The last load of Amazon boxes contained a microphone. It is a Shure SM48 handheld vocal mic, with dynamic cardioid pickup.
This is a piece of professional audio equipment. Not a pricey one -- they're about $40 -- but not the sort of thing you'd buy for fucking around with your friends on Discord. It hooks up with balanced stereo cables, and you have to run it through an amp to do anything with the signal, or an audio interface box if you want to get the sound into a computer. It is well-fortified and feels like it was carved out of a chunk of solid metal. It would probably survive being used to drive framing nails. Or being handed to your drummer. Same thing.
It came with a stand adapter, a zippered case, and a warranty card. It did not come with any instructions. They figure if you've got one of these you probably already know how it works.
It was on my Amazon list because these things are really good for general environmental sound. I've used them at work to mic everything from the piano in ballet classes to the entire cabaret theater for small shows. And despite that, I'm not sure I ever would have managed to buy one for myself.
When most of your life involves worrying about having no money, suddenly having a contextually-significant sum of money can be almost as bad. It should be great! Now you have FUNDS to fix all those THINGS you've been putting off! Except there are always going to be more Things than Funds, because you've been putting the Things off for a very long time. And you never know what Things might come up in the near future. Such is the nature of Things -- they like to jump out at you from behind the bushes right when you least expect it.
So you have to triage. Rent first. It's a million times harder to take care of anything else if you're unhoused. Most other creditors have some tolerance for late payments, with or without fees, especially if you call them to explain nicely first. You need to get to work, so you need gas money or transit fare, and probably internet if you do anything at all from home, and a phone if you do anything at all outside it.
After that you have to wrestle with a lot of things that are more problematic.
Do I really need new shoes? Like right now? Can't I just make do with the ones I have? Do they have to be new new, or just less dead than the current pair? Well, what can I afford? Oof, that much. I technically have it, but if I spend it, then it won't be there anymore. A pair of good shoes would be best and would last a lot longer, but then what do I do in the meantime? What if something else happens and I regret spending so much? There's no good way to convert shoes back to money in a hurry.
When things get bad enough, I do it with groceries. I go into the supermarket thinking about what I want to have in the house, then I see the prices on all of it and I ask myself, "Do I really need it that badly?" And no, I do not. I do need to buy something, but don't need any one specific thing in that store, so I wander around picking things up and putting them back and doing a lot of very stressed-out math. Eventually I buy more rat veggies and some random shit for that night's dinner just so I can go home.
Buying work equipment is similarly troublesome. On top of the "what if I need that money later?" element, there's also a sense of obligation to only invest in supplies that will eventually make that expenditure back. You can do a lot with a USB desk mic. It won't be as good as using the Shure through an audio capture box, but it'll work. How do I know that spending $40 on a microphone (and then coughing up for the cable and other accessories) will get me enough extra gigs to get that $40 back? Forty bucks is a week of groceries for me, or the broadband bill. When you're in a position where you regularly run out of transit fare, that is a significant enough investment to be scary.
Putting things off when you don't have the funds to deal with them is a lot easier if you decide that things like convenience and self-actualization are luxuries beyond your reach. It's very practical until you hit the point where you literally cannot afford to live no matter what you cut from the budget. Then you start making what probably look like weird, childish decisions, but are really just your last desperate attempts to be slightly less fucked-over by the whole ongoing situation. There is some help available when you're incredibly poor, but it takes time and effort to find it and convince people you need it, and it is only the absolute basics. The attitude is not just "this is all the help we can afford to give you", but "this is all you deserve until you shape up and make some money". You spend your tax return on a new TV, and blow a few hours of overtime on takeout and acrylic nails, because these are the 'nice things' accessible to you in that moment, and you are the only person who ever actually gives two shits about whether you are in any way comfortable.
One of my most dearly beloved teachers has moved his weekly class to another studio. They haven't answered me yet about their workstudy program, and he doesn't have the power to comp me in exchange for work, so I'm stuck paying money. Things unexpectedly worked out -- this time -- but until then, my plan for dealing with it consisted of not buying groceries, Googling how long it would take me to get to the West End on foot, and trying to figure out how far my overdraft protection would go.
There's enough to eat in the pantry right now, but I would have done the same if there weren't. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the wrong decision, but also that there isn't a right one. It's the uncomfortable overlap between "adults understand that sometimes you make big sacrifices to get what you want" and "adults understand that sometimes dreams are stupid and your wishes are unimportant". I can walk a lot and be hungry and indebted, or I can be bored and restless and heartbroken. There is no option where I do not suffer, so I might as well do what I want.
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