About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Micro-income, freelance: I eked out a trickle this month. In any month we travel, even just a long weekend, the routine disruption eats up all freelance work time. That stinks – travel costs money and it also costs the opportunity to earn extra. +$80!
Micro-income, Craigslist: PiC knocked out a sale at the end of the month. +$50!
Micro-income, credit card churn: We finished our minimum spend on the Citi Thank You Premier this month and I am contemplating how to convert those 50,000 points. I think 30,000 will turn into Target money to cover normal needed household spending. I haven’t decided about the other 20,000 points yet but my goal is to use it only to cover necessities and thus preserve $500 in cash flow.
Teaching your kids about consent. (This last bit really really doesn’t work for JB though: “With parenting, something I heard is that when little kids are melting down—say, lashing out and generally being terrors—it means that they’re yearning for connection. So even if it goes against your instincts, what you can do is kneel down and give them a big hug.” If you want to see how fast a three year old can try and rip off your limbs, I have a model case right here. Hugs before ze is ready is a HUGE NO.)
Are your kids addicted to television? Mine is a bit, obsessively asking me some weeks “is this a tv day?” but surprisingly, it doesn’t (so far) have the effect I was worried about. In a stunning indictment, though, JB told me one day that ze was going to pretend to be me. When I agreed, ze put on fake glasses and said BYE I GOING TO WORK. You don’t know me!
N. K. Jemisin put it perfectly when she said “Golf Digest to the rescue” ain’t peak 2018 but it’s definitely not a sentence I ever expected to type… For Valentino Dixon, a wrong righted
The price of relevance is fluency: “You see, there is no “Twitter mob”, there’s only people. And people shape culture, and culture evolves. But in the past, the powerful could keep themselves isolated from the way culture evolves, if they wanted to. Janet Jackson didn’t even know what Hot Cheetos are!“
PiC and I were having one of our talks about life and stresses. He’s going through a particularly rough time at work right now with no specific end in sight, and in our discussion, I had a realization that may be incredibly morbid.
I am not deeply stressed by our three kids (2 and 4 legged alike) because this is all temporary. Parenting woes, power struggles, training a new to us dog, juggling work and relationships, love and friendship, finances and fun. All of it will go away. JB will grow up and leave. If we’re lucky, ze will always want to come back and spend time with us but no one can see that future. The dogs, honestly, will not live for 20 more years. Everything in front of us, including the mortgage if we’re diligent but not the house if we’re lucky, will be gone from our day to day lives.
Nothing is permanent. Nothing stays the same forever. Whatever good I have in front of me, it’ll go away. Whatever bad I’m staring down the barrel of, it’ll pass.
I know what it is to lose a parent, to lose the people you love and cherish and respect, to lose people who have just been getting started in the world. I know what it is to mourn and to have the edges of grief blunted, to have their memories fade with time. I know that in years to come, we’ll lose more because life is also aging and dying. I know that that’s going to happen with us.
Somehow, that thought galvanizes me. I try to do better, be a better person, be more humble, be more confident, love hard and authentically, whine less (a little less). Our time here is short. It needs to matter to me because it doesn’t matter to the universe as a whole. The vastness of how little I matter as this tiny speck in the cosmos is reassuring.
This makes my life with the responsibilities I chose, that I got to choose, feel light in comparison to the weightiness of the day to day pulls on my time and energy. Obviously I get stressed in the moment, of course, after the third go-around with the 3 year old or fourth meltdown of the morning but way deep down, I still have an even keel because objectively this is the best I’ve ever had it. Everything that’s tough right now? Is here in my life because I got to choose it. The very privilege of getting to choose my life, life companion, family, friends, and a hobby, even? Boggling. I’m grateful for that choice.
I’ve lost so much over the years to illness, to my own body’s frailties, that I cannot help but be all in on what I get to have now. Tired? Sure. Frazzled? Yup. Worried, uncertain, furious about the state of society? Absolutely. But overall? Grateful for what I do have.
The first question is always: are we over-committed financially? If we aren’t, then it shouldn’t be a problem, right? We’d just tighten our belts for a while and ride it out with our cash in hand.
Answer: not with two jobs. Also true: to my disaster brain this means yes, we are over-committed. We should be able to handle all our expenses on one income. That’s one area I’m extremely sensitive to – this mortgage really messes with our financial position. I’ve reduced it by nearly 1/3 and recast so that our monthly commitment is several hundred dollars less but it’s still not anywhere in the neighborhood of low and low is what we’d need for me to feel like we weren’t over-committed. Mortgage aside, having children is a serious financial commitment between basic childcare and saving for college for them. If we wanted to add to our family, that’s a huge expense we’d be adding and I hate that we have to look first at the price tag and second at the joy (and pain) of having children.
The second question is: are we prepared for expensive life events and emergencies? In my previous experience, one spot of bad luck is absolutely manageable. We’ve absolutely got that covered. My previous experience also says that bad luck doesn’t tend to happen in ones, they tend to be a streak. I’ve planned just fine for a limited series of bad luck but not beyond more crap than two job losses. Compound that and we won’t be able to hold out as long as I projected. So that’s another sensitive area these fears keep prodding with a sharp stick. See, that’s what fed my cash hoarding. This fear that says putting lots of cash into the stock market now “right before” (except hah, who knows when “right before”really is) a market correction or crash makes us vulnerable to financial ruin and that cash hoarding will fend off financial ruin.
If I can’t convince someone that giving is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself, and I’m forced to keep them in my life despite their being a terrible person because who doesn’t believe in caring about more than yourself (??), perhaps Matt would be more persuasive.
I am sick to my stomach of all the people who are ok with how men and boys treat girls and women. I see you not speaking up. I see how you support this culture. GIRLS MATTER. And I am sick of the people in the comments section acting like the vast majority of rapes aren’t credible reports because of the rare false accusations out there. It just keeps on with the protect the boys narrative as if boys can’t be better than this, as if they can’t possibly be expected to take responsibility for their actions while the body count of their targets pile up. The only concern these people have is about the future of the boys while the people they actually hurt, by the thousands, are told they don’t matter: Girls . . . are human. Girls are not there for the benefit of helping boys to turn into men. They are not there to be soiled and then tossed on the heap while boys go out and buy themselves a whole new look, a whole new life.
If you don’t want men to be dragged down by decades-old accusations of rape, then you need to crack down on minutes-old accusations of rape as they happen. But that’s not how it goes. Still, even now, that’s not how it goes.
If a friend was ill and you sent them food for a week, would you let them pay you back?
If you visit chosen family every year, they always feed you, and don’t let you contribute, would you engage in a long, probably losing, battle over it? Or is this a thing that family does and you’re supposed to sit down and shut it?
Income and savings
Once upon a time, at least ten years ago, I told a friend “I can’t wait until I make $100,000 a year. Can you imagine how much I could save???”
Answer: Not as much as I had originally planned. But still a healthy amount!
How much could you save on a $100,000 salary and do you have a single income, dual income, and/or any dependents?
Skills
“You know, I lied before. I didn’t really learn to play guitar. I just kinda … gave myself the ability. I did the same when I learned French.” – Chuck, Supernatural
If you could, would you just give yourself talents (musical, lingual, or athletic)? What would you pick?
Massive loans
We’re whittling away at the redwood that is our mortgage and I periodically check to see whether we should refinance for a lower interest rate. Now is really not the time – interest rates are approaching 5%! Our rate is a not great but not horrible 3.875%. I miss our previously pretty great rate that was a full percentage point lower.
What’s the best interest you’ve ever had on a loan?
My first round, I didn’t bother to comparison shop. I was in a hurry to make some kind of progress in shifting the glacier of boxes in my office so 3 books, 7 DVDs, and one broken 16 GB iPhone went straight off to Decluttr. They downrated the broken phone as though I had miscategorized it, even though I’d marked it with the lowest option they had given me on the selling screen, and we came away with $10.85.
Notes: Decluttr pays for shipping and doesn’t return unsold items. They won’t take items without barcodes, which annoyed me about two or three sets of CDs and DVDs that were in great shape but inexplicably had no barcodes. Your barcodes must be identical and the items must be in good shape. You need to enter a minimum of $5 worth of items to complete an order.
My second round, flush with having successfully emptied out 5 boxes of packing boxes, I was able to take an extra 15 minutes to check other DVD sites to see if we could get better prices. This time, out of ten DVDs, Decluttr offered me $1.37 for 4 DVDs. Second Spin offered $5.40 for 8 DVDs. Since the point was to maximize both income and clearing out stuff, Second Spin was our friend this time. Or so I thought.
