4,698.02

E-mail contact with Jenny. She's confronting culture shock but handling it pretty well, which is good to hear. I think it's the afternoon in South Korea right now. She was having breakfast tomorrow when she sent me the e-mail I read as the sun was going down. That makes sense.

Took some photos of the room. 

Spent some of the afternoon at Old Soul looking over all the articles I found for my research paper. Today I learned that the money spent on higher education far exceeds what is statistically necessary to spend on students' education. The cost of educating is not expensive. It's the dorms, the administration costs, the research and the campus events that lead universities to asking for hundreds of thousands of additional funds, an increasing amount every year, which is leading to tuition hikes and what could turn into an "education bubble" when the enrollment drops and a trillion dollars of debt is never repaid. I'm not under the impression that it's cheap to pay the staff of any college and I certainly think most of their role on campus serves a valuable purpose. I don't know what to make of this new information I'm digesting for this research paper, but I get the impression from the teacher that I better know my shit before I turn it in.

Got a TB test at The Effort, probably my biggest achievement of the day, and I've got to come back on Monday to see the results. Lady stuck some chemical in my arm that looked like a big spider bite (until the swelling disappeared). Not a big fan of injections. I can do 'em just fine, but I always feels a little off-centered afterward.

UPS was charging 57 dollars for a fingerprinting, so I said, "Ya'll are nazis," and left. 

Tomorrow Jake and I are going to go get fingerprinted at a place charging 12 bucks. I was gonna just take the bus out there but Jake's got a car and he's gotta get them for the same reason as me. Reading Partners starts on Tuesday. 

It's been two weeks since leaving Old Soul so it was convenient I stopped by today because there was a check for me in the back, almost two-hundred bucks from my last couple days on shift. A nice surprise. I split my account into EXPENDABLE and RENT accounts and put aside 2,000 for rent only, which gets me to February. Leaves me roughly 2,700 of actual spending money. I can't figure out how much of that will automatically go to bills, or food or things. My motto is going to be: as little as possible, unless I feel like it.