you on the west coast, is not Providence) earlier this summer.  I casn’t even tell you how many songs I first heard on his “Lost 45′s” program back in the nineties.

There’s a petition circulating, asking for the British government to issue a formal apology about Alan Turing, who cracked the German code during World War II but who was chemically castrated just a few years later for having a homosexual relationship.  Pretty interesting story.

The Huffington Post on the G-Spot and its association with the upper palate.

The Utne Reader on a less muscular patriotism.

James Tracy, headmaster of the elite Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, is an idiot.

A Dutch teenager’s photo blog was one of the nicer things I ran across this week.

If you ever wanted Bill O’Reilly or Perez Hilton to look like President Obama, but on canvas, you’ll love this.

Typewriter cake!

A lottery for the apocalypse!

Cool Songz 4 Teen Girls!

No Shit Dept.: Cell Phones Linked To Brain Tumors

Finally, before this week I had never before heard of the Boston Molasses Flood, which killed 21 people in 1919.  Now I have.

I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment (again) this morning, and my downstairs neighbor with the spare key was out at a doctor’s appointment.  To kill some time until she got back , I went to Whole Foods and then stumbled into FYE, tempted by their “All CDs Now $9.99 or less” sign. I’m pretty sure I’ve never once bought a CD at FYE because they’ve always been ridiculously expensive, but $9.99 or less had a nice ring to it.

I ended up spending a lot of money I don’t actually have, though I did pick up a lot of pop albums I’ve been too embarrassed or broke to buy elsewhere.  I got the new Kelly Clarkson, the Taylor Swift album, the Metro Station CD that I got for free when it came out but then gave away because the wonderful amazingness that is Seventeen Forever hadn’t quite struck me yet, and Keri Hilson’s In A Perfect World.  I also got some discounted oldies:  John Cougar Mellencamp’s Uh-Huh and PJ Harvey’s Peel Sessions, as well as Freestyle’s Greatest Hits Volume 1, which for some reason I didn’t own already.

So far I’ve only listened to the Mellencamp (it’s good!), the Metro Station (parts of it are really good!) and the Keri Hilson, which is kind of a letdown.  The album version of Return The Favor is missing the chorus that’s in the single, for one thing, and I can’t imagine why.  Also that song has a minute-long fadeout on the CD, and it’s track 4.  That’s something that should be saved for the last song, or at least the song that would end Side A on the record.  Also, In A Perfect World has at least one too many songs about how Miss Keri only wants to talk to dudes with money.  As someone heavily feeling the economic downturn, this isn’t what I want to listen to.  It just isn’t.  And current single Knock You Down, though it’s grown on me considerably over the last two weeks, still has 30-45 seconds too much of Kanye West.

Because I spent most of today figuring out my stupid rent situation, here’s a song for the destitute.  It’s Elizabeth Cotten’s version of Shake Sugaree, a Cotten wrote with her grandchildren.  Notable covers include one by the sadly neglected Fred Neil on his Everybody’s Talkin’ album, and one by Mary Lou Lord on her major-label outing Got No Shadow.

Cotten’s version appears in the depressing but lovable 1991 Vietnam-era film Dogfight, for those of you recognize the song and spent some part of your life obsessed with River Phoenix and/or Lili Taylor.

The other issue I’ve got going on is that my roommate gave me his half of the rent with a money order.  Being new to the world of check-like things that aren’t actually checks, I told him to make it out to me, thinking I could just cash it when I went to the bank yesterday.  But it turns out that banks don’t let you do that unless you have enough money to cover it.  You can deposit it, like a check, and then wait for it to clear, even though the whole point of money orders (I thought) is that they’re supposed to be just like cash.  Since my landlord is sort of understandably pissy about the rent being a week late, I figured I’d just go to a 7-11 (where it came from) and cash it there.

Except that they don’t cash them.  They just issue them.  They’ll only cash them if they’re for less than $75.  So then I went to another Western Union place, and I was told that they didn’t cash them either, and that I’d have to go to a check cashing place.  I haven’t done that yet, because I’m pretty sure they charge a bunch of money for the service.  Since I have more or less exactly the rent money, I can’t afford to give a chunk of it to a dodgy check-cashing place just because they’re the only option.  I AM SO ANNOYED RIGHT NOW!!

So, it’s been a while now since I’ve used the “money (lack of)” tag on any of my posts, and since I have spent most of the last 48 hours fretting over stupid things I figured I might as well share.

As you may or may not have gathered, I’m currently unemployed.  Busy all the time, planning events and fundraisers out the wazoo, but not actually making any money doing it.  (Also, I’m not pursuing the rentboy thing anymore, for personal/boyfriendal reasons.)

In Rhode Island, you get your weekly unemployment payments via a debit/Visa card, which makes it easy to get cash out of ATMs and track your payments and, though credit cards are evil, I’d rather do that than have to go to the bank and stand in line and wait twenty-four hours for checks to clear and everything.

There’s just one problem.

The cards are issued by Chase.  And there are no Chase banks in Rhode Island.  That means that every single time one of the sixty-eight thousand unemployed Rhode Islanders takes money out, they have to pay an ATM convenience fee.  Even if each unemployed person takes all their money out in one lump sum, and assuming people will only pay $1.50 per charge (which is conservative these days), that’s about two hundred thousand dollars a week that the state forces people to pay in convenience charges.  And that’s totally aside from the fact that it means the state is choosing to work exclusively with a bank that does no other business in the state.  If, like me, you don’t want to walk around with large sums of cash, your fees add up pretty quickly.  Unless you go to a Chase branch, I guess, but according to their website the nearest location would require an hour of driving plus two ferry rides.

And that’s just the first part of why I’m so annoyed today…