Haiku for the week

All work and no pay
Anxious days counting pennies
Month's end far away...

Yes, it's been a difficult time these last few weeks. I have, in fact, been extremely busy since I got back from Malaysia at the start of the month, but... a lot of it has been running around trying to set up new jobs; a process which can be hugely time-consuming, and for which, of course, one does not get paid. The one new regular teaching gig I have already started is at a university, so... well, I'll be grateful (and not a little surprised) if I get paid at all. It's quite likely I'll terminate the engagement in a righteous huff before long. It seems their payment system involves paying mid-month, a month in arrears - so they'll give me two weeks' pay after I've done six weeks of classes. Hmm, that's rather a long time to work on trust for a Chinese university! The other stuff I've been doing has all been writing or editing - about 8 or 10k in total, but... I haven't been paid for any of it yet. And when/if I do finally get paid, most of it's going to go into a bank account. And that doesn't feel like being paid at all. It's unreasonably hard to check whether payments have been made (the Bank of China still doesn't seem to have a decent e-banking service; not in English, anyway). And I try to leave that account untouched, as an 'emergency reserve'; I prefer to try to get by on cash-in-hand.

And that works out just fine, most of the time. This month, however, nobody's been paying me in cash. And I've had an unusually large number of 'phantom jobs' that were offered to me and then evaporated: reviewing the English subtitles on a documentary about migrant workers, writing the bid for Beijing to become a World Design Capital (I kid you not - that's worth a post or three all of its own!!), transcribing the dialogue from a documentary about Western supermodels (nice), narrating a film about Tibetan culture...  There might have been another 8 or 10k in that lot. And then, well, regular recording work has been thin on the ground; and the two gigs I did have lined up in the past week - last Friday's was gallingly cancelled/given to someone else (scheduling screw-up!), and this Monday's was postponed a week or so.

I thought I'd done pretty well to get through three weeks on less than 3,000 rmb. I didn't think I was going to have to make it last all the way to the end of the month. But it seems I am. And it's not going to last. In fact, a couple of minor alcoholic indulgences in the first half of this week have left me quite literally FLAT BROKE.

It's going to be a bread-and-water weekend, unless I dip into the money under the mattress....