Went out to eat lunch at a bar today. Also spent some money doing laundry. Had a nice conversation about Adventure Time with the male bar tender. No ladies for me to talk to there.
Been dealing with a fair amount of depression lately. The voices in my head have me convinced that I’m incompatible with people generally and with women in particular. It often goes better when I actually talk to people; I have to remind myself of that and not let the voices in my head reinforce my already considerable misanthropy. Just fucking carrying on right now.
Doing my goddamned best to remain sex-positive.
Talked to another professor in my math department yesterday, and it seems like I may actually have a shot at a tenure track position. Getting paid to do research again sounds awesome, but living in one place for the rest of my life sounds like madness. I’m not happy with my life right now…I’m not doing work that I think matters. I’m doing some things that should make the future better, like applying for jobs and building the van, but the work that actually matters is getting left behind. I feel like I was doing more meaningful work when I was a fucking drunk. At least I wrote occasionally then. So things have to change.
Speaking of being a drunk, today is 14 months since my last drink.
Even if I don’t get tenure track here, this new possibility of my mother buying a piece of land in this area and me serving as caretaker opens up new possibilities. Perhaps, with my van and a piece of property to garden on and build on, I could get by with part-time teaching. Things should be better inside of 5 years.
The current model we’re operating under is that this piece of land should be like a fund that she pays into and that yields returns at a fixed interest rate. Say she spends 20k on the land itself now, and pays 1k in property taxes per year. All of that is held in a virtual fund (just numbers, no cash), and the money in that fund compounds monthly at an annual rate of (say) 6%. We agree to turn the property over in (say) 5 years, and at that point either I buy her out for the amount that’s accumulated in her account, or we sell the property, pay her out from that amount, and I get the rest. The idea is that I’ll be increasing the value of the property while I’m living there, though landscaping, planting orchards, and building structures (possibly including a small house on a slab). I could be generating income from the property in the meantime, in addition to working to increase the value of the property (selling produce, developing tiny-houses or treehouses or similar to rent on airbnb, etc).
This is very similar to a model I’ve thought of in the past, where any labor or capital that anyone contributes pays into an “account” of this type, and accumulates interest at a fixed rate until the property is flipped. Then it pays out to all who contributed, and I keep the rest. This is that, but with a much larger initial capital investment than I first envisioned.
It’ll be of great psychological benefit for me to know where I’m headed everyday after work. I’ve been homeless before, and it’s hard on the old psychological well-being.