I hate money so much right now.

It seems like every problem that comes up in my life has something to do with money. A while back, my parents moved me out to Iowa, but I was completely against it, but I had no say in the matter. The only way that I could have moved out on my own and stayed back home was if I had money. So here I am, being dragged away from my home in St. Charles, and I haven't been happy... In fact, I was so miserable that I couldn't even keep up my grades in school and was in and out. I was unstable, I couldn't think about anything except how unhappy I was that I was forced to do something that I didn't want to do. I felt like an animal caged in a zoo, and that was eating away at me for such a long time. And part of the reason was because I wanted to fulfill this crush I had on Liz, this girl I met in college who is now a friend of mine thanks to social networking. Finding her online gave me a sense of hope, but as it turns out, trying to get back to Illinois has caused many problems, most likely my fault, but not entirely my fault. The problem again is money. And money seems to be more of a problem, too, because she's desperate for cash as well, and she lives in a crappy apartment in Dekalb, and her boyfriend doesn't lift so much as a finger to help her... Yeah, she has a boyfriend, I eventually found that out from talking to her... And she doesn't have people to turn to for help, all her friends in real life haven't stuck with her and now she's got an apartment to carry all by herself with 2 mouths to feed, hers and her boyfriends, and she's struggling to keep her grades up in college. All this because of money, or a lack thereof. And here I am trying to move back to get a job and help her, but you know what? I need money to do that. And I need money to drive a car and money to eat and money to stay in one spot for a while and money to s***, shower, and shave, money to drink... Every damn thing costs money! And I notice this more than ever now because I haven't been spending as much money lately on video games, I can't afford it anymore!

Which reminds me... A while back, I played a little game called Mother 3. It was never released in the U.S., and in order to play it in English, you needed a patch. Well, I played it, and the story is much what I was just ranting about in the last excessively long paragraph. The story starts out in a little quiet place called Tazmilly Village. There, everyone lives a quiet, peaceful life, in harmony with nature. The focus of the story is the Lucas' family, which consists of Lucas, his brother Claus, his father Flint, his mother Hinawa, and his grandfather Alec. After the kids are done playing with the dragos, they eat dinner and decide to head home. But on the way there, evil pig mask soldiers start tearing the forest apart and mutating the wildlife. With the help of his friends, Flint manages to save most of the villages, but eventually it is discovered that his beloved wife Hinawa had been killed by a mutated drago. They had turned violent because of the mutations. Fast forward several years and Lucas is more grown up, and a man named Yokuba comes to town, promising everyone that they will be happy if they get this device called a "happy box" (the resemblance to a T.V. is no coincidence), and that if they don't get one disaster will strike them, and he also introduces money to the village. Eventually things change for the worse, as these new changes cause people to distrust one another, and forces people to work for the one who turned their forest into a chimera preserve. It's all the devices of an evil spoiled brat named Porky Minch, and he wants to summon a dragon to rule the world. But Lucas has to summon it first to keep the dragon from working for Porky, so it's up to him to save the world.

In a way, the plot makes me think a lot of the way the real world is now. Money is an instrument used by those in power to enslave humanity and make it do their bidding. But this world has no equivalent of Lucas, no one to stand up and stick it to the man.

On a totally unrelated note, I hate to ask this of anyone, but if someone just so happens to be reading this, can they send me $100? It would mean a lot to me. My Paypal email is snow_mage@hotmail.com. Please don't ask why I need it, though, I just do.