Very, very little is happening in my world right now, and there are two things to blame for this. One is a usual suspect: Unemployment.

The more unusual suspect is my car. My car has been a rock. Ten years old, eight of them under my care. Other than routine maintenance and a couple cosmetic scrapes, it’s been quite solid.

Now, however, it’s starting to get old and cranky. It all started when my regular mechanic pointed out that the A/C and alternator belts were really worn out, and that I probably needed to get my timing belt changed.

It’s recommended at either 90 or 105,000 miles, and neither he nor I could find any record it had ever been changed. My car is currently at around 134,000 miles, and if the timing belt breaks it pretty much takes out half the engine, so it’s definitely a bit of maintenance I wanted to get taken care of ASAP once I realized it needed to be done.

My regular guy couldn’t do it because you basically have to take apart half the engine to change it. After getting an obscene quote from a dealer, I was referred by Nate to someone his friends had used, who quoted me a third of what the dealer wanted (and less than half of what my regular mechanic had guesstimated).

So I took the car in on Wednesday, and they shaped up the timing, alternator, and AC belts for exactly what they quoted me, to the penny. Great news, right? Except for one tiny detail.

There’s a thing that goes around the axle, inside the wheel (what it’s called is written on the quote they gave me, but I’m currently too hot and lazy to get up and look for it), and it has a bunch of axle grease in it to keep the axle running smoothly.

So the guy opened the hood, took out what’s basically a flashlight on a long snaky pole, pointed out this item, showed me the decent sized crack in it, and showed me the large amount of axle grease it had kicked out.

It was one of those, “I don’t know what the hell that is or what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to look like that” moments. Obviously, it needs to be replaced before the axle gets fucked up, since I do know that if the axle gets fucked up, that’s INCREDIBLY expensive to fix.

And of course, since it involves the wheels, if you change one side, you have to change the other so it doesn’t get thrown out of whack. The quote to get it completely fixed brought the total I’m going to wind up sinking into keeping the car running to just over $1000.

Normally, that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be terrible. But since I have no current income beyond the unemployment checks Unkle Ahnuld’s been sending me, it basically means I am a LOT broker than I already was.

Where I previously thought going out once a week for a night with my friends for $25-40 was a splurge, at this point I’m finding that going once a week to In-N-Out burger ($6.10 for a double-double, fries and a soda) is a splurge.

Hopefully something will come through soon and I’ll be able to start living like a normal-ish human again. Or I’ll finally snap and convince myself that living with a roommate wouldn’t be that horrifying. We shall see.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I hate Sprint and their shitty shitty reception with the fire of a thousand suns, but last night just about tore it for me.

I had what the phone kept telling me were four bars of reception and yet:

• I could not place an outgoing phone call for over 20 minutes, and did not receive an important call I’d been waiting all day for
• When I tried to text people to complain about it, I kept getting error messages indicating said messages had not gone through. Of course, the recipients informed me this morning that they’d all gotten multiple copies of the text.

I really need to line up my next job to be able to afford the switch, but I’m perilously close to flinging my financial rectitude to the wind and just buying a goddamn iPhone.

I’ve said it before (and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again): Fuck Sprint.

It’s one thing to say, “Boy, I really had a shit year financially last year.”

It’s quite another have your tax guy explain to you that your adjusted gross income fell by over $14,000, particularly when you weren’t making THAT much money to begin with.

And the icing on the cake is that I get to wait for about 1/3 of my total refund, since California is printing IOU’s instead of checks until the legislature gets off their collective asses and passes a budget.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck 2008.

In case any of you were wondering, I am not the Ellen Shapiro mentioned in this story.

Hint #1 is that the story mentions she was married in 1968, whereas I was born in 1981. Also, I am not married. Also, I cannot legally get married (thanks, Prop 8!).

Hint #2 is that my father was a communications lawyer, not the owner of a Boston department store whose family foundation has recently been defrauded of over $450 million.

But it is ever so fun to know that our shared name is now going to get dragged through the mud thanks to Bernie Madoff and his Gigantic Fucking Ponzi Scheme That Apparently Defrauded Every Jew In The Country. Fun!

Today marks the end of my Sprint contract, and the beginning of a technological battle royale. Let’s meet the contestants!

IN THE RED CORNER….

The Blackberry 8703e, better known as the Crackberry. A practically indestructible phone on a shittastic network. A phone that I’ve dropped on concrete or asphalt so many times I’ve lost count.

But it’s started to act up. It’s starting to refuse to come off roaming. It’s starting to send calls straight to voicemail. I don’t know how much of it is Sprint’s asstacular network and how much is the Crackberry itself.

And it’s also starting to get old. It strains and buckles under the weight of simply trying to load Facebook’s mobile site. It freezes up when I’m trying to switch between applications.

It’s only a matter of time.

IN THE BLUE CORNER…

The iPod 5g. Replacement for the first iPod I ever got, a purchase that changed my life because I could carry all my music around without throwing out my back.

This one had enough space (80gb) to let me get some Podcasts going, and I’ve gotten addicted to the point that I’m now a month behind in 2 of my main ones (BBC Global News and This American Life).

It seems to be rolling along just fine. It seems to be handling its daily trips around the universe in my pocket just fine. But the last one seemed to be doing that until one day the line-out just up and died on me.

Will the hard drive hold out? Will the line-out survive? Will I accidentally drop it in a giant puddle of water? Only time will tell.

And finally, we have….

THE REFEREE

…my complete lack of fiscal restraint when it comes to purchasing shiny electronic things.

Particularly after spending an hour playing with my friend Dan’s iPhone this past weekend, I want one. Like, NOW.

My utter hatred of AT&T stopped me from switching when it first came out, but I’ve gotten to the point with Sprint that I’m pretty much ready to tell them to fuck themselves, and at least have some NEW asshattery to deal with.

Part of what’s keeping me from buying one is the extent to which I am fiscally screwed after the last year: $2k to join the union, $4500 on COBRA, PLUS a delightful four months of unemployment have left me damn near tapped out.

But once I’m done with COBRA as of the first of the year, and once they inevitably release the 32GB iPhone that would let me take my main playlist (which by itself is 12GB), my Podcasts, and some videos with me…I don’t know how long I’m going to last.

The battle begins today, and ends when one of the three above breaks. Place your bets on when I’ll crack in the comments.

Still just buried in work as we try to get our footing, but a few quick:

THINGS I LIKE

- This American Life’s podcast this week, aptly titled “Another Frightening Show About The Economy.” You can download it for free from that page for the rest of the week, and it’s a much, much clearer explanation of what in the hell is going on with the economy than I’ve heard from any other place thus far. Really fascinating stuff.

- Google’s Gmail Goggles. If you’re going to send a late-night email from Gmail, you can now enable a new feature that will ask you to answer a series of relatively basic math questions in a short period of time to prove that you’re not too a) drunk or b) tired to be emailing someone.

- USAA Checking. Sweet god, Deposit @ Home is awesome. You scan a check with a normal scanner, you upload it, and then you’re done. You can walk over to an ATM 20 minutes later and withdraw the cash, which is REALLY convenient when that check is your petty cash advance from work. And USAA reimburses you for the ATM fees since they’re an internet-only bank.

THINGS I DO NOT LIKE

- The nights I just can’t seem to get out of the office. We had pages drop right as we wrapped tonight, and when I should normally be getting out of the office by half an hour after wrap, I wasn’t done until almost 2 hours after wrap.

- The fact that every muscle in my body is seriously pissed at me right now. I ordered a footrest for the office which should help prevent me from hunching over my computer, but between being the Hunchback of Notre Lot and working out like a crazy person, my body is hating on me right now.

- Waking up in the middle of a REM cycle, which I did this morning, and which made me drowsy, cranky, and off the ball all morning.

THINGS I’M UNDECIDED ABOUT

- I mentioned this to a few people, but for some reason two different guys in my office asked me if I was ex-military this week. Apparently I have a military precision about me, according to them. Frankly, I think it’s just because I know the alpha-bravo-charlie alphabet and use it to be clearer on the phone. That, and I keep making my PA’s drop and give me 20.

- I’m pretty clearly not going to make my goal of getting my weight loss total to 80 pounds by Halloween. At least not unless I get some sort of serious gastrointestinal illness like the one striking half of USC. However, I’ve already lost 70 and will hopefully be in the 73-75 range by the end of the month. I’m debating whether I should be happy about this, since it’s so close to my goal and weight loss slows as you lose more weight anyway, or frustrated with the slowing pace. I think for the sake of my sanity, I’ll go with the former.

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log breaks down the bailout in terms of the Apollo program: Even accounting for inflation since the program ended in the early 70′s, this bailout could pay for seven Apollo programs.

Seven Apollo programs. Not just sending one set of guys to the moon, but the ENTIRE program. SEVEN TIMES. And that’s before you take the extra $110 billion they tacked on to get the damn thing passed.

That is a lot of goddamn money.

Last week: 6 days, somewhere between 75-80 hours (I pretty much lost count).

Today: 13 hours, and lost my boss halfway through the day so I got to pull double-duty for most of the afternoon. Tomorrow: Likely even more ridiculous.

I’m bloody exhausted, but I will say: I’m glad I’ve been WAY too busy to watch the economy implode. I’d probably be a lot more worried about it if I had a better grasp on what in the fuck is going on.

I bought my first $50 tank of gas tonight. $50.45 for 10.970 gallons. For those lazy at math, that’s $4.59 a gallon.

I fear later this summer as gas continues to spiral up, my credit card is just going to melt one day.

I got a USAA checking account for their bad-ass Deposit@Home feature, where you scan in checks instead of mailing them in or having to go deposit them somewhere.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize you had to have a “Credit Product” (ie. car loan or credit card) to access this feature, so I had to sign up for a credit card.

With the hilariously high “limit” they stuck on this card, it brings my total available credit to 2/3 of my annual income in a year where I work the whole year. This year, I have not. The limit remains unchanged.

I mean, I pay everything on time and am super-anal about my finances, so I suppose my credit rating is good, but yeesh. And the media were so confused about how the credit crisis got as bad as it did.

If the banks are neck deep in shit and still offering my broke-but-responsible ass this much credit, it’s no wonder people spent themselves into holes that dug halfway to China.