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There were rules for my lump sum disability back payment when I got
it and one of them was I couldn't hold onto it as personal savings
otherwise it would show me as having too much money to qualify for
benefits. But as this was a known issue, they had worked out a grace
period that one could have that cash on hand before they would
count it against you. Thus of my over four thousand dollar amount, I
needed to burn up all but a few hundred dollars of it before the end
of Summer.
Of the things I used the money for was new clothes. I had actually
been living in the original clothes my parents had bought me during
High School and not only had they worn out in the intervening years,
they were a few sizes to big for me given my emaciated state. And
so I was off shopping!
One department store had not only come out with a new line of neon
bright and cheerful tee shirts, they were also offering chances to
sign up for their credit card. Given how my lack of a credit history
had interfered with my getting an apartment, I readily accepted and
bought much of the line of tees as well as several new pairs of
jeans. Given my awkward puberty, I was sticking with the jeans &
tees style as it was pretty much the only style common between men &
women in America. This allowed me to dress and not feel like I
was presenting myself as something I wasn't.
Gone too, was the ACE bandage I had worn to strap down my breasts
since the age of thirteen. Given my extreme weight loss my breasts
had also withered, leaving me with just protruding nipples. In the
year and a half I had lived solely in my mother's mobile home without
any job, I had gotten use to no longer wrapping myself up each day.
With my technique of rolling my shoulders forward to cause my tee
shirts to drape like a curtain, that alone would be good enough to
keep my nipples hidden in public. I retained the best of my old
clothes for house work type chores, but on the whole I was publicly
in my new clothes the moment I got them.
I debated about replacing the winter coat I had held for over five
years, but I decided to wait a bit longer until I found one that
really caught my eye. While I did have light jackets for Fall and
Spring in New England, since moving to Colorado I had just gone
between no coat or winter coat with nothing in between. That was to
change as with Fall my not as older brother, stationed in Europe for
the Air Force, bought me a grey leather jacket and sent it to me. I
don't know if it was another example of mother drumming up gifts for
me from other people to reward me for moving into my own apartment,
or if my brother had coincidentally bought the jacket for me that
year. Either way I quickly fell in love with it and it's unique, for
America, styling. It became my Fall/Spring coat.
One thing that ate a sizable hole in my remaining lump sum amount was
an upgrade to my computer and an associated piece of software. The
software was a typeface foundry which would allow users to create
and/or modify type styles and fonts for Microsoft Windows to use, and
thus have as new options when creating documents for desktop
publishing software. It made great sense on paper given the amount
of desktop publishing work I had fallen into doing. As typefaces
were highly dependent on curves, the program did a lot of math and as
IBM PC clones had no built in chip for that, the program would crank
away for hours as I tried to work on a single letter. To compensate
for this I also bought the 'math coprocessor' upgrade for the
computer and once that was installed it changed these hours into
several minutes per letter instead. Ultimately while I had great
plans of creating original fonts and even hand importing existing
ones from printed source material, I ultimately did little more than
tweak an existing font or two. The only thing of value I got out of
this upgrade was a higher resolution monitor which was a huge help on
all the subsequent publishing work I did. But that was only a little
over one hundred dollars, whereas the typeface foundry and math
coprocessor ate up short of nine hundred. I could have gotten a
vastly bigger hard drive for the computer and other more useful
tweaks for that kind of money.
Oh well, live and learn.
Another, much smaller, purchase I made was to buy myself a small
synthesizer keyboard. All my life I've had original music flowing
through my head but no way to express it other than humming. Oddly
enough, even though I was a writer, it was the tunes themselves that
flowed in my head, not any words. I had originally dabbled with a
next door neighbor's organ as a child and my hope was I would be able
to come up to speed on the keyboard and start making the music in my
head come to life. But first I'd have to learn how to play it and
that I'd do in dribs and drabs over the coming years.
By the time Fall came I had successfully burnt through the lump sum
amount, with the final portion used to bridge the gap in the money
needed to order the Doctor Who radio play ''Slipback'' from
Britain so it could be played on our local public radio station as
part of The Doctor Who Report's activities in town. Having traded
letters with the production office a few times in the past, I only
had to learn how to have an international money order made up for the
purchase. Once that was done, I dropped the check and order form
into the post knowing we'd soon have new Doctor Who to listen
to and hopefully raise the club's profile that much higher!
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