Broken screens, the lotto and how exhausting it can be to be broke.

“buy yourself a lottery ticket. The universe owes you one”

That was a friend of mine’s response to my litany of all the small things that went wrong in the past 40 hours or so. FYI, that was this: my plane being hours late so I didn’t get home in time for anything but (some) sleep, being woken up by my neighbour’s alarm far too early, feeling ill yesterday and missing training, that incident in the shop where the other guy took my bin tags and it took us 15 minutes to sort it out, my ereader’s screen breaking (moment of silence for my wonderful bookmachine, please), and then being kept awake by thunderstorms and- you guessed it- my neighbour’s goddamn alarm an hour before I had to get up. Again.

Obviously I don’t think that buying a lotto ticket would do much good in any practical sense. I am well aware that the universe doesn’t owe anyone a thing. And that the chances of winning the lotto are vanishingly tiny.

I’m still tempted.

I’m tempted for the same reason that people light candles for people. Because I’ve had a complicated time lately (eh, in more ways than the last day!) and I need to remind myself that hope is a thing. That things can get better. Not that they’re horrendous right now, but with a lot of things on my mind and less resources than I’d like to deal with them, life can feel pretty damn exhausting. That’s a thing they don’t really tell you about, isn’t it? How a tenner’s worth of bin tags can scare you when you’re short of money and know you’ll stay that way for months. How a broken screen means just another thing to do without, and how goddamn frustrating it is to see all the little things break and know how long it will take to get anything fixed.

I know I’m not too badly off. I’m broke, not poor– I have enough money for rent, bills and food. I’m not scraping by on £10 a week to feed my family. I’m damn good at cooking food that’s both cheap and mouthwateringly delicious. If I’m careful (and oh, I never knew how tiring it would be to be careful every single day) I can afford to either have nice things every so often, or to get away for a few days sometimes. I’m lucky- I have a bike to drive around in, live in a city with parks, beaches, forests and mountains all within an hour’s drive at most. I still have a laptop that still works and I have wonderful friends and a park to go skating in not ten minutes drive from my front door. I have courgette (zucchini, USians. Zucchini.) plants out the back threatening to take over the world like baobabs from The Little Prince, I can barely eat fast enough to keep up with the spring onions growing next to them, and the mint plant I coaxed to life from years-old seeds doubled in size in the week I was away.

But I’m fucking tired of going to work every day and not being able to afford to replace the screen on my ereader. Which isn’t a dig at work, by the way- I rather like the place. I’m tired because a lot of why I missed training yesterday? Was because I really can’t afford to eat out or eat convenience food for a while after my week away and since my plane was so late I had no food in my house and hadn’t been able to cook a few days of food the night before.

Holding things together is tiring. Knowing that you’ll be absolutely fine- as long as nothing goes wrong- is tiring. Not having much time or money? Is exhausting, because living on a tight budget takes work. Living on a tighter budget than you need to- both with time and money- because you know that you need that little extra wiggle-room when things inevitably go wrong? Even more so. And when more than one or two small things go wrong and you see your weeks or months of wiggle-room knocked back in hours or days? That’s exhausting. Yes, there’s times when I just want to hide away in my room, shut the world out, tell them all they can go to hell and cry.

So maybe I’ll get that lotto ticket after all.

It’s the placebo effect, innit? You do things that symbolise getting better for you, and you feel better. You feel better, so you have more spoons to do better things. It’s a symbol, a statement that you really do wish for more. That you know that things can be hard, even when they’re also good. And that you haven’t given up yet.

Edit a couple of hours later: I got the lotto ticket. Wish me luck 😉

Broken screens, the lotto and how exhausting it can be to be broke.
{advertisement}

Jerkbrain, trampolines, gardening.

Imagine you’re in a garden. It’s a sunny day. A big, green garden- shady trees in one corner and a great big lawn, tons of flowers and somebody’s cooking on the barbecue over by the house. You’re on a trampoline. You twist your ankle- or have you broken your leg? You try to get off the trampoline but you can’t find the way out. You know you need to stop bouncing but the door is gone, there’s netting all around you and everything you do just bounces you more.

You’re still in the garden. You love trampolining. Everyone knows you love trampolining. You know that you’d be fine if you could just get out of this trampoline and sit by the barbecue or under the trees until your ankle heals. It’s still a sunny day. Your foot is getting worse, you can’t get out, and you can’t stop bouncing.

It feels like that, sometimes. I’m in the midst of this fantastic life, surrounded by things that I love. I should be having the time of my life- but all I can do is keep bouncing on that goddamn ankle.

It’s not like that all the time. Eventually I find the way out, figure things out.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging as much as normal. It’s partially being stuck on that trampoline and not having any goddamn energy left to deal with messed-up things in the outside world. Partially that a couple of months ago I started a job and moved house and a whole bunch of other things in my life changed and working out what shape my new normal is supposed to be seems to be taking a while. Also, work involves sitting in front of a screen and when I get home all I want to do is anything else. I’m tempted to turn this into somewhere I talk about gardening and cooking and skating and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with keyboards. 

Speaking of gardening, check out these pics of what I did this weekend. With my bare hands (okay, there were gardening gloves involved) I turned this:

garden before

 

Into this:

garden sunday

Important to note there is the massive pile of rocks you can not quite see in the right hand side of the picture. Those rocks used to live in the Future Veggie Patch. They do not live there any more. Because ME.

 

Jerkbrain, trampolines, gardening.