Yesterday I got rid of my home phone line and cable t.v. We still have the internet obviously but I am unable to continue paying $120+ a month on things I view as a luxury. Since I quit my job on April 30th, I am now on a fixed income. I was luckily able to put in 15 hours of over time before I quit which really beefed up my last pay check. We needed it! Its funny how this process of downsizing occurs. It requires a lot of determination to go from $56K to no income in one day flat. I didn't just quit though. I planned. A little. I just had to get out of there. It was imperative to my health. I had started grinding my teeth every minute I was there. I'd come home a sore mouthed zombie everyday. I was depleted.
My plan was to at first go to school. I never wanted to go back to school taking needless classes just so I could take the "real" once necessary for my evolvement in whatever skill I chose. I am a pretty focused individual and prefer learning about subjects I am so focused on its hard to tear me away from it. I can spend endless hours researching a subject and then immediately drop it half way through and switch to something else. I used to think I was just spinning in circles until I realized that its just that not many people work this way. I tried to start a business with someone and they said they couldn't keep up with me. I find this process very fulfilling though. I learn at an odd angle I guess. A little here and a little over there don't look like much by themselves but then I eventually group the piles together and have something completely tangible. So school is really a tough concept if I have to be learning about subjects I don't care about. However I finally came to the idea of film making and that interested me a whole lot. I've been playing around with story ideas for some time and have always loved writing. I've had a video camera for years but never the creativity to play with it due to the job. When I came around to the filmmaking idea I found I had the type of camera without a fire wire. That is the only way to easily get it online.
I applied for financial aid as soon as I realized that this would be my ticket to quitting my job. I needed this anyway for a change of pace and to build some skills. But as usual, my job got in the way and I quickly learned that I wasn't even eligible for a Pell Grant. I might be wrong but those about the easiest form of financial aid to apply for and get. And according to the schools they base their decisions off the Pell Grant acceptance or in my case, denial. I already knew before I applied but I had to try. So by the this time I'd already quit.
I am already on tight funds as I continue to try and downsize everything possible. Getting rid of junk. Getting rid of services like Comcast. And a huge one I am struggling with is not being able to go to the grocery store and buy whatever I want. But an interesting thing has occurred to me. I am a person that has been mainly vegetarian for 4-5 years now. I will eat meat occasionally but not something I am into cooking myself and it absolutely needs to be organic. I believe being vegetarian helps the earth's environment, it helps me have a healthier body and it also stands against the factory farms a lot of meat comes from. Its funny how I didn't see that downsizing and buying in bulk also helps. I have been leaning more towards fruits and veggies than the usual packaged food to conserve money and I realized I am producing so much less trash. A head of lettuce, a carrot, an onion, avocado, bread, cucumber. For about $10 I can make many sandwiches instead of going to Subway and only getting two. Why are we so lazy in America? We waste so much money trying to be convenient and we never really appreciate that until its taken away. I sat eating my sandwich tonight and really just felt spontaneous gratitude for it. I thought about how the next few months aren't going to be easy trying to navigate money and a future. Not lush and cushy like a stale, stagnant corporate job. I will be living life but also learning to be more conservative with things like food and toilet paper and how many times I wash the same pair of jeans. But isn't it funny how now that I've quit I don't need things to be the same anymore. Unlike working at a corporate job, who would notice or even care if I did wear the same pair of jeans in the same week or even in two consecutive days.
Isn't it interesting that if none of us were working these types of jobs we wouldn't need convenience? We wouldn't need tupperware and microwaves. Which I got rid of my microwave about a year or two ago. I hate those things and they are literally a death box. Wouldn't we all get back to the core of human "being" if we didn't have day jobs? How would life be if we were all fulfilling our passions? Wouldn't we get back to gratitude if things weren't so monopolized and convenient?
My next plan is to see if I could live without a car. We'll see if I can make it happen.
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