on being in a pawn shop:

i've had lots of fun escapades i've been on recently that i've gotta fill y'all in on.  and i will.

but i have to tell you about my day today.  it was... special.
yes, life has gone a bit wonky at the Casa del Batshit, lately.

my strip club friends and i have this joke: "what is a B.A. in Creative Writing (my degree, for the record) good for?"  "stripping!!! bwahahahah."

well, it's not good for landing your dream job, that's for sure.  (oh please, someone even vaguely connected to the writing/editing field hire me... please!)

what a lot of people don't realize is that in NOLA there is a completely dead season, lasting all summer.  not that i blame the tourists for staying away from this heat.  i went to texas (austin - more on that later) and their 104 still felt a bit better than our 95. yeechh.

anywho, since all of the photobooth jobs are pretty much nil and void for the summer months, we've been... limping by.  well, more like crawling.  or maybe like a legless guy on a skateboard.  or doing the zombie body drag.
suffice to say, we are so poor it's not even funny. except it kinda is; i mean you have to laugh at it.  we're supposed to be grownups and shit (HA!), yet i'm more destitute right now than i was in college.

i currently have (looking up bank balance...) $1.92 in my bank account. no lie.
i don't know what the Matt has, but it's probably not much better.

so, to the end of getting some food in the house (i had beer yesterday for dinner), we went to the pawn shop with some assorted random jewelry, and a steel drum (have i mentioned Matt's a drummer?).
i'd brought some nice heavy silver pieces, and i'd looked up the price for silver per ounce: currently $43, for the record. and 14k gold is about $1040.  and here you can see what i mean...

to put this in perspective, an ounce is the maximum weight that you can send with one stamp.  it's not all that heavy, you know?

the pawn people offered $5 for a steel drum worth $80+ so obviously we didn't sell that.  then, i tried the jewelry. i had a nice heavy silver bracelet, and a silver necklace with turquoise.
pawn lady had the audacity to tell me my bracelet wasn't even silver. do i LOOK like i'm stupid?  for fuck's sake, i was with my mom when she picked that out for me in like 7th grade - it's definitely silver.  then, she claimed that my turquoise was not, in fact, turquoise.  i wanted to scream at her - my dad's an antique dealer, and you're not fooling me, you lying bitch!  
unfortunately, i was still trying to get money out of her, so i held my tongue.


then, we went on to the gold.  now i don't know how much it weighed, but it wasn't hollow and light.  i told them i wanted $50 out of it.  this seemed like a good deal to me.  i'm sure the piece itself must have been $200+, and it was practically brand new.

those fuckers gave me $15 goddamn dollars!  if i didn't desperately need to eat today, i would have told them to fuck off.  unfortunately, i don't feel like starving to death anytime soon, soooo...

i understand pawn shops have to make money, i do.  but jesus fuck, no need to rip somebody off like that - surely a 100% markup should suffice, instead of a 400%!  cuz you know they're gonna sell that necklace for $100, they could have given me $50.

i call SHENANIGANS!

so we went to the walmart (i am a whole foods shopper - showcasing my desperation here) and bought: ramen, bread i'd normally never touch, lunch meat of the terrible kind, and american cheese.  hell. i had to get shit we could both eat for a week, on $15. what else do you do?

i don't even think i can explain my loathing for american cheese. i am a cheese snob. i think my face was probably pinched into the "mouthgun" look for the entire time we were in the store.

if any of you lovely people can figure out how to scrap together $600 by the end of the month let me know! i have to pay rent and my phone bill... and the utility bill, lest they shut off my electricity, air-conditioning, and internet.  quelle horreur!


we're rocking the pathetic around here.  ROCKING IT, i say!!!