Comcast are wankers. We have the modem, it works, and we can see their network. but they are telling us they cannot turn on the actual internet until the "beginning of the billing cycle", whenever the fuck that is. They're lying about that -- I've gotten it done before -- and we all know it. I suggested the roommate handling the internet bill call Comcast back and sing The Song That Doesn't End, or anything else Shari Lewis and Lambchop ever did, until they give him a manager.

In the meantime, I am forced to work at the library, for an annoyingly useless definition of "work". Their federal funding requires them to lock me out of the erotica site I am technically helping to manage, so I cannot actually do much of anything online. It's also forcing me onto the exact business hours schedule that is the reason I do not have a regular office job, so this has to stop sometime very soon.

PayPal also has not bothered to pull their thumbs out, so the payment that was sent to me Thursday evening still has not shown up on my end. Payments directly out of a bank account via PayPal are sent as eChecks, which makes PayPal spontaneously decide it is a bank after all, and sit on the money for some random amount of time. Which is probably going to be "until Tuesday", because it's a holiday weekend in the US. Not that this matters when you HAVE NO STOREFRONT OR BUSINESS HOURS. PAYPAL.

I have 96¢ in my checking account, which is NOT AN OVERDRAFT, so the bank is leaving me alone. There are groceries at home, because one of my friends took pity on us and sent some over via Peapod, but I still can't feed myself while I'm out at the library, not getting any real work done but at least not feeling cut off from the entire outside world, and I can't take my turn at ordering the pizza when we're too tired of moving shit to cook. That's fun. I can remember a time when this would utterly freak me out, but these days I just figure on starving until The Man decides to give me my fucking money. I won't die. (I drink a lot of lemonade and vitamin water. Actual juice is out of my price range.) It's not really an improvement, I suppose, but it lets me feel like something is going to plan.

[To be perfectly honest, I kind of desperately want a lot of dissociatives right now. I moved a bunch of very heavy shit across the city about a week ago, and I've been out of naproxen and DXM for quite some time. In parallel to the groceries thing, my game plan was basically just to continue hurting until I can buy more. So far so good. Drugs don't play well with empty stomachs, anyway, and I obviously don't have the money for them right now. Practicality ruins so many otherwise appealing plans.]

The new place is pretty. I have a room that now contains two wardrobes, a standing clothing rack, and a bed, and I can still use a hula hoop in it. We're half a mile inland, if that. The neighborhood smells of ocean when the wind comes in from the east. My roommates both grew up in New England somewhere, so I think for them "oh, coastline, nice" is pretty much their only thought, if they happen to notice. I foresee me spending a lot of my worse nights staring out my front window at the tiny sliver of Dorchester Bay visible over the trees and houses. Every time the breeze comes in, the rats all stick their little noses straight up to catch it, probably dreaming of seaweed and fish.

Speaking of fish, we now have a truly bitchin' 90 gallon aquarium in the living room. Jazmin and her boyfriend hauled it up the stairs last night. He inherited some fish from his last place -- by which I mean his drunken recidivist ex-roommate wasn't feeding them, so he decided they would henceforth belong to someone who wouldn't neglect them to death -- and it turns out that literally everything the aforementioned roommate told him after "these are fish" was wrong.

[I don't use real names for non-celebrity people here, so Jazmin's boyfriend is henceforth going to be Tom. I want to keep subliminally reminding the two of them that they should go to Arisia dressed as Sarah Jane Smith and the Fourth Doctor. If you saw them, you'd know why. Jazmin is little and dark-haired and feisty, whereas I have been known to refer to Tom as "the shaven Wookiee", and he has cleverly min-maxed himself by draining his WIS down to base stats and pouring all the extra points into INT. Great guy, and technically-automotively-mechanically brilliant, but prone to AWESOME IDEAS! that immediately deflate when someone points out tiny flaws, like that they contravene the laws of physics, or whatever. Sometimes they don't deflate, and he somehow makes them work anyway. How he has survived into adulthood, I do not know.]

The fish in question turned out to be Jack Dempseys. They're very pretty, but they're eventually going to get 8-10" long, and they get territorial. Plainly they were not going to fit in the 30 gallon tank they came in. Also one of them appears to be female. A few days after Tom bought them some black volcanic gravel and more tchotchkes, he found out that they like to spawn in hidey-holes over dark substrates, which means he had just inadvertently set up a love hotel for cichlids, and was maybe about to get into the fish breeding business whether he wanted to or not. He also somehow ended up with a fourth Jack Dempsey from the chucklefuck who sold him the big tank, and he is praying that 1) it lives, and 2) it's not another male.

The cichlids are all still kind of wary of the new giant-sized habitat. The pleco is having the time of its life. It was waddle-swimming all over the place last night, slobbering at the acrylic in exactly the same food-seeking "pattern" as a rat who has been let loose on a floor full of spilled Cheerios. There's food over here! And over here! And in this corner! THERE IS FOOD EVERYWHERE I NEED TO GO IN ALL THE DIRECTIONS AT ONCE. It is a happy little ratfish right now, and probably forevermore.

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