This song makes me miss Freddie Mercury

stay the fuck home next time

If anyone remembers if they can please help me find it again I would be totally psyched because I lost it.

It needs to be the kind of place you could pretend to have done entry level IT for

I don't know what I should do and this website is basically what goes for my social support system these days, so I'd like some advice please.

So I drive a very old car that until recently I didn't use much. It's from 2003 and it has less than 150k miles on it. It has a check engine light that I learned today comes from a tiny crack in the (a?) cylinder head gasket that's causing me to lose coolant. They quoted me 3-4k USD to replace it.

If they said 2k I might have been able to melt my debit and credit cards at the same time MAYBE. But 4k I need a loan for.

It's possible that this place is just a ripoff. I'm partially just talking this out right now so I should really get on the phone and find out if I can find something that won't break me.

Part of why it seems like it might be a ripoff is that I can find the parts (according to my completely uneducated and untrained figuring) on autozone.com for like 250 bucks. Maybe I can just do it myself? Maybe my landlord has tools? Or I can rent some maybe?

The guy at the car doctor said that if I wasn't going to do the repair I should probably trade it in sooner than later while it still holds value. Down this path I might really start crying about needing an adult though. A whole branching tree of decisions to make afterwards.

And to bring up an added complication: part of why I don't have a solid chuck of the downpayment of a house on hand to deal with this is that I was semi-homeless up until three months ago (friday is the anniversary). A downstream complication to that is that I never received my auto registration renewal from the state of CA. And by the time I realized it was a thing I should have had to deal with already, my shit expired. I'm pretty sure they're going to make me do a smog check which requires that I don't have an engine light on. So it's extra fucked to be driving with it right now. Oh and my insurance dropped me over a dispute over late charges I refuse to pay because they didn't tell me I owed them money and sent shit to the wrong address over and over.

So I guess an informal poll:

A: I shop around for a mechanic that's willing to fix my cars for the clothes off my back + fill up my credit card again ( T_T ) IF I CAN FIND ONE (and if not I guess take out a loan)

B: I buy the parts/find the tools and see if it's possible to do it myself, on like, a weekend.

C: I throw in the towel on my car and try to find a replacement somehow despite being broke enough to be here

D: Something I'm not thinking of.

I fucking hate this. I hate cars. I wish I could bike. I wish I could take transit. I hate having this single point of failure in my life that can completely sweep my still shaky legs out from under me, which I just now finally got up onto. I need advice because this decision could literally be the fucking end of the world for me. Yay.

edit: the specific car is a 2003 Suzuki Areio

Today I moved into my first stable housing since October 4th.

On that date I returned from a trip to visit a friend whom I had just learned had advanced cancer. My then roommate and close friend for two decades took the opportunity to declare that I had moved out. When I tried to come back I was shouted out with threats of calling the police and having the locks changed on me. The day before I left, I had explained why I was in such emotional distress by explaining the situation with my friend and my relationship with him. In the process I came out as bisexual. In hindsight this seems like the reason he acted so viciously towards me. I left my cats in his care while I was on my trip; he repeatedly threatened me with sending them to a pound (and then when I told him I had flagged them and he would be arrested if he tried it) or just releasing them outside. He dumped my possessions next to a dumpster and told me I had two hours to collect them. When I came for my cats he stuffed them into cardboard boxes and taped them shut with no air holes.

Since then I've been living in hotel rooms. I picked up a job as an amazon delivery driver. And even working full time only slowed down the rate at which my savings was getting eaten up. Finally I found this place, 30-60 minutes away from my work and willing to let me keep my cats. Because of the generosity of one of our comrades here "C" coming through with a couple very timely loans, I managed to keep my cats and keep from sleeping in my car all the way to now. I'm broke, in debt to multiple sources, but I managed to keep from being outside. And I managed to keep my family together, even if it's only cats at this point.

The story doesn't end here. I have a civil rights complaint that was accepted by the state's civil rights department. I'm going to bring a civil action against my old friend as soon as I have the money saved up for a lawyer. I'm going to finish studying for my certification and find a job in IT before/after I'm done with that. But the part of the story where my existential security is at question is now mainly over.

Let's say you have two cats and you'd rather go homeless than them.

I'm not even sure it would open up my search to include anywhere I'd be able to afford.

And here's the punchline: https://www.google.com/search?q=orange+county+ca+median+income