so here's the basic situation: I've spent several days crunching the numbers, and there's two ways out of our current situation. this took a lot of soul-searching and hard budgeting calculus to arrive at.
number 1, one of us quits our current job and goes to work somewhere else. that sucks because it means either Dai gives up on commissions or I give up on domestic life. that, bluntly, will suck, but if it's the cost of survival, fine.
number 2, is that if one of us can somehow finagle an extra 400 or so dollars monthly, that'll be enough to offset the loss of food assistance and provide a cushion for emergencies. I have no idea how we would do that.
neither of these options are good. and it's extremely frustrating to be in a situation where survival is dependent on one of two bad options, a situation that only exists because of the erosion of basic civil services.
but, this is where it stands. I can't change the way the world works. either I drum up 400 extra dollars, regularly, from a completely unknown source, or one of us has to quit our job and find something monumentally less satisfying to keep afloat.
@hystericempress I hear from /r/workonline that ESL teaching from home jobs basically just require charm and comedy skills and people can clean up doing them... I realize this is THAT kind of advice, but it's all I can think of offhand except maybe streaming--and I know what a godawful algorithm-pleasing slog that is--but it's the best I can think of other than immediate socioeconomic revolution. >___<
