Some numbers come out in my favor, and Yale decides it owes me $287. I file for my refund and it hits my account a few days later.
I walk to the UPS store, then, and ship off my laptop for repairs ($97, with insurance). I’ll get it back in a few weeks, in time for midterms, and Acer will reimburse me. I walk to Yale Health and buy a month’s worth of injections ($37). The needles won’t be in stock for a couple of weeks, so the price gets knocked down a bit. I’d been putting off the meds for a few days. The laptop business, a week. I pay back some money I owe to a couple of friends.
That afternoon I’m on the train to New York ($35.50, round trip). I stretch my legs across the seat, unlock my phone to check my W-2. There was a withholding error last year, and the government owes me $330. I make a mental note to file my taxes tomorrow. An e-mail directs me to a research study, $15 for twenty minutes of my time (plus a fifteen-minute walk, each way). It’s better than the Film Archive pays. I sign up for a Monday time slot.
I close my eyes and run through some upcoming expenses. I’m seeing a movie Friday evening. I’ve agreed to grab coffee with an acquaintance, Saturday afternoon. My friends and I are going to bar trivia next Monday. A week ago, I promised a friend I’d buy a concert ticket from her if she can’t go—I shouldn’t forget about that.
I sleep through the rest of the train ride.
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Last semester, I walked to Wendy’s nearly every day after Arabic. That expense ran to something like $20 each week, almost every week, which means I spent something like $200 at Wendy’s throughout the fall. I told myself it was a mental reset: it’s just far enough from campus that I felt like I was in New Haven and not at Yale. I never saw another Yale student there. And a meal, being like $6, seemed a small enough price to pay for that reset.
Sometimes these meals would spoil my appetite and I’d skip the free dinners in the dining halls. Then I’d get out of work later that night, decide Fuck it, I’m hungry again! and drop another $5 on the most tasteless sandwiches I’ve ever eaten in my life, courtesy of GHeav.
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I’m in New York now, and Y is running about forty minutes late, so we agree to meet at Kinokuniya Bookstore, a few blocks away from Grand Central. It’s been raining and sleeting all day. I pick up a Red Bull and some chips at a roadside stand, then walk into Kinokuniya, my coat drenched and dripping.
There are some funny things in the shop. Jewish Comfort Food and The Jewish Cookbook displayed on the top shelf of the “Asian Cooking” section. Under “Travel,” some outdated Rand McNally road maps ($7—though, some years ago, you could pick these up for free at gas stations and rest stops). A tall white man is loudly telling a woman about a book he’s just read on comfort languages, and she chimes in with its name. He continues explaining the book to her.
My eyes land on a Pokémon-themed journal, and I briefly entertain the thought of dropping some money. I check the back cover ($19.99) and think better of it. Y is nearly here, anyway. I’m relieved nothing else catches my eye as I walk out.
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This time last year, there were no tax withholding errors, and Yale had decided it didn’t owe me money for that term. So it was January as usual: after a month of unemployment, I was flat broke, with about $40 to tide me over for the first few weeks of classes.
I started HRT a week or two into the semester—but I fucked up and had my meds sent to Walgreen’s, where they were uninsured. I paid out-of-pocket for the spiro ($30) and told the pharmacist I’d come back later for the estro. My first paycheck was due to hit in a week, and I figured I could at least kill some testosterone until then.
A friend offered some of her patches until I was able to get the pills. She thought Walgreen’s simply didn’t have them in stock. I showed up to her dorm that night, and I accidentally let it slip that, yes, my prescription was there, I just didn’t have the money to buy it (but I will! next Wednesday!). I didn’t get the patches—instead, another friend who heard this slip-up insisted on paying for the prescription the next morning. So we met up, at I think 7 or 8 a.m., and we walked to Walgreen’s together, and she paid for it. We had a nice conversation on the walk back.
I never repaid her. I think about it from time to time.
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I think I’m troubled about taking people’s money because I’m so bad with my own. Two summers ago, I made about $900 through some wallstreetbets-style gambling on the stock market. A ridiculous options play which could only have worked in the months after the GameStop™ People’s Revolution of 2021. I withdrew my embarrassingly sourced winnings and immediately blew them on an impromptu road trip to Colorado. Innumerable Greyhound delays, two AirBNBs, some shrooms, and six days later, I was broke yet again.
My first semester at Yale, I was given something like $3500, from a combination of financial aid and outside scholarships. This translated into a flight to Tulsa on a random October weekend for an Animal Collective concert, a nose piercing, a $500 weekend in Boston, a Mets game, a hit-‘em-all tourist-trap traipse across Coney Island, and some change. When the winter hit, I still had no proper clothes. So come January, there I was, discussing the Quran in the Med School with a resident from Saudi Arabia, a giant needle sucking out cerebrospinal fluid from my back, for a study that paid about $200 (for what it’s worth, it was a wonderful conversation).
My eighteen-year-old brain’s thought process went something like: This is more money than I’ve ever had in my life, and quite frankly I’m a little scared of these numbers, and I don’t want to hoard this wealth or become attached to it, so, fuck it, let’s make some memories. And, to be fair, the memories that $3500 bought me will stick with me for the rest of my life. But on the other hand, that winter was cold as shit. I’ve learned by now that a few months’ worth of savings probably don’t constitute “hoarding wealth,” but I unfortunately don’t see any more $3500 windfalls in the near future.
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This semester isn’t shaping up to be too bad. I’ve got most of the books I need, and I’ve got my old laptop to get me through until my newer one returns (even if nothing on this garbage computer works, and even if it dies after 15 minutes off a charger). Earlier this week, I was worried about the cost of doing laundry, but now I’ve received the first of two minor windfalls to cushion surprise expenses. And next week I’ll be working again, and I’ll be able to start rebuilding my savings in preparation for May, when I’ll once again empty them out. And I won’t be getting out of class at 4pm every day, which should translate to fewer impulse trips to Wendy’s. Praise be to God.