money and driving

I am not going to lie. The California budget crisis really worries me. The fact that higher education is probably get a $3 billion cut is disconcerting to say the least. This will obviously impact UCLA since it has the highest operating costs out of the whole UC system. The economics department promised in writing that admitted graduate students would be able to gain financial support by undertaking teaching assistantships in their second year, but I'm not so sure that's actually going pan out. Even before the announced proposal, the department couldn't offer me a first year stipend, and only offered my friend $10,000, which is only barely enough to cover rent and not enough for UCLA's own graduate housing. I'm even beginning to have regrets about declining Duke's and Cornell's generous offers so deliberately.

The current budget deal will shut down a lot of programs that in particular aim to benefit low-income people (and in Los Angeles like most cities, that means minorities). The Los Angeles Times wrote that lobbyists for the makers of TurboTax were even pressing the state legislators to dismantle a program that has the state tax board fill out the tax returns of low-income residents for free. It definitely must suck to be poor in California now. There probably was a convincing reason to start the program in the first place. Maybe.. it was to make it so that people who don't speak English and therefore don't know which fields mean what on the tax forms would be able to file their returns. This seems pretty important, and it's sad that the politicians were actually listening. I understand that taxes were astronomically high in California already, but I don't understand why the Republicans won't even allow a teeny tiny tax increase on the rich.. which LA and SF have many of. That would save programs that people really depend on, not to mention the jobs that the programs support.

Anyways here's a screenshot of my planned driving route to California, for the sake of adding images to this colorless blog. In posting/editing mode, this image seems to be of very low quality. Oh well. (EDIT: but ah, I see you can click on the thumbnail to see the original image in its full Microsoft Paint-cropped glory.)

Some of you readers have heard this from me already, but here are my stops:

1. Bethesda, MD
2. Ann Arbor, MI
3. Memphis, TN
4. Dallas, TX
5. Temple, TX
6. Los Angeles, CA

I am picking up my cousin Patrick at the University of Michigan or as I like to call it: the fake M school (since you know.. Maryland is the real one). I'm visiting a couple friends in Texas and then hopefully making it to LA. I'm leaving Bethesda on August 26 and hopefully reaching Westwood on the evening of the 31st and moving in to my 385 sq ft studio (including the kitchen and the bathroom) on September 1. Crap.

I don't have any obligations until September 8, so I'll have some free time to check things out. I fantasize that this will include locating all the sweet bars, the cool clubs, and the hotspots in West LA but this will probably boil down to locating where the closest supermarket, convenience store, pharmacy, and farmer's market are.