Day 18: Serenity Now (Please?)

With school getting close to starting back up again and all the fees for tuition and housing and books, etc. piling back up, I've been more than a little stressed lately. When you consider than I have a part-time minimum wage job and don't even get 40 hours a week, money is pretty tight for me.
For instance, I've been working and paying for my own extra things since I was 14. Since then, if I wanted to go on a vacation with a friend or I wanted to join winterguard at school ($75 a season) or I wanted to go to Cedar Point or to a concert or see a musical, unless it was a birthday or Christmas present, I paid for it myself. And I was working enough that all those things were just fine to be spending my money on, because I didn't have college to pay for.
Of course, last year I started college. I had a nice little cushion in my bank account to still pay for some extra things that I wanted, and to pay the $200 a month for the student loan I had to take out.
By the end of the year, the cushion in bank account was nearly gone, but my student loans were paid off and I congratulated myself on a job well done.
However, this summer I had lots of big plans. Not only did I buy my lunch every day at work, but I saw John Mayer in February and The Spill Canvas in May and went to Cedar Point and to the movies a lot and out to lunch, and had plans to do quite a bit more when, suddenly, I overdrafted my bank account. This was the first time this had ever happened to me, and I freaked out. Luckily, it was only a few bucks and on a weekend, and my mom lent me enough money that I wouldn't get charged an overdraft fee.

That was when I decided things needed to change. I wasn't getting a whole lot of hours at work and I just didn't have enough money anymore to be spending it on things I didn't need. So when John Mayer and Spill both came back to town, I couldn't go see them again like I had planned on. When my best friend Sarah invited me to go to a Sara Bareilles concert with her, I had to say no. When I got an email saying I could get presale Ingrid Michaelson tickets, I had to ignore it. When Marquise was looking for people to go to Cedar Point with, I had to tell her to find someone else. And I started buying fruit salads at work because they were cheap and I couldn't afford the expensive chicken sandwiches I had been buying.

Still, I was only making about $200 every paycheck (which is every two weeks where I work) and even those the dollar every shift that I was spending on those fruit salads was adding up. With having to pay for gas now that I'm driving, and the $2-3 for postage each time I had a trade on Swaptree, and tithing at church (10% of my paycheck every two weeks), and attempting to pay back the massive amount of money that my mom had lent me to help me pay for school, I overdrafted my account again.

Now I've got about $50 in my account until I get my next paycheck in a week and a half, and I had to drop the dance class I really wanted to take this semester because it's two credits and I can't afford the $500 in tuition that it's going to cost, and I have no money to buy books or a parking pass, which means I'll probably have to borrow from my mom again and owe her even MORE money. And my student loan doesn't cover everything it needs to cover, so I have to pay some out of my pocket, and I don't have it.

Needless to say, I'm stressing like crazy. I'm working 36 hours this week, and as many as I can until I go back to school, but that's in two weeks. If I can't find a job on campus (I've been trying but haven't heard from anyone) I'll have to stay at McDonalds, which means I can only work weekends since I'll be away at school during the week. Of course, just working weekends isn't going to get me enough money to pay for everything I need.

On top of everything, I want more than anything to go to LeakyCon next summer. I'm saving up like mad but registration goes up at the end of September and I don't think that's enough time for me to save up the almost $200 for registration, so I don't know if I'll be able to afford it.

I don't think I've ever had this much of a problem with money before, and I'm not exactly sure how to handle it. I'm actually terrified about what's going to happen this year and I'm just praying I make enough money to make it through.

Wish me luck.

Song of the Day: Hey Beautiful- The Solids