Money Matters (to me now!!!)

If I want to study architecture in UEL in the UK, it'll cost me something like S$28,000 a year. To practice I need about 5 years of study (though the last year of professional placement might cost less).

That makes a total of about S$115,000, not including living expenses. If I live modestly and get a job there maybe I can get by on S$150,000.

If I pimp my ass at S$100 a night and take 2 customers a night on weekdays and 5 on weekends (I don't know, do people visit prostitutes more often on weekends or weekdays?), I can earn something like SS4,000 in a month, minus living expenses, payment of loans and instalments for the plastic surgery I'll have to go through to become a successful social escort.

That means I'll need about 36 months, or 3 years to raise enough money.

If, instead of pimping my ass, which I doubt I can do for long anyway, I get a decent, respectable job that pays a simple starting salary of S$1,500 a month (optimistic in view of the fact that my current prospects are bellboy at the Fullerton or designer at some small company), I'll take about four times the amount of time, meaning I'll get the money in about 12 years.

I will be 36 by then. And in all probability suffering from AIDS, or cancer, or some other insidious disease (medical term meaning it does not show any symptoms until it is too late) that I cannot help but splurge my savings on because I want to live out the rest of my craven life on a cocktail of medicines and hooked up on happy-tubes.

If I studied in Singapore I could save up enough for the entire course within a fifth of the time (ie. a year pimping ass and three in a decent job). Though I'll still require plastic surgery before I will allow myself to step into NUS as an undergraduate again.

Regardless, financial matters seem to be my largest obstruction. I guess my first step should be to actually start making money and see where that takes me. Incidentally that appears to be my primary coping strategy in life, to just take a step in a direction and see where it takes me (usually someplace uncomfortable and alien). Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Nick and his money-making schemes. Or made more rich friends like my brother. Or started pimping my ass at a younger age, when it was still tender and fresh and could make more than S$100 a pop.

I suppose I could also pray for an outbreak of some debililating disease or catastrohic natural disaster to strike Great Britain, like the Black Death or a tsunami, so that the exchange rate drops like a stone on Jupiter, making my Singapore dollar much more powerful compared to the British Pound (exchanges at about 1:0.32 right now). Of course, at that point the fees would probably hike from the sudden influx of students from China, India or any country on the globe with students clutching their money hoping for exchange rates to fall. And then I'd be arrested for battery and assault of some poor English kid from my participation in some international students' association protesting the dirtiness, smallness or my generic dissatisfaction with the country, promptly deported and end up pimping my ass again.

Ah, to be a Pip.

(I am kidding about the ass-pimping. I have never, at any point in my life, had sex for money, and I doubt I ever will. Not due to any moralistic fibre, but more because of a general lack of good looks. Anyone who wants my ass must therefore have some kind of hideous venereal disease, which S$100 isn't worth getting it for.)