Epiphanies In The MRI

So my car's still shaky.  It runs, but it continues to leak like a motherfucker, and it's making more weird noises than a haunted house.  Just this morning I looked underneath to see as big an oil spill as I have ever seen on the driveway.

But then, driving to Robbie Stadium there was only a small oil leak.  I didn't check when I was running around to two coffeeshops so I could get on my online auctions (two of them, staggered only half an hour apart) in time (I just missed the first two picks of my first one), but going from the second coffeeshop to the free parking lot for the State Fair, I didn't see a big leak, or a leak period -- although I admit I wasn't looking all that closely.  Finally, even though it drove fine all day, I heard the "second noise" frequently, and even though it was absent on my cool night drive home, when I made that final turn onto the driveway, that turn felt really, really hard.

And yet I am feeling somewhat happy, or at least not as down as I was a couple or few days ago.  Why the fuck is that?  Am I lying to myself?

I probably am.  But the main issue of this -- the fact that I am now convinced I have car problems that need to be fixed now, and I don't have the money to pay for it all -- maybe, maybe covered.  And I came to this realization while "working" at the U. Sunday.

This was another of these incidents where I was stuck in the MRI tube for 5 1/2 hours even though I thought I would be there a lot less, thus breaking my promise to my parents that I would be home to have dinner with them.  Usually I complain about my sore back and stiff muscles after such a marathon session doing nothing, but I actually felt good.  Weird to say this, but I could've pulled, oh, 8 or 9 hours in that machine.

It's possible I felt this secure, even euphoric, not because of this realization, but because my car was on my mind the whole time I was in there.  You know how you ruminate on something, and then all of a sudden you think of something?  That happened to me.  Wish it happened more often.

To help pay for the car repairs (and, incidentally, shore up my dwindling accounts), I decided to finally go to my stock portfolio, something I look at only from time to time and have done nothing to (besides continue transferring $100 from my checking account into it every three months) and finally pulled the plug on Petrobras, the Venezuelan oil company I thought was going to hit big.  Maybe I neglected it, because I think it was trending higher when I first purchased shares in the company.  But now it's cratered to (I think) a third of what I bought it for.  Fact is, I should have sold the whole stock before the end of last year.  But hey, more than half of 2012 is over, and Labor Day is a good time to sell, and the Blue Moon was on the 31st, and that denotes changes, so ... yeah.

But that only gives me $140 -- more than nothing, but nothing like the hundreds of dollars that sealing the oil leaks will cost, not to mention the transmission leaks that, according to my current mechanic, take first priority.  But where will the money come from?

Well, it was finally in the MRI that I finally paid attention to another underperforming part of my portfolio: An international mutual fund.  I bought it, I think, at the nadir of The Great Recession, when I thought that overseas economies would come back before America's did.  Well, it turns out that with a few exceptions, no country's economy has come back.  And so even though the loss is not as bad as it is for Petrobras, the mutual fund, Scout International, has taken money from me.

Now, I thought about immediately selling it along with Petrobras (and another small company called WasteMasters but is now known as Environmental Services, which I think I bought 100 shares of for $100 and is now worth, uh, 10 cents -- how the fuck do I still have money in this company, and why the fuck is this company still being traded?), but I just made a quick look of its history, and even though Scout International has been volatile, it's kind of battling back.  So instead of making it a quick kill of three stock properties, I think I'm going to hold off on Scout International.

And you know what?  I think I'm OK with the option.  If I sell entirely, I get over $900 back.  That should be enough to cover all the necessary repairs on my car.  And, if it's not, reality sets in and I can go ahead with the certainty that there is no reason to spend more than that on my car, or at least not all at once.  I can baby it and check the levels frequently to make sure it doesn't die on me, and in the meantime I look for another car.  The thing that puts this over the top: Selling these at a loss helps with my taxes.

So I can now go ahead and live my life knowing that I have not only money, but options.  And thank Buddha my parents are going to Vegas next week, which means (I think) I can use their van in case anything happens and I need to go somewhere.  That somewhere isn't some place I can spend money, but I still have my freedom to go places -- such as the Minnesota History Museum in St. Paul, where I want to check out the New Deal artist program exhibition; I did not know FDR spent government money to pay artists to do art.  Who da thunk it?  So I have about three, four days to shop around and ask for price quotes, or give it to my mechanic and tell he has time and do it right, or take it back to the guys who replaced my transmission and ask them if they can look at it again for cheap.  Or I can do nothing.  I have options and, if I need it, I can tap money.  I feel good, almost too good.

And it'll just be my luck that tomorrow, as I go to the U. and enjoy their (free) festivities for The First Day Of School, I will see that all the oil has dripped onto the driveway and I can't turn shit.  We'll see.