Dirt.

This is one of those days where I cannot handle one more molecule of stress.

The day started out fine, I suppose. Just the normal "I hate my neighbors"/"There's no gas in my car"/"Things are dumb" stuff, I guess.

Then my phone died.

My phone is a refurbished Blackberry. A few months ago the screen went white while I was texting and I had some weirdo error message. I have no land line. I have no internet. This makes life so much more complicated. I went to the AT&T store, had a long phone conversation with the tech support guy, and after a while he said they'd replace the phone and send me the "new" refurbished one priority shipping for free. I got the new one, and two weeks later, the same thing happened again. This time we were able to reload the software from my brother's laptop. Well, it happened again today. While no one was at my parents' house. While Brandon was out of town working in Radcliff. So I called my mom from the work phone and told her I'd call her again when Brandon got home, and that she needed to text him to tell him my phone wasn't working. Shortly after I got home, Brandon got home. His phone hasn't been working well either, lately. The difference is, his is more than seven years old (so it's to be expected). So when I was trying to make the call, his phone kept dying. I plugged it in, and it still died.

At this point I was basically losing it. I blame all this on the fact that I'm poor. We live in an apartment because we are poor(ish) and if we didn't live in the apartment I wouldn't hate the people who live near me. And also my oven probably wouldn't sit at a tilt so I could cook things on the stove properly. If we weren't poor we'd have good cell phones. Maybe really fancy ones. If we weren't poor we'd have paid my medical bills from last March off by now. If we weren't poor we'd probably have the internet, and also an OK computer. I could check the weather forecast without having to text my mom to find out if it's going to be "skirt weather". If we weren't poor we'd have a landline and cable, and our phone problems wouldn't be such a big deal. If we weren't poor I'd have a dog and I wouldn't be so lonely during the day. If we weren't poor, maybe I'd have a car whose air conditioning works and B would have a car that didn't have a busted door handle and a messed up trunk. If we weren't poor I could get the dumb nightstands I have been trying to buy for a year, and I wouldn't have to keep putting my stuff on an old end table (not that it isn't a nice, dependable end table. It's still not a nightstand. And it's even sadder that Brandon is using my beat up old night stand that has water marks on it and is missing the handle.)

There are some good things about being poor, though. We don't have credit card debt (it will take thirty years to save up for a new computer, I think.) We aren't wasting our money on cable tv when we need to spend it paying off our bills. This will pay off somewhere in the future. In the distant future. I guess.

My phone still doesn't work, though. And Jonathan couldn't fix it this time. Which means I risked my neck on a dark rainy night to come over here for nothing. Poo.


EDIT: I realize things could be so much worse. I could live in a corrugated tin shack with a dirt floor like my sponsor child, Tasya. I could be one of the millions of people who will die this year because I don't have clean water. I'm just having a bad day, and I really can't take it anymore.