Dirty Girl's Hierarchy of Needs

I often feel like my life is just breaking down around me. Not in any huge psychological way, but in a largely physical way.

My digital camera has been on the fritz for months now - it appears to be frozen with a cache full of pictures of the back of my head as I attempted to get a clear shot of my true hair color without actually showing my face. I haven't been able to take pictures or mini-videos of Baby Girl for weeks now. Every time she does something cute, I'm reduced to screaming, "Wait! Wait! Please, just put it on hold and come back to it in a few weeks when Mama's raise kicks in!"

But even worse than that is my iPod. I've had my iPod for about three years and have loved it. It gives me the energy to work out. It makes me feel like I'm living in a musical. But it happens to be dead. It's long past the repair stage of the game - I'd pay as much to buy a new (nano)* as I would to fix up my 30G (that I don't really need 30 G of).

But I have no money. I am negative broke this month. I also need to place an order for new contacts, I need new bearings for my skates. I could use some new pants to fit my ever-expanding derby butt.

But apparently, my needs don't fit the typical need structure. I'd be perfectly happy starving to death under a flimsy piece of cardboard outside the public library downtown as long as I could listen to Afroman's "Because I Got High" while I wasted away.

So I may be laying out money I don't have very very soon for a product I absolutely, without a doubt, need.

*I'm facing difficulty in purchasing said iPod. Since I work at a university, I should be getting the education discount, which, despite all my technological savvy, refuses to show up on the order page. I've talked to customer service, removed all cookies from my computer, tried everything. No discount to which I am entitled. Oddly enough, our campus also has - and I'm totally serious here - a vending machine that dispenses iPods. While I have some major concerns with sliding my credit card into a machine for what is a Very Expensive Metaphorical Bag of Doritos, the lure of having my new iPod in time for my noon workout is very, very strong indeed.
**Update: Apple no longer allows the education discount to apply to iPods. Fuckers.