I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
NOT BEING EVICTED (FOR NOW). Pshew. (See here for triggering event.)
I spoke to my landlord a few minutes ago. The bottom line is that he agreed to drop the ten-day eviction notice (at the end of the month) -- for now. He made no commitment whatever beyond that. He was very clear that for now it's only a temporary reprieve, and that he remained completely on the fence as regards me. (He specifically said "you have a reprieve for the ten day notice at the end of the month, for now, but you should look into other places.")
Long story short: I pled like crazy about how much I wanted to stay here, how much I liked it here, what a great landlord he was, how there had been a complete miscommunication between me, him, and the temp handy guy; I let him unload all about how unhappy he was with hearing that I was complaining behind his back, and that he had been on vacation, and it was the last thing he wanted to hear, and he'd just rather not have to deal with that, and he doesn't want to hear about the pool, and I hadn't shown him respect, and so on and so forth. Also, he didn't like that my kitchen area (which is about three-feet-by-two-feet; it's a sink so small a dinner plate won't fit in it, and two burners; no oven; under the burners is a tiny quarter-sized fridge with a freezer literally big enough for one tv dinner and nothing else) was messy, which is a valid complaint, because it was, since the faucet had been leaking and I hadn't been using it.
So I let him vent, and I kissed his ass like crazy, and hammered that I'd do anything it took to make him happy, that I'd never say a word about the pool to anyone, how apologetic I was for being disrespectful, and so on.
So he went on venting about how disrespectful I'd been, and finally said he'd forget about the 10 day notice, "for now," and "take it from there." He said I should "check out what else Boulder has to offer."
It most definitely wasn't the time to ask about renewing an actual lease. So this leaves me pretty darn nervous for the future. I certainly can't be surprised if at any moment in the future he takes it into his head to feel annoyed again, for whatever reason (god forbid he googles me and reads this), and decides at whim to evict me again.
Unfortunately, I've been assuageously reading apt ads for the past week, and the alternatives available to me stink.
If I had more income, obviously, I wouldn't have a problem; and that's been a problem, anyway, as everyone well knows, for the past couple of years, since I had to give up my last full-time job because my health wouldn't let me work more than sporadically (a condition that, alas, pretty much continues).
But on the limited income I have, as it is, I'm short a good $100/$200 a month, on the most minimal budget, after covering the rent and phone bill and a bit of food, down that much on otherwise getting the month's remaining food, and medications, let alone any other possible spending/expenses, save for what I can scrape together through occasional freelance/odd jobs, and people's most kind and generous donations.
So: will continue to work on what I can do about health, and therefore possible more or greater or steadier income.
Absent the income increase, were I forced to move, the only real choices seem to be roommate/housemate situations, absent great good luck in some cheap studio in town suddenly opening up.
There's the question of whether I'm stuck in Boulder, or could contemplate moving to Denver, where there are far more choices of apartments.
There are various problems with moving to Denver.
A huge limitation is that I don't have a car (or driver's license). Another is that since it's a two-hour-plus bus trip each way, from here, my ability to apt-hunt is extremely limited, particularly since at present I'm in sufficiently crap physical shape that (assuming the gout isn't acting up and keeping me from walking at all) at present I can't walk more than a half a block without stopping to rest, and if I have to walk more than 4-5 blocks, I'm pretty exhausted; much more and I'll start to collapse.
Another problem is that since I don't have a car, that although I've lived in Boulder for almost five years now, come December, I've only been to Denver once; I don't know the neighborhoods at all; I don't know what's good or bad, or anything about them; so I can't even guess what a neighborhood is like, save through the very inadequate resources of Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and the rest of the internet, etc. This is very inadequate to judging how suitable a place/neighborhood might be.
So moving to Denver isn't out of the question, but it's very difficult.
Moving out of state, to a state with Medicaid coverage for single male adults, would be a great idea in many ways; not to mention a state with other social services, tenant laws, and so forth. But the problems with moving to Denver loom even larger with moving out of state, not to mention that I'd have to give up almost all of what little stuff I have, since I couldn't afford to ship/move it, though given how little stuff I have, that's by no means an overwhelming obstacle. It's something I will give further thought to, but I'd still need to raise a bunch more money to move further away, and start over (again), and I'd have to do the gamble of moving to a place sight-unseen. I'd have to come up with at least a couple of thousand bucks, I figure, to make it a serious option (probably ~$3k).
Back in Boulder, which is where it's most practical to otherwise stay, it's a small university town of about 83,000, with a major housing shortage. I most definitely can't afford to go over $500/month for rent and utilities (and that's continuing to be without cable tv or more than dial-up internet, of course). Options for independent studios at that price are few. And I dearly do not want to have to take up roommate/housemate living again if I have any possible choice.
Anyway, that's the situation. I might still hear from the landlord at any time in August, or thereafter, that he again is evicting me with a ten-day-notice (at the end of the given month). I can't really press him to give me a lease again -- the law allows it to be his whim to keep me on month-to-month, and there's nothing I can do about it.
I'll continue to examine options to move. But small as this place is, and broiling hot as it is in summer, and uncertain as the landlord is (who has otherwise basically been a good landlord), my options are limited until such time as I can be in better health and able to find myself able to find and do some more regular work.
Sorry for boring you with all this. I'll try to get back to at least attempting to be semi-entertaining/informative Real Soon Now. (Though, frankly, I'm apt to still be in shock and nervousness for a few days to come, I suspect; this situation has pretty well upset and depressed me.)
Ah, renting in Boulder! Always a painful prospect, unless one is a Trustafarian student. Westminster used to have tolerably inexpensive apartments, and some move-in incentives (this info being about 3 years old, since we moved from The People's Republic ourselves, sniff and waaaah!). The downside there is it's not a pedestrian friendly area. Downtown Denver is (I have a pair of friends who don't own a car at all, and live down near the capitol), but the neighborhoods can be dicey or pricey, depending.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine rented from Walnut and Main realty, and we did, and they were awesome people, and had tiny little studios down near Pearl... but I suspect those've gone into Too Expensive For Anything Useful by now. Good luck. If I hear of anything from my friends out there, I'll let you know.
The Google AdSense terms of service prohibit saying anything about the terms of service, and are very emphatic that people can't be advised or suggested to click on the Google Ads, and we can't say why; we're not even really allowed to say this. Make of that what you will.
The blogads don't pay based on clicks, but if there was a real ad there at the moment, it's helpful to click on them in the vague sense that the clicks are measured, and the more an ad is clicked, the more apt the ad-taker is going to be pleased, and apt to take another ad, and the more a potential future ad-taker will be impressed with the results here; so it's indirectly useful, though not as directly useful as an ad system that paid per clic, which I've heard exist, cough.
There's something screwy about the way Google doesn't seem to read my whole blog and pick topics, and I've been meaning to look into that for the longest time, and see what I can do to fix it, incidentally; it's sufficiently complicated that I've procrastinated forever, but really must get to that Real Soon Now, as it might help slightly.
And feel free to mention to anyone that my Blogad rates are cheap!
I could always put up a generic Amazon ad that would give me a trivial cut if anyone bought through it, but I dislike increasing the clutter, and the benefit seems marginal, at best; no one has clicked on any of my text Amazon links yet.
To be honest, frankly most of the time it's all I can manage to eck out some blogging; behind the scenes, I spend an excessive amount of time Not Being Well in one variant or another, generally a few overlapping at once. But I mope about that sort of thing too much in public as it is.
"If I hear of anything from my friends out there, I'll let you know."
Please do. I also didn't mention that given that I don't have a Real Job, and also that I've suffered an identity-theft incident, and have a screwed up credit record, getting approval from a mainstream sort of realtor agency might or might not be problematic. Can't know until I try, but it's another concern.
And obviously the closer I am to a supermarket, and good bus lines, the better, among my other criteria for an adequate place to live. Plus, obviously, getting a real, and renewable, lease, preferably for as long a term as possible.
"I have to say that regardless of logistical difficulties, in your place I would be benefits-shopping, and moving to the state in which you could get the best medical coverage."
It is almost certainly the best idea.
It's just that to do it, as I mentioned, I'd have to come up with something on the order of ~$3000 to manage it.
I don't know how to do that for now. I kinda have hopes of sooner or later being able to sufficiently improve my health/work situation enough to save that much, though that's not on the horizon any time soon.
Otherwise, what, am I going to beg people to donate me another $3K? I've had so many fundraisers, I don't remotely have the chutzphah to try that (and more urgently, if I do another significant fundraiser, it needs to be for my teeth; as soon as I'm up to it, I have to see a dentist, and see what I can get done, because my teeth are endlessly long beyond emergency status; it's pretty super-urgent) (it doesn't help that I get some harassment whenever I fundraise; my self-esteem is already quite sufficiently low about the whole beggin' for money thing).
Lastly, it's damned hard for me to do anything, including think, in this kind of heat. (Any kind, actually; I'm uncomfortable over 72 degrees F, let alone more.)
And I'm kinda depressed, if that isn't obvious. Though at least my teeth have been less appallingly painful yesterday and today.
With luck I'll be feeling somewhat less anxious in a few days, I hope.
"...that of the various impossible tasks you need to accomplish...."
Unfortunately, one of the great lessons of poverty -- and I'm afraid I've had lifelong training in this -- is that it's always a situation of "for want of a nail."
One needs to accomplish A, which one can't because of lack of b, which situation c causes, due to problem D.
Etc., through the alphabet. And even if one can accomplish a few letters, too often a necessary improvment requires a good dozen or more letters, and missing just one brings the whole thing crashing down.
There's no doubt that beyond a certain minimum point, money doesn't make people happier, but not having enough to have some minimal control over one's life does tend to have some negative effect on their happiness, unfortunately.
But, as I keep saying: lots of folks have it endlessly worth, and I'm always always always completely conscious of that.
And I've had it lots worse in much of my past, for that matter. So I'm grateful for the good stuff, regardless.
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