This is about talking to a high schooler about college but OMGoodness the opening paragraphs about the years before then wrench my currently tender heart. And then I was very sad to see that this was the blogger’s last entry since May. I was so excited to find another substantive writer.
Brooklyn Bread’s zero waste wins. We’ve got to do the pancake thing. Financial infidelity. In our earliest years, I definitely struggled with trusting that PiC would be responsible with money, as I defined it, and wanted to hide money from him to save more. He didn’t do anything to earn my distrust, that it entirely stemmed from my fears built over years of being betrayed by my dad. I had grown to adulthood being lied to by adults about money and had a thick shell to protect myself – control everything and trust no one. Thankfully I realized that long term, that was a terrible solution to a trust problem engendered by someone else and I made myself work with him to make sure we were on the same page with the same goals so I didn’t have that impulse any longer. I have complete control over our money of course but I share all the information with him.
This measles outbreak is horrifying. Anti-vaxxers are terrible people.
Are You Selling Yourself Short Professionally?: As women, I think we tend to sell ourselves short when we talk about our work, not just because bragging is hard. (Though to be fair, it is.) It’s also because our culture doesn’t value the soft skills it takes to make a company withstand the test of time. And it doesn’t value support work.
Things I didn’t know about RMDs for inherited IRAs. No one in my family has enough money to leave an inheritance so this was all new information to me! Our generation is the first to invest and may be passing money down to the next generation. Though I wonder what’s really going to be around in 50 years, considering climate change.
I didn’t learn about Jane Elliott and her Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes experiment until adulthood but her work is hugely impactful. It makes me sad to know that not that much has changed since she started her work, though.
Luxe’s $6000 rental car debacle: I’ve always used my AmEx for anything that I might need to make claims for and that’s because I absolutely loathe working with Chase. They are the pits and they make everything, like this claims process, incredibly difficult.
By contrast, I have filed multiple claims with AmEx for various things (like that purchase protection claim) and think the most difficult claim I had with AmEx was one that I didn’t bother completing because I got the manufacturer to actually honor their warranty.
Life as an adjunct is intensely stressful – low pay, tons of work, scarce stable work.
I think we know the answer to this
“If you, as a White person, would like to be treated the way Black people are in this society, stand.” pic.twitter.com/t7WcwCahAt
Matt has been a welcome vocal feminist ally on Twitter and talks about how that’s impacted his own life here. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t ruined his life and it HAS generated respect for him, in contrast to what the misogynists claim.
A Dying Mother’s Letter to Her Daughters: “While I would have chosen to stay with you for much longer had the choice been mine, if you can learn from my death, if you accepted my challenge to be better people because of my death, then that would bring my spirit inordinate joy and peace.”
As a daughter who lost her mother too early, twice, first to dementia, and then later in truth, this letter broke me a bit. I wish over and over to know what she would have wanted to tell me, as an adult. We had just begun to get to know each other in my adulthood, and see each other as fully people outside of our relationship as mother and daughter, when her grip on her self slipped out of her hands.
Accidental hug at work – I have a fun anecdote of my own on this. Someone reached over to open the door for me but did it in an awkward way that triggered that “he’s coming in for a hug” recognition in my brain the same way it did for the OP and it was NOT accurate. I blurted out: what are you doing?? Because I don’t believe in keeping silent awkward to myself I guess. He was pretty confused.
Although the actor believes that he learnt a lesson from the ordeal after he eventually thought, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’d argue that there’s something even bigger to glean from all of this. Whether we like to admit it or not, racism has and will continue to have a far deeper psychological impact on society than many of us realise.”
This family of four’s downsize from a 4/3 to a 2/1 is visually stunning. I definitely don’t have an eye for creating this kind of living space splendor but I’m taking notes!
K Wright on the idea of job security. No matter how good I am at my job, and I’m pretty dang good, I don’t take my job for granted, ever. Something can always happen. It doesn’t mean I should be hypervigilant like I was for years, but I most definitely don’t assume that my job will always be there.
3 Women on Caring for Disabled Siblings. This was akin to the situation we ran into when Mom’s health precipitously declined: She was cognitively not very functional, she didn’t have control over key functions of her body, and I was running ragged working to keep a roof over her head and desperately trying to figure out how we would function long term. This was before I married PiC, I delayed marriage for years because I was trying to get her in a stable situation before I moved out, but that was a losing proposition.
Do you have the same money anxieties that Tonya and I share?
I’d like to think a bear really did help this child.
I knew Ashley Ford’s name first on Twitter as @ismashfizzle because she does good work for the world there but here’s another facet to love: her interview with Michelle Yeoh.
“America First” – not my America. This piece was hugely resonant for me as a child of immigrants, knowing how much the generation of parent-immigrants gave up in order to give us a better life. I still feel that sense of gratitude even if my own remaining parent has turned out to be a terrible person. It’s weird but I do.
Golden Globes
I don’t watch awards shows but I will watch Sandra Oh in pretty much anything. And Samberg is hilarious. This monologue made me laugh out loud. And they cut to her mom.
Katelyn Ohashi, I Was Broken – her recent performance was breathtakingly extraordinary but it was made more so by the joy she has now. This video of her finding her joy again, whew: “There was a time where I was on top of the world, an Olympic hopeful. I was unbeatable. Until I wasn’t.“
Not Mine to Mold: My children, nondisabled and disabled, are not mine to mold. I wouldn’t subject my bookish nondisabled son to unwanted daily sports training; nor should I force Edmund to stop repeatedly tapping his head for comfort. Accepting Edmund, and supporting him to be himself, means I stop acting so much like a coach, and more like his mom.
I strongly feel this about JB. I am responsible for molding zir into a compassionate and caring human, but not to make zir any kind of duplicate of me.
Everyone in the department knew that this doctor discriminated against women, are afraid to speak publicly for fear of retaliation, and yet they can’t find evidence supporting it. Hm.
This was a lovely description of empathy around the holidays with a child. I keep trying this with JB but ze just gets worked up and angry instead as I describe zir feelings.
I wouldn’t believe him either. Unification Plan From China Finds Few Takers in Taiwan: On the one hand, Mr. Xi threatened military force if Taiwanese leaders grasped for independence. On the other hand, Mr. Xi said that if Taiwan were to agree to unification, its rights would be ensured by the “one country, two https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/xhina-xi-jinping-taiwan.htmsystems” framework that Beijing used in Hong Kong after it returned from British colonial control in 1997.
…
But neither the threat nor the promised reward seemed likely to sharply weaken Taiwanese opposition to China’s demands, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at the Hong Kong Baptist University who studies relations between China and Taiwan.
