less money, mo’ problems

well, i recently did my taxes, and looked at all my documentation for the last year, back to the beginning of 2007. what in tarnation is this documentation that is such a bother? well, i do not normally throw away postal mail that i receive, but rather, i pile it up in stacks that turn into big messes, and i do not always read my mail, so sometimes i do not pay bills on time, because i do not notice them as important mail, and i am disorganized. anyway, by looking at “bank” statements from my credit union, i was able to ascertain that i have been steadily loosing money for the last year, ever since i went down from working 8 hours a day to working 6. prior to that, i was actually running a profit with my personal finances, enough to pay off all my student loans almost exactly 1 year ago. or was i running a profit? it is hard to tell. i had a separate bank account at bank of america, along with my bank account at the local credit union, and i had to close the bank of america account 1 year ago because i did not have enough money to maintain the minimum balance required to avoid paying the monthly maintenance fee for people who cannot maintain the required minimum balance. also, there is not a bank of america for many, many miles in any direction from binghamton, new york. i think the nearest one is in cortland, to the north. i decided a year ago to close that bank of america account because although it was easy for me to write checks from that account and use it to pay bills, it was almost impossible for me to deposit money into the account. there are no local branches of the bank. it was just impractical. for a brief period a year ago, my checking account with bank of america was actually overdrawn, by several hundred dollars. i had the money in my credit union account to pay off that debt i owed to bank of america, and i tried several means of paying them, such as wire transfers, money orders, bank checks, etc. nothing seemed to work. eventually the payment went through, but they had charged me the monthly maintenance fee again so i could not close the account, since the balance has to be exactly zero to close the account. i finally got all that business straightened out a year ago with bank of america and got my account closed. and then all my money was in the local credit union. and that is when i realized i had more than enough money to pay off my student loans, since i only had a very small amount of student loans in the first place (i think the total was originally like $2,500 for all of college, which is quite low). and i had already paid off like half of the student loans with the regular monthly payments, so i paid off the rest of it all at once. the loans were all from the united states department of education, and had very low interest rates. anyway, after that, i was left with a situation where all my bank accounts were at the local credit union and nowhere else, and i did not have any debts at all. but there was another looming crisis: june of 2007 was the last month that i had cobra health insurance coverage from my parents’ health insurance that i had been using all my life and throughout college and then extended using the cobra program for the full 3 years. i had to get a new health insurance. now i could either get it through my employer or from the government, or maybe buy it myself. buying health insurance yourself is really expensive since it is not subsidized at all by the government, whereas employer-based health insurance and government-sponsored health insurance programs are both subsidized by the taxpayer dollars of other people, and therefore cheaper. so at the time, i was still a temporary employee of my company, and had not yet become permanent (i became permanent in october 2007, earning a raise of about 50 cents an hour over my previous hourly wage). and i got a copy of the application for my temp agency’s health insurance plan. it was really, really cheap health insurance. like, amazingly cheap. i think it cost like $15 a week, so if we just round things off and pretend months are 4 weeks long, it was like $60 a month or some ridiculously low price like that. but there had to be a catch! and there was: this health insurance covered basically nothing. i read the fine print carefully, and found that there were high deductibles and copayments, and then if you did have something expensive enough for them to cover, there was a very very low limit of how much they would cover, and anything above that, you would have to pay yourself. in other words, it is reverse “doughnut hole” coverage. in doughnut hole coverage, everything is covered up to a certain amount, and then above that amount, the person has to pay their own medical costs in between that lower amount and some higher amount, and then the insurance would cover everything above the higher amount. the reverse doughnut hole coverage only covers things in between a lower amount and a higher amount, and the lower and higher amounts are pretty close to each other. so, in simple terms, it covers pretty much nothing. that is why it costs hardly anything. and of course it has all the now-standard restrictions of no pre-existing conditions, no mental health, etc. of course, those restrictions did not exist with the cobra coverage i had until the end of june 2007. that insurance covered 80% of mental health costs and required me to pay 20%. and the copays for prescription drugs were $1 for any drug at all. so, anyway, i had to get a new heath insurance. i chose the new york state family health plus program, after going to the local welfare office with all the poor people where you have to apply for help from government programs if you are a dirt poor loser like me or all those other people there. this family health plus thing is a government-subsidized hmo, or rather, there are a bunch of different hmos to choose from that all offer identical coverage, and the coverage is dictated by the state government; the hmos get to decide what monthly rates to charge for things on their own, and then the government publishes a list of the prices offered by each hmo. and hmos can choose to only cover people in certain counties of the state, such as the counties with less sick people and more healthy people. so anyway, all the coverage is identical from each hmo, so i chose the cheapest one offered in my county. and it turns out that this family health plus thing does not cover mental health at all. if i visit a psychologist or psychiatrist, it pays nothing. if i go to the psychiatric ward of a hospital, or have an emergency room visit for psychological problems like panic attacks or being suicidal, it covers absolutely nothing. if i go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription drug prescribed by my psychiatrist, it may or may not cover the drug, depending on which drug it is. they have a list of which drugs to cover and which not to cover. drugs that are only used for mental health purposes are not covered at all. drugs that have other uses are covered. currently, my psychiatrist has me on 2 psychiatric medications that are “dual-use”, meaning they are also used for other problems besides mental health ones. one of them, gabapentin (trade name neurontin), is used to treat certain types of pain, as well as a bunch of other things too (it is sort of a panacea used to treat all sorts of things, off-label of course). i take it to reduce anxiety and prevent panic attacks, which is apparently one of its many off-label uses. gabapentin basically mimics the neurotransmitter gaba, it is absorbed directly into the bloodstream and goes straight through the blood-brain barrier in its original form and binds to gaba receptors in the brain. it is apparently a very safe drug that it is pretty much impossible to overdose on, since if you take way too much, the extra gabapentin in your blood will basically have no effect whatsoever since all your gaba receptors will be full and there will be nothing for it to bind to. but it seems more than one type of gaba receptor exists, and gabapentin only binds to one type, and that is why it is safe. the other medicine i take is clonazepam, which also seems to target the same neurotransmitter, gaba. but clonazepam is a totally different kind of drug: a benzodiazepine. benzodiazepines are minor tranquilizers that make you more sleepy and lethargic, and help calm you down from anxiety. the trade name of clonazepam is klonopin. now benzodiazepines like clonazepam are considered addictive and are classified as controlled substances. but clonazepam has less potential for being abused than certain other benzodiazepines such as alprazolam (trade name xanax). anyway, benzodiazepines are somewhat similar to barbituates, alcohol, sleeping pills (such as ambien) and other sedatives, in that they have the same withdrawal symptoms if you take them for too long or if your dosage is too high, or especially if both are true (taking for too long and at too high a dose). if you drink too much alcohol, you get alcohol poisoning: coma or death. same with barbituates, same with sleeping pills, same with benzodiazepines such as clonazepam. and there is a benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome that is very similar to alcohol, barbituate, or sleeping pill withdrawal. so basically, benzodiazepines are like alcohol, barbituates, or sleeping pills, except they are a safer form, supposedly. and if you mix different drugs that have this same effect, like for example if you have alcohol or sleeping pills along with benzodiazepines, this is very unsafe. now other things that benzodiazepines combat against, besides anxiety and panic attacks, include seizures, insomnia, and all sorts of other nasty shit. if you stop taking benzodiazepines cold-turkey after taking them for a long time at high doses, really bad stuff will probably happen to you. as for me, personally, i have been taking clonazepam since late 2003, on and off, usually just as something to take when i have a panic attack, and not at other times. the month of march was very bad for me this year, since i went to the hospital emergency room twice because of very bad panic attacks, and both times, the treatment was to just continue the clonazepam, and to take more on those specific days when i was having bad panic attacks. but okay... i need an exit strategy. i was having a lot of insomnia that month and almost constant anxiety, panic attacks all the time. near the end of march i was getting a lot better, but i rebounded a bit the second week of april. since then my anxiety/panic problem seems to have been gradually going away, but i keep having insomnia problems. and so my main use of clonazepam has shifted to using it to help fall asleep. i can’t fall asleep without taking at least 2 0.5 mg clonazepam pills, and for a week or two i was taking 3 every night, so getting down to 2 is an improvement. i would like to be able to get down to taking 1 every night and then eventually zero. but, as the withdrawal symptoms are quite dangerous, i need to be very careful about this. the safest thing to do is to keep taking the same dosage indefinitely, and if any changes are ever made, to do them very very slowly. back in march, when i was suffering from extreme insomnia every night, i read the book power sleep by professor james maas of cornell (if you look at the wikipedia page i just linked to about professor james maas, you will see how he has cheated on his wife for years by having affairs with his female students and sexually harassing them). i actually met professor maas and his wife back when i was a student at cornell, near the ithaca commons, outside an ice cream shop. his course has, for many years, been the most popular course at cornell, with over a thousand students packed into a giant auditorium that takes up an entire building, called bailey hall. i am not sure if he is still teaching it, since i graduated back in 2004. anyway, his book was not very helpful. it emphasized the importance of sleep for good health and for maintaining your sanity. it emphasized it a great deal, as if it is the most important thing ever. and after reading his book a month ago, my insomnia got worse than ever, since i kept worrying about sleep and about how my lack of sleep would cause severe problems for my physical and mental health. his book made it impossible for me to sleep, because it made me think sleep was super-ultra-important and made me worry about sleep all the time (which i already was doing prior to reading the book, but i had been hoping the book would have all the answers to my problems with sleep, when in fact all it does is mainly talk about how important sleep is, how you need sleep, and how it is really bad not to have sleep, and it actually recommends seeing a sleep specialist if you have problems sleeping, which is not something i can afford given my poverty and my bad insurance that does not cover much of anything). oh, and the book mentioned that taking sleeping pills or benzodiazepines like clonazepam was not a good idea, and that sleep should come about naturally, not through the use of pills. no suggestions on how to get rid of my dependence on clonazepam for combating my insomnia, my anxiety, and my panic attacks. my psychiatrist knows about my concerns with clonazepam and suggested a gradual reduction of 1 pill every 2 or 3 days, until i stop taking it completely, except of course for panic attacks. but from my readings of the literature online about benzodiazepine withdrawal, that is actually a very rapid reduction of dosage, practically as bad as cold-turkey, and likely to cause severe withdrawal symptoms for a few days, a week, or a month. after that, of course, things should be back to normal, if the withdrawal period is survived. i suppose the literature i read online about benzodiazepine withdrawal might be mostly talking about more powerful benzodiazepines, and not the less powerful ones like clonazepam. for about a month i have kept a sort of diary on little slips of paper, keeping track of every time i take clonazepam, gabapentin, or any other medicine, and how much i take. this has helped me sort out how things are going. for the first few days of the diary last month, i was having trouble eating food, and had vomited once and felt nauseous most of the time and was somewhat afraid of what would happen if i ate food, afraid i would vomit it up and it would be horrible since i hate vomiting. but it only took a few days to solve that problem, and i gradually ate more food each day, until i started overeating like usual, and no longer had any problems with nausea or vomiting, and was no longer afraid that if i ate something i would vomit it back up. i have found, since the second week of april when my insomnia and anxiety had a minor relapse, that the best way to fall asleep is to not give a damn whether i am awake or asleep, and to just lie there in the darkness and allow sleep to come over me, if it wants to. and if sleep doesn’t want to come over me? fine, whatever, i don’t care. if i don’t fall asleep when all the conditions are right, it must mean i am not sleepy and therefore do not really need sleep. i do not really get much physical exercise, so mostly i just need sleep because of the effects it has on the brain, effects which i need in order for my brain to function properly so that i have good mental health. this decreases my anxiety. and i have found there is a very, very easy way to tell what my anxiety level is, whenever i am confused about it: i get diarrhea whenever i am anxious. that happens almost every day. i have had this problem of anxiety-caused diarrhea since 11th grade in high school, and i also used to vomit when i was really nervous, back in high school. back in high school, i had hardly any sleep, i ate a ton of food, especially very salty food, and i had a lot of headaches, plus i had no friends, but i had higher grades than everyone else because i am extremely obsessive. my grades got lower in college after i stopped being such an obsessive perfectionist about all my academics. anyway, back in high school, i had a rather unhealthy lifestyle, and i ate tons of food, but never got fatter, and never grew taller either. my super-powered digestive system would pump all the food from my mouth down through all my digestive organs and then out my ass as fast as possible. that kept me from getting fat. after i got to college, i ate more food because of all the all-you-can-eat cafeterias at cornell that feature food made by highly skilled, award-winning chefs. the all-you-can-eat cafeteria that i ate at during freshman year had won an award as the best all-you-can-eat cafeteria at any college in the united states. similarly, profesor maas has for years taught the largest class that is all taught in a single room, in the united states. some foreign countries have bigger lecture halls, however. anyway, once i was at cornell, i was on psychiatric medications, which i had started near the end of 12th grade in high school. and these medications had largely eliminated the problem of my chronic diarrhea, since i was no longer such a nervous wreck. i also stopped being completely paranoid, like i was in high school. of course, i still had mental/psychological/emotional/psychiatric problems, and those continue to this day. i have had many changes in my medication, ever since i started taking psychiatric medications 8 years ago. there was 1 year when i did not take any psychiatric medications, and did not see any psychiatrists or psychologists: i think it was my junior year in college, and the summer afterwards. i did fairly well, in my opinion. but once senior year came, my psychological problems returned with a vengeance and i had to return to psychologists and psychiatrists, despite my preference not to do any of that. of course, at this point, i would like to first solve the problems of insomnia and anxiety/panic attacks, and then get off my medications. none of the medications i take are particularly effective. gabapentin does not seem to do much of anything, and clonazepam used to work quite well, but has gradually become less and less effective, to the point where it hardly does anything at all, and i just need to take it to feel normal. if i go for just 24 hours without clonazepam, and do not have any anxiety (which is the usual trigger that tells me to take a pill), i become hyperactive, full of energy, and just... well... not feeling right. usually this hyperactive state leads to anxiety, and then i take clonazepam as a sort of automatic response that i have learned to do, but if the anxiety somehow fails to occur, the hyperactivity just continues indefinitely and it is impossible to get any sleep, unless, theoretically, i were able to go through the entire benzodiazepine withdrawal cold-turkey and have my brain go back to normal functioning without being dependent upon clonazepam, all in time to get some sleep. or perhaps i could get short naps when i get exhausted after being hyperactive for many hours straight, and then wake up hyperactive again. i am not really sure what would happen but i do not want to risk it... all i know is that if i do not take clonazepam for just 1 day, i start to become hyperactive, and it gets worse the longer it has been since i took one of these pills. that is why, in order to meet my long-term goal of eventually getting off my routine of taking multiple clonazepam pills every single day, i need to first solve these problems of insomnia and anxiety. then when i start to reduce my dosage, my insomnia and anxiety will probably return with a vengeance, along with the diarrhea and panic attacks and all the other related symptoms of the overall anxiety. and so i will continue at the lowered dosage of clonazepam (1 a day instead of 2 or 3) for a while until i am able to conquer these demons of mine. and then after a sufficient period of 1 a day, i would go to taking 1 every other day, or maybe half a pill each day, and do that for a while and get used to it. and then finally i would stop taking it completely. but it has to be very slow and gradual. but anyway, that is just one of many problems. it turns out that i also have dental health problems: gingivitis and early-stage periodontitis (periodontitis is what happens after gingivitis, which is just the first step in a long decline in dental health that eventually results in all the teeth falling out if it is not corrected soon enough). apparently 30-50% of americans have periodontitis. and in the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, i am sure the numbers are much higher, as that nation is infamous for its bad dental hygiene. anyway, now i have to brush my teeth twice a day and floss once a day, and i still have not figured out how to floss (i have never successfully used dental floss in my life, and find it impossible to use, since i can’t even tell where one tooth ends and the next one begins, back in my rear teeth, and i don’t understand where i can position my hands to do the flossing, and it seems like it is physically impossible). i need someone to teach me how to use dental floss. also, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, my athlete’s foot (which i have had since i was maybe 7 years old and have never had cured, which i have continuously had for almost 20 years) has recently become worse, since it appears a new type of fungus has appeared in between my toes. this new type of fungus is not the standard athlete’s foot fungus, because it is bright green in color, it only grows in between my toes, and places where a lot of it grows turn dark green. in order to combat this fungus, i have scraped away as much as possible, and recently started using ancient foot fungus medicines that were prescribed to me over a decade ago, and also officially expired over a decade ago. specifically, i am using nizoral (ketoconazole) 2% cream from 1996. apparently it is a broad-spectrum antifungal that kills all sorts of fungi, presumably including this green mold. as for what this green mold is, it might be the green mold that grows on bread, meat, yogurt, oatmeal, or other foods that are left around for too long and not eaten. it might also be the green mold that grows in between shower tiles in the bathroom. but i think it is the mold that eats food. ironically, this is probably the same type of bread mold that produces penicillin, and it is growing in between my toes. but penicillin kills bacteria, not mold. i hope the green penicillin-producing bacteria in between my toes goes away, because it is not a good sign that a type of mold that usually eats the same food that humans like to eat is now eating my dead skin cells in between my toes. i am no longer at the top of the food chain! so, the antifungal cream should kill this mold, as well as the athlete’s foot fungus that created the conditions that allowed this 2nd fungus to grow there. and then, there will be no more bread mold growing there, producing penicillin, and bacteria will be free to grow and prosper in between my toes, no longer being poisoned by the bread mold. perhaps i should see a podiatrist as well as a dentist and a sleep specialist. then i could really find out why i have green fungus between my toes (which is not what athlete’s foot typically looks like) and how to cure it, and i could solve all of the problems with my gingivitis and periodontitis and have perfect dental health, and i could have a sleep study and then have them cure my insomnia without having to rely on pills to fall asleep anymore. of course my health insurance will probably not cover any of this. which brings me back to the original point: i am dirt poor, and cannot afford anything. if my health insurance cannot cover something, i will have a hard time deciding whether i want to pay for it myself or just not have whatever treatment it is. you know, i really really like barack obama, but i have not donated any money at all to him. if i were not in such dire financial straits, and were able to afford it, i would donate the maximum amount permissible by law to him. but, as a working-class low-income white male, i simply cannot afford to give donations to political candidates. nor do i give money to charity. a year ago, i would sometimes go to restaurants during my lunch break, and beggars would stop me on the street and ask for money, and i would give them some money, usually around 1 dollar. well actually, that was over a year ago, back when i regularly did that. i soon realized that this was a foolish endeavor, and that both restaurants and the beggars were costing me valuable money. so then i relied on a mixture of food brought from home, food bought from vending machines at work, and food that i sometimes bought at convenience stores, pharmacies, or supermarkets. back around the beginning of march or february (i forget which), i quit caffeine completely, which seemed like a good move at the time, but it seems to have made my problems with dependence on clonazepam worse. i used to be able to fall asleep using caffeine withdrawal, and caffeine was a valuable mechanism to control how active/inactive, hyper/sleepy, or anxious/relaxed i was. now my only mechanism to control this chemically is clonazepam, because i took a sacred atheist oath not to have any more caffeine at all, under any circumstances. and of course, i am forbidden to have alcohol, given the drug interaction with clonazepam and the fact that i take clonazepam every single day. there is only one other legal drug of any significance: nicotine. i smoked cigarettes for about 3 months in the year 2000 before i quit. why did i quit? i started to have really bad panic attacks. and cigarettes were probably the cause of my first panic attack, back in november 2000. since cigarettes cause panic attacks, i had no choice but to quit: everyone told me to, namely my psychiatrist, psychologist, and both parents. well of course my roommates and their friends told me the exact opposite, and kept asking me to smoke cigarettes with them. but i had learned that they were bad people who did not really care about me or have my best interests at heart, who only wanted to have fun and did not really give a damn about much of anything. they were heavy drinkers and heavy smokers of both cigarettes and marijuana. later, a few people within that group of friends got into some harder drugs (ones worse than alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana). they stole some xanax from me (yes, i was given xanax back in 2000 when i first had panic attacks, and i think clonazepam would probably have been a better choice). back in january 2001, i was very dependent upon the xanax for my emotional well-being, and it was really hard to quit, but i managed it over the course of several weeks. later in 2001, i had some more emotional problems, many of them over the issue of girls and my intense desire to have sex or at least a relationship, and also, i was taking too many classes and not doing enough work and studying, and i ended up having to drop several courses and go down to 10 credits, and get a special waiver from my academic adviser that said i was still a full-time student despite taking too few credits. (without that waiver, i would have lost my health insurance, among other things.) by the end of the semester, i was doing very badly emotionally, and some fellow students actually considered me a “psycho” and thought i might be dangerous, because of a negative outburst i had made after being turned down by a girl after i asked her out, and the fact that she then started going out with the guy living in the room right next to mine in the dorm, despite him being the biggest geek ever, a devout star trek fan who was majoring in geology and a total nerd. i mean, i had spent my whole life trying to avoid seeming like a geek or a nerd, and here was this jackass who fit the profile perfectly, and did nothing to try to seem cool or like he wasn’t a total nerd, who seemed completely unashamed about how much he loved star trek and geology and crap like that. it made no sense why a girl would like a guy who unashamedly embraces being a total geek/nerd. i had always tried to hang out with the “cool kids”, you know, the in crowd, and i thought that this was the only way to be popular and have people like you. it just boggled my mind that a girl would like someone like him better. of course, now that i am no longer completely batshit insane, it makes perfect sense why that girl liked that guy better than me. he was actually keeping it real, he did not try to hide who he really was, and he was not a totally fake person like me, someone who pretends to be nice but really isn’t. but in another sense, it does not make any sense, because nothing girls/women do ever makes any sense. of course, you can extend this rule to include males, since nothing guys/men do ever makes any sense either. but i tend not to give a damn about other guys or why they do what they do. i have no interest in them. i am only interested in the ladies, which is why their strange behavior is what i think about, a lot more than the strange behavior of other guys. of course, lately, in the past few years, i have gradually gotten less interested in sex... my interest level peaked around the time i was 17 years old, or maybe when i was 16. back then i didn’t understand my sexual feelings towards the ladies very well, and everything was new and exciting. i think i started masturbating maybe at age 13, but for several years i was burdened with a guilt complex about it, thinking that it was evil and sinful and that i would go to hell for masturbating. i think it was around age 16 that i finally stopped feeling guilty about it and was no longer burdened by the judeo-christian indoctrination that american society had put me through, when i finally had the confidence to realize that god did not exist. of course, my theory of why god did not exist was based on my paranoia and my belief that everyone else in the world was out to get me and was evil, and that i was the only good person in the world and was the innocent victim of all these evil people out to get me. i reasoned that if a large portion of these evil people who were out to get me believed in god, their faith would get them into heaven. but since i had no faith in god, i would go to hell, no matter how righteous a life i lived. therefore, things like masturbation or other supposed “sins” were completely irrelevant: since salvation is based on faith alone, and only evil people had faith, and the only good person in the world, me, did not have any faith, logically god was evil for sending the wrong people to heaven and the wrong people to hell. and logically, if god were good, god would send me to heaven and everyone else to hell. so therefore, since i am good and everyone else is evil, i never have to worry about if i do anything sinful, because i am inherently a good person and i am going to heaven if it exists. but since there is a 99% chance that god, satan, heaven, and hell are all completely imaginary, i figured, this was all just idle conjecture about what things would be like if god actually did exist. but i figured, since god did not exist (since if he did exist he would have to be evil for punishing a good person like me with so much suffering), there was no such thing as right and wrong, or morality, or any of that, and it was all a human invention, all arbitrary and made-up, just like religion. and thus, i did not have to worry about morality. of course, the logic of someone who is 16 years old is not that good, and i am just trying to remember the way i thought back then, but it was nowhere near the levels of logic i am able to use today. although i was an atheist before i went to college, i was still slightly unsure. over many encounters with other college students and hearing them say what they thought about god and religion, all of my doubt went away, and by the time i graduated, i was 100% sure that god did not exist, although i did believe in morality and ethics in spite of my atheism. and those are still my beliefs: i believe that there is 0% chance that god could possibly exist, but i do believe in morality and ethics, just not the type that fundamentalists advocate. i am not sure why fundamentalist christianity had such an influence on my thinking about religion when i was a teenager. the religion i was raised in, quakerism, was quite the opposite of fundamentalist christianity. i am not sure where i even found out about fundamentalism. i think it was because i watched the news all the time and read every issue of time magazine. it just seemed to me like fundamentalists were the only real christians and all other christians are fake christians. and after i concluded that christian fundamentalism was completely wrong about everything, i realized that this also meant that all of christianity was incorrect, including the non-fundamentalist branches of it such as quakerism. why? because christian fundamentalists closely follow the bible and believe it literally. anyone who does not do this is not a real christian, since they do not even believe in the original document that is the basis for the entire religion of christianity. after studying the first few chapters of the bible, i easily concluded that the god described in the old testament was incredibly evil, and the bible was full of ridiculous stories about supernatural things that completely contradicted science. and, of course, i knew that science and logic were the only real way to find the truth about anything, so obviously anything that contradicts science or is illogical is wrong. anyway, once i stopped feeling guilty about masturbating and no longer believed in the concept of “sin”, i gradually started to lose interest, the same way young people lose interest in things once they become legal. cigarettes are interesting and kinda cool until you are 18, at which point they are just stupid and anyone who smokes is an idiot. alcohol is interesting and kinda cool until you turn 21, at which point it is just stupid and anyone who is still drinking after that age is an alcoholic loser. i was always shy around girls, and although my shyness started to go away during college, i never really had my shyness go away completely until i got my current job, back in august of 2006, through a temp agency. through my interactions with co-workers since then, i have learned a great deal about social interaction, and made up for many years of my life when i basically learned nothing about social interaction and how to get along with people. and if you actually talk to a girl, she is a lot less interesting than she is when you are too afraid to talk to her and she is mysterious and you know nothing about her. she says things that make you think, wow this girl is dumb as rocks, or wow this girl does nothing but go shopping and talk about going shopping even though she is dirt poor and in debt, or wow this girl is a complete racist, or wow this girl is a creationist, or wow this girl just got out of prison for stealing money from her dad, or wow this girl is friends with a guy who was arrested for murder 2 days ago. once i talk to them, i usually find them to either be stupid, or to have really annoying personalities, or to have crazy beliefs, or to either be criminals or to be closely associated with criminals. so i have kind of lost interest in talking to girls... it usually ends up diminishing my opinion of them significantly, and then once i have lost all respect for them, it is hard for me to feel attracted to them anymore. i suppose this is the type of girl you encounter if you are working at a job that pays barely above minimum wage. that is why i really regret not meeting any girls at cornell and getting to know them well enough to get into a romantic relationship. i think the girls at cornell were much better quality than the girls i encounter nowadays. but maybe they were not... most of the guys at cornell were either wealthy spoiled-rotten alcoholic frat boys or complete nerds with no social skills. and so many of the students at cornell were foreigners who went around speaking foreign languages to their foreign friends... not the type of person it is easy to be friends with, especially since foreigners travel in packs. and i could never tell the chinese from the koreans from the japanese, and that always confused me and made me uncomfortable. and when i saw packs of french people going around speaking french, i actually found that very amusing since french sounds funny. and then of course there are the hispanics who go around speaking spanish. i wondered what country they were from, and why they talked so fast, and after i studied spanish for 4 semesters, i wondered why the hell nothing that the hispanics said to each other made any sense to my inferior brain that was incapable of deciphering more than the occasional word here or there, maybe one word per sentence, if that. and of course there were always the students from india or from africa or even a few from britain, but people from those countries usually spoke english, so they were pretty much no different from americans. the students from african countries always seemed like the most hard-working, professional students, out of everyone at cornell, and seemed to take college a lot more seriously than everyone else. anyway, there is plenty of diversity at my workplace too. we have blacks, hispanics, and asians, and we have both jews and muslims. the difference is, the students at cornell were all upwardly-mobile smart people who potentially had bright futures ahead of them, who were getting a very good education. but at my workplace, working at barely above minimum wage, we are not really making progress in life while we are at work. a large percentage of my co-workers are also college students part-time. they are studying so that they can get a degree and get a better job. i am not using my college degree. and that is why i am dirt poor and cannot afford anything. i need to see a podiatrist, a sleep specialist, and a dentist, and i have to pay my psychologist and psychiatrist bills myself. now perhaps i can cure my foot fungus using my ancient antifungal cream from 1996, and solve my sleep problems without having to see a specialist. but i definitely need to see a dentist every 3 months until my periodontitis goes away, or else i risk losing my teeth. and something else i have been avoiding is getting a haircut. i am not sure if i can afford it. sure, it only costs like $10, or maybe the price is up to $12 now. but i need that money for other things. like my car insurance bill every 6 months, or my income taxes every year, or my cell phone bill every month, or my credit card bill every month, or gasoline every time my car is low on gas, or all my medical bills that are not covered by insurance. so yeah, universal healthcare is very very important to me, since currently i am stuck with really really sucky health insurance through a state-government-subsidized hmo that has a lot of restrictions on what it covers. i would love to be able to just go to the dentist, podiatrist, and sleep specialist, not pay them any money, and have the government pay for everything with taxpayer money, and also have the government pay for every visit i make to a psychologist or psychiatrist, and every prescription drug i buy. and you know why else i have stopped talking to girls as much as before? i realized that since i am dirt poor, i basically have nothing to offer them. i cannot afford to take them out on dates or buy them gifts or anything. i am incredibly poverty-stricken. that is why i am dependent upon free room and board from my parents, free food from my parents, free electricity, running water, cable television, and broadband internet access. and i did not have to pay for my dog either, nor do i have to pay for his dog food. imagine how deep in debt i would be if i actually paid for everything! i never pay for anything i can get for free, as both a practical matter and just plain common sense, along with a deep aversion i have to spending money. it is my money and i want to keep it forever! i hate it when i get sent stupid bills and have to pay for shit! but i have no choice! anyway, what i really need is a job with a much higher salary and good benefits, or a democratic president who works together with a democratic house of representatives and a democratic senate to pass universal healthcare so i never have to pay another medical bill again. of course, they probably will not adopt single-payer healthcare, which is unfortunate for me, personally, because it has a negative impact on my personal finances as an american citizen who votes in every election and wants free healthcare that somebody else who is a lot wealthier pays for with their ridiculously high taxes (not that their taxes are ridiculously high now, just that i wish they were so that we could pay for all this stuff to help me and other poor people out). there are literally millions of millionaires in the united states, and hundreds of billionaires. i want robin hood or some other thief disguised as a government to take their money and give it to me. i do not give any of my income to charity or to beggars on the street or to political campaigns. as far as i am concerned, charities ought to raise money so they can give it all to me! that would be charitable! first of all, i deserve the money, because i am a good person, and i need the money to help pay my bills. secondly, the u.s. dollar is completely worthless now, if you have been looking at exchange rates with foreign currencies, so you might as well give me all your money, because it is worthless anyway. thirdly, i am the most important person in the entire world, because i am me and nobody else is me. me being myself, i am the most important person to me, since i have to make all the decisions in my life, and they all directly impact me. so since i am the most important person to myself, i ought to be the most important person to everyone else in the world. if i were a billionaire, i would do much better things with my money than bill gates or warren buffett do with charity. i would just go around the world giving money to whoever i feel deserves money, and i would give them whatever amount of money i felt like giving. like ok, if i were a billionaire, imagine if i made a thousand people into millionaires, in countries where most of the people earn less than a thousand dollars in an entire year. or maybe i could give 10,000 people $100,000 each. or maybe i would give every person in the entire world the same amount of money: about 16 cents. or i could just spend it on research to cure all known diseases. or on creating a self-sustaining colony on the moon. who knows what the hell i would do with money? all i know is, i want more money, i need more money, and i don’t want to spend what little money i have left on anything that is not absolutely necessary. i may be getting $600 from the government in may as part of the economic stimulus package passed by the democratic congress and signed by president bush, but i refuse to cooperate in the government’s scheme to have me go out and spend that money. i am going to keep that money. it is mine. MY PRECIOUS! yes, i am just like gollum from the lord of the rings. nobody else gets my money. i do not have money. what little money i have is mine, all mine, and i am keeping it, and nobody can stop me, unless you send me a bill that says i owe money for something, or unless my car is running out of gas, or something like that happens, but otherwise, i am keeping the money. by the way, what the hell kind of crazy-ass girl would be willing to go out with a guy who has mental problems, who is dirt poor and can’t afford anything, who has green fungus in between his toes, and who is generally a total failure at life? i know, i know, plenty of girls in the binghamton area are also likewise total failures at life, and maybe if i find one that is more of a failure than i am, i would seem relatively successful compared to her, and she would be willing to date me. but i am really not very impressed by the girls i see; i mean sure, lots of them look really hot, and would probably be really fun to have sex with if i actually knew how to have sex, but i only had sex once so far in my life and it was a total failure. and if you look at other aspects of them, like whether they have any intelligence and whether they are upstanding citizens who do not go around breaking laws and going into jail, well, that is going to limit the size of the dating pool. you see, the thing about binghamton is, binghamton sucks, really badly. the economy here has been terrible for many years, and there are no good jobs. all the young people with any sense at all leave this horrible place as soon as possible in their lives, and never come back, except on rare occasions to visit family or friends. the few young people who remain, after graduating high school, are generally the lowest level of society, what people in india would call the untouchables. and, i am sorry to say that i am part of that group of idiots who still live in this godforsaken blighted community that has no good jobs. if i had any sense at all i would leave this town and never come back. this place is the pits. nobody around here makes any money nowadays. all the businesses that used to give local people high-paying jobs left town years ago, leaving all their workers unemployed. i have no idea how this community manages to survive at all, given the fact that there are pretty much no good jobs anywhere in this region of new york state. by all rights, this ought to be a ghost town. maybe it is just because housing is so cheap here, and so expensive in the rest of the nation, that people in the binghamton area who already own houses are kinda stuck here. this community never had an economic boom in the 1990s; we actually lost jobs and became poorer during that decade, at least around here. this community never had a housing bubble; our housing prices stayed quite low the entire time. maybe people just live here because the cost of living is lower. who knows? the reason i live here is i am stuck here and i cannot afford to move out. and i do not know where else to go. i do not know where the jobs are. i suppose plenty of people around here are retired and they have no reason to move, since they do not need jobs. perhaps that is why we have not had complete economic collapse in the binghamton region; maybe we have a service economy kept afloat by people who retired from the high-paying jobs that used to exist around here in previous decades. a decade or two ago, there was a lot less diversity in the binghamton area: it was almost all white christian people. nowadays, diversity seems to be going up exponentially around here, and i think that is pretty cool. i guess people are moving here from new york city because some of them have heard about this place called binghamton where everything is cheap because nobody has any money. so the laws of supply and demand dictate that the prices go down to a level where people can afford stuff. meanwhile, there are big cities with plenty of rich people, and according to supply and demand, businesses can charge high prices and still sell lots of stuff, and then make a lot more money. then all the poor people have to leave and come to places like binghamton, or other dying towns that litter the landscape of the united states with their continuous atrophy, other towns where all the young people who have any sense move away, other towns where all the good jobs have left. as we have seen with this presidential election, the midwest of the united states, extending into most of pennsylvania, has had a lot of economic troubles of this type. but what is always forgotten is upstate new york, because when people think of new york, they always think of new york city, which is over 200 miles away from here, i think. upstate new york has the same economic troubles as western pennsylvania, or ohio, or michigan... the only difference is, upstate new york got completely ignored by all the presidential candidates. a funny thing is, hillary clinton was elected by the people of new york state twice to represent us in the united states senate. she promised to improve economic conditions in upstate new york, and bring us more jobs, among other things. what happened? we ended up losing a lot of jobs, not gaining jobs! but don’t worry... she has an excuse. when she was running for senate in 2000 and promising all that, she was assuming al gore would be elected president and we would actually have someone competent and progressive as president of the united states. all of her promises to us in upstate new york were premised on the idea of al gore being president, and since george w. bush ended up as president, those promises are all null and void. so fine, whatever... blame the republicans, just because they controlled all 3 branches of the federal government for most of the last 8 years. the republicans deserve plenty of blame for ruining this country. but not everything is their fault. a few things are not. the economic decline of the binghamton area and other areas of upstate new york had started long before the presidency of george w. bush. it had been going on for many, many years. perhaps the new york state government is to blame for it, even more so than the federal government. in either case, hillary clinton is certainly not to blame for the economic decline here; it is not her fault at all. but she did promise to fix it, and she should have known that there was no way she could ever fulfill that promise. she should have known it was an empty promise, a lie. maybe she did know that. so her recent rhetoric in states like ohio, texas, and pennsylvania about the economy is quite interesting. she is trying to fool people into thinking she is going to help them out economically, when she promised the same thing to us in upstate new york and it turned out to be a completely empty promise. she is a complete liar about nafta, since her records as first lady reveal that she actively campaigned to have nafta enacted on multiple occasions. she is not to be trusted. i want universal healthcare, but i do not trust her as the one to do it, since she botched it completely in 1993. anyway, i just want money. look, if any of the presidential candidates wants me to vote for them, please just send me money. whoever sends me the most money gets my vote. just send me some damn money. of course, none of them are going to send me any money. so i will vote for whoever i think is best. and that is obviously barack obama. i mean, he is the only antiwar candidate. if it weren’t for the war in iraq, we could spend that money from the federal budget on other stuff like universal healthcare instead. anyone who voted for that war is an idiot and ought to be kicked out of office the next time they are up for re-election. and i want money. and no, i am not some beggar like those annoying beggars on the street that i used to give money to last year sometimes. i am just complaining on my blog. if anyone actually sent me money after reading this, i would be astounded and amazed. especially if it were a billionaire who decided to make me a millionaire. please be reading this, warren buffett!