Lifestyle Changes (phase 2)

If my life was fiction, I would have been going through a deus ex machina experience this summer. For three years I have been plodding along, diligently checking job listings, filling out online applications, emailing resumes, and attempting to find the legendary "hidden job market" where, they say, 90% of all jobs are found. Knowing all the time I should be doing something to change course instead of following the track of my own front tire.

Lifestyle Changes - Phase 1

After losing my full-time real job in September 2010, I worked a part-time low-wage no-benefits restaurant job for two years, from March 2011 to February 2013. I've been receiving at least partial unemployment comp. benefits for most of that time, except for about six weeks last summer, when I was working a bit more than forty hours a week in two jobs. It must be the combination of working part-time and the federal emergency benefits programs that have allowed me to claim for so long, but over this past summer I was always vaguely aware that my time was running out - in August I would move to Tier 3 benefits, which had been reduced by 20% because of sequester budget cuts. Sometime in July, in checking up on what I had coming, I found out that because the unemployment rate in Washington state had fallen below 7%, Tier 3 benefits would be phased out completely. My claim schedule fell just outside the deadline to qualify, meaning I would have no income after the end of August, with less than $1500 left in savings.

Here's where the deus ex machina comes into action. In mid-June I had received a phone call from my sister, with the news that my mother had died in an Alzheimers-care facility in the mid-West. Already aware that I was running out of money, I decided I couldn't travel from Bellingham to be with my family. My sister, who for several years had been looking after our mother's care, and her taxes and accounts, later informed me that Mom had left us a life insurance policy and some other investments, to be divided equally between us. Mom had also asked to be cremated, with instructions for burial in a family plot near Seattle.

This was the reason for my trip to Seattle last month, paid for from my half of the insurance money, which turned out to be more than I earned the whole two years I worked my coffee-shop job.

I keep thinking of that Cyndi Lauper song:  Money Changes Everything.

Several times I've thought about buying a car, for about a half-minute at a time. But parking isn't secure in my neighborhood, and to me a car still represents expenses, risks and liability, not convenience and freedom. I thought about moving to an apartment with laundry facilities, and looked around a little bit. But in the meantime, I made some other plans and commitments. Now my schedule for fall is filling up, and the weekly bus-trip to the laundromat in Bellingham is so much a habit that I decided to wait on making that major change, too.

In fact, the first thing I did when I found out I had enough money to live on for a while and didn't need unemployment comp. and an EBT card any more, was to check on the autumn class schedule at the community college and register for some business and foreign language classes. Soon I will be a bicycle-commuting student again.

I've also noticed my attitude is getting less meek and laid-back. Once when an SUV-driver yelled something rude at me while cutting in front of me turning in to a parking lot, I yelled back. Now if store clerks seem to be trying to hustle me out of a shop when I'm browsing through clearance racks, or baristas get snippy when I loiter in a cafe, I think "I don't have to put us with this crap anymore." I think I'd better get a grip on myself.