Been a long time since I last posted anything here. I wonder if anyone noticed.

Lately I've been dipping in and out of ruts like a repetitive roller coaster. One week, I'll be feeling alright, and the next, I'll be all upset about something, although I usually keep it to myself. (Unless it's tech related, then I'm scrambling to find answers and live help if I can't solve it myself. Usually.)

This week has been sort of a mixture. I've been getting hardly any sleep because of a toothache that won't leave me alone, and the fact that I've gotten back into playing Magic: The Gathering with a local group of friends - and since I'm not supposed to have people at "my" place, I'm frequently out late (midnight or later) dueling or playing video games, or just taking advantage of the closest Internet connection since I still lack one at home.

The drive home is short, but I always want to stay up and work on some sort of project, like cleaning clutter off of my desktop computer's terabyte hard drive (which recently had a whopping 287 MB of free space on the primary partition). I'm usually in bed around 1 or 2 AM, having gotten nary a thing done. Rinse and repeat the next day, with minor variances.

And I'm under pressure, from various sources (myself included), to resume taking classes at the local college. I want to finish, I really do, but it's hard to work up the motivation to reapply when the last three semesters I attended ended in spectacular failure, dropping my GPA to below 2.0 and causing me to lose eligibility for H.O.P.E. I refuse to take out loans, so all I really have left is my own cash and the oddball generous grant (if I apply for any).

And speaking of money, I'm not so hot there either. Over a year has passed since I was "temporarily" hired at a local church as a janitor, and I'm still there. I've almost given up on finding other work because ... well, Cochran's a small town and none of my searches have been successful. Scouting the surrounding counties frightens me for several reasons, not the least of which includes an unreliable car that I don't even actually own, a severe lack of social skills, and a concern for unfamiliarity with varied sorts of work and "normal" work hours (40 hrs. per week when I'm used to a maximum of 15? Yeah, that'll take some adjusting).

Meanwhile, I'm almost done paying for repairs to the car's transmission, but I'm still paying a hospital bill from LAST YEAR in tiny bites. And that toothache? Yeah, I'm probably about to see a dentist about it, but I have concerns for its impact on my financial welfare. I'm dangerously close to going broke, so much so that I would almost rather suffer through the tooth problem than fork up my final Benjamins.

I don't know exactly how I got into this mess, but one thing is certain: it's going to take a LOT of work to get back out.