Is this a rant or a rave? I don't intend this as an insult, but honestly...
Takhisis is right. You need to wean yourself off the chemistry experiments until you get some control over the finances. You'd be surprised what you can do without when it comes down to hard choices. I lived for an extended time on cheap canned ravioli 10 years ago, and while it got revolting after the first week, it kept me alive and I used the money I saved to make sure the cats had cat food. And there was a stretch of over a half-dozen years of no TV (couldn't afford it). It's amazing how fast a person gets out of the TV habit when there's no choice. Even now that I have TV and even a Netflix subscription, I barely use it.
It's a rant. You can read a rave into it - that I happened to be born at percentile ~80 within US society - but it's a rant against that society itself. I don't think our society should be structured so that people who don't happen to have rich uncles should suffer terribly, sometimes unrecoverably, for doing stupid things and putting themselves into hard situations.
I have an addiction. Specifically, I am addicted to learning. I am willing to forego other parts of my life in order to further my habit, and that my habit is causing adverse consequences but I cannot seem to stop anyway. It's not just the chemistry experiments: I buy e-books from Amazon and read long posts on the internet and spend most of my waking life trying to figure out what is going on and why, on all timescales and distance scales, and how multiple variables interact to form complex systems, and so on. Why not go to the library? Because I'm such a slob that I was charged $155 in lost and late book fees last semester - I cannot keep myself organized to save my life.
Rationally I know that I cannot understand everything, but this just pushes me to want to understand more and more, and the more I learn, the more questions I want answered. Chemistry is a latecomer: I was a physics major as an undergrad, then was in a biology MS, that didn't work out and I studied a bunch of things including economics (actually political economy) and atmospheric science. I ended up applying to a bunch of schools in atmospheric science, and here I am, doing nonzero but very slow work in what I signed up for. Meanwhile I'm ruining myself with my quests for knowledge. I'm not just doing chemistry, I'm doing everything the internet has to offer, which is pretty much everything except the experimental side of chemistry and physics. (edit: to be clear, this is what the legal internet has to offer. I am not on the darknet, and I hope not to be forced to go there.)
I actually have cable here, but choose not to use the TV. I just don't like TV at all. Never have. I could live off canned ravioli for quite a while, too, if I got to have unlimited access to all the secrets of the universe as we know them. That's what you get, especially if you're a student at a big-league university and can access almost any scientific paper you want, using a glowing rectangle without ever having to leave your bedroom. I have read papers in all sorts of disciplines. I am conversant in the academic jargon of most fields; where I am not, I know enough that I can piece it together within a matter of hours. I can, and have, lived off ramen and whatever. I'll tolerate almost any hardship to get my knowledge fix. That's how you know I'm an addict.
Nobody I've ever spoken with seems to realize it's possible to become addicted to learning, that learning isn't always desirable and that there are other things in life that are necessary too. Occasionally I try to break out of the trap and just find a social group of some sort - if I could learn as a group then at least the
loneliness would be over, but I haven't pulled it off in the long term yet.
Maybe, but then again, if Adriana Lima wasn't born drop dead gorgeous, where would she be, dead in a gutter in some favela?
I was oversimplifying the class space because mere mortals can't seem to comprehend it. Very well. Adriana Lima is drop dead gorgeous, which is one of the many variables that go into the stochastic (aka probabilistic) algorithm that determines your social class. In her case, the gorgeousness plus the roll of the dice got her out of a standard working-class Brazilian background and into supermodel-dom. Had she been born less gorgeous, chances are she'd still be alive, doing something fairly normal for working-class people in Salvador. Some of the less favorable rolls of the dice do leave her lying dead in a gutter in a favela, or a prostitute somewhere, or whatever.
But if we're assuming this is the same Adriana Lima, whose birth-dice are identical except that she is not as pretty, then she still likely has that sort of internal energy and drive that causes people to persist in doing what they want to. Other people become fatigued and dispirited and quit, and almost all successful people are "high-energy people". So probably she's doing okay there in Salvador, or maybe she's moved to Rio, and is solidly within the Brazilian middle class.
Einstein claimed that God does not play dice with the universe. Einstein was wrong. It's not just that God plays dice with the universe.
God is the dice.
(edit: addition to third paragraph)
and
and
and just general
), and recent loss of grant funding (essentially loss of job). All my cards are maxed, and I recently decided to make things worse and take out an online triple-digit APR loan with an Indian tribe to cover rent this month, and that was before the second fender-bender. I will have to get the car looked at for an estimate on both ends now.
But I gotta make some changes on things because it wasn't in the budget.
