Another day

 Well here it is another day. I'd run flat-out of clear packing tape and ridden all over the place, from finding a place called Astec nearby which turns out to only be interested in semi-truck quantity sales, to finding tape at the storage place nearby but it's $3 a roll - nice to know it's nearby and not too expensive, but I passed. 

Then I did this epic ride from 99 Ranch where I swore I'd seen it before and my little container of food cost me over $11, to India Mart, the little convenience store nearby where tape's $4 a roll (but they might be 150-yard rolls making it a fairly decent deal) to H Mart (none) to FedEx Kinko's where it's $8 a roll(!) and my deciding to head downtown to Medex which is a furniture store now, Dai Thanh which only had narrow cellophane tape, to finally Walmart where I found some tape for $2 a roll that's OK, Duck brand. I got 5 rolls of that and a couple of other things and a lady in the line with me in the checkout told me the same tape's $1.25 at the dollar stores so that's good to know. 

It's not Ken's fault I was out of tape, it was mine for not keeping track of how much I had on hand. 

So I was able to pack the things I needed to pack, and yesterday didn't go out except to take a big load to the post office and FedEx. I didn't find anything in the way of packing materials, or anything at the "bountiful" dumpster. And it actually felt a bit cold out there, at 7PM or so, so the weather is changing. 

I've been reading, and watching, a lot of stuff about the WWII era. It seems there was a real shaking-up of the old class and caste systems, which gradually re-established themselves and were largely back in place by the time I came along and especially by the time I was trying to make it on my own as a young adult. 

College, for instance, was a huge, huge mistake. Unless you're in the top 10% at least, college will only make you poor and keep you there. Trade school is a different story - I might have made a very good welder and all that keeps me from pursuing it now is my age and the fact that welding is notoriously hard on the eyes and my eyesight is marginal enough as it is. But for some decades there my good eye was pretty good and I've always had a very steady hand. 

But the thing with college is, not only is a degree in, say, engineering, not guaranteed to get you any job but waiting on customers in a coffee shop or washing dishes somewhere, but if you are poor you're going to college on grants and loans and the thing with grants and loans is, you have to prove you're poor to get them so you're forced to never have any savings or financial assets. Right at the stage of life when savings and financial assets are the most effective. 

Outside of India Mart, a Chinese guy because of course the Italian restaurant there is owned by Chinese people, got talking with me. His family had come over in the 90s and his father, making about $3 an hour, could support 5 kids etc. We both agreed the 90s were great - anything was possible. He said they're saving their money, still renting, because they can't find anything (like a building) to buy. I told him to wait five years, holding my splayed fingers for emphasis, then buy. We ought to be about at the bottom of the real estate crash we're just starting by then. 

I wish I'd had the chance to tell him, Now imagine once you were 18 your family kicked you out of the house, never wanting to see you again. And your siblings all never wanted to have anything to do with each other. That you were utterly on your own, and had no one, family or friend, who cared whether you did well or starved in the street. In short, imagine you're part of an American family. But instead we discussed the drug problem in this country and I said that's American culture, where there's no shame connected with being a drug addict and all thinking is short-term. We agreed that Singapore was the best country in this regard, and I said also Thailand and Malaysia have the right idea. It's death or prison for decades on end (where a non-native will generally die before their sentence is up) for druggies in these places. 

I've been getting to bed relatively early, midnight to 2AM, and waking up relatively early, before noon, and generally before that and sleeping without a tons of trips to the bathroom so that's good. I think I was drinking too much coffee there.