Tag: rambling

When elections give me nightmares

Last night I donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Making political donations is not something I do often, or lightly. As I’ve written earlier, I’m trying to keep a close eye on my finances so as to get my debt under control and start saving for retirement. But this election feels more important, and thus more stressful, than any of those I can remember in my life thus far.

I am a straight, white, middle-class male, with full-time employment, able to afford my own place to live, food, and a certain degree of comfort and entertainment. Yes, I still worry about money, but really, I personally am highly unlikely to be directly affected by any governmental policy that comes out of the next four years.

Why, then, am I so concerned about the outcome of the next six and a half weeks? Because it’s about everyone else. It’s about who we are as a country. There was a running joke in my AP Humanities class back in high school that every culture’s rise in greatness was paralleled by a rise of the middle class. Well, we are at a turning point here. On the one hand, we can elect a reality TV plutocrat, who has tied himself to outright racist and hateful ideologies, and thus continue to oppress minorities and concentrate wealth in the hands of a mighty few, leading to our own collapse into mediocrity if not outright destruction. Or we can say no, we are better than this.

I may not agree with the entirety of Clinton’s platform. As someone with ties to the technology field, I am quite disappointed with how she’s handled her information infrastructure in the past, and look forward to the day when someone who grew up with the Internet and information technology as an integrated part of their lives is a viable candidate. I certainly don’t agree with her hawkish foreign policy stance or ties to the banking industry. But in these ways, Trump would be far worse.

I know some people I know would ask, why not vote for a third option? Because that’s not what this is about. We need to prove that we as a nation will have nothing to do with the hatred and bigotry that Trump advocates. To quote Wil Wheaton, “Trump has to be defeated in an historical landslide. He needs to be humiliated, and he needs to take as much of his party down with him as possible.”

How To Do Basic Shit

Stop Taking Pride In Not Knowing How To Do Basic Shit

This was the article that inspired me to start writing this blog. Someone “liked” it, or linked to it, or in some other way caused it to appear on my Facebook feed. I don’t much care for its holier-than-thou attitude, and I’m not sure I agree on some of the qualities that supposedly define “adulthood”, but it did make me take a closer look at how I’m living my life and what I would like to improve.

At first, I was somewhat defensive. I might well be one of those “[dudes with]…bare-bones furniture and empty walls and nothing in the fridge but beer, old pizza, and a crusty bottle of ketchup.” Then I realized that it’s not really about home decor or design aesthetic, but about taking charge and responsibility for your own life. After all, the reason my fridge is so frequently empty is because I live within a mile of three different grocery options, so on-demand shopping tends to be the name of the game.

So while that might not be a problem, there are three areas of my life that I would consider myself to still be “failing”, at least in terms of how this article might define adulthood. First, and least, driving. I had originally set a goal of earning my license before I turned thirty. That did not happen. My usual excuse is that my day-to-day life is such that I really don’t need a car. And this is true. I can walk or bus to work, shopping, entertainment, really 95% of what I need to. But for that last 5%, I do wind up feeling guilty for having to request car-pool solutions, or the fact that I can’t visit my parents without arranging them to meet me at least part way with a ride. That said, this is probably the lowest priority of things I would like to improve. Though I sometimes suspect I’m subconsciously holding out for improving technology to render the point moot.

The next two are somewhat intertwined, and probably stem back to the same personality flaw. One is financial management and planning. Right now I have no real financial safety net that doesn’t involve running up more credit card debt. I am not in any meaningful way saving for retirement. I’m not exactly just living paycheck-to-paycheck, though, either. In college and shortly thereafter, I made some financial decisions that were less than ideal. Additionally, I’ve had some health crises and pet-health crises crop up that have been more expensive than I would like. As a result, I’ve had to prioritize paying off old debt rather than starting new savings. I don’t know that there’s much I can do here other than what I’m already doing–try to get all of the high-to-medium-interest debt paid off within the next few years, then use the money I had been paying into those accounts each month to start long-term savings instead.

The key part to that will be avoiding taking on any further debt. Since most of my credit card and consolidation loan balance accumulated slowly as I didn’t quite keep pace with paying it off, that means keeping my normal daily expenditures under control and within the budget allowable by my paycheck. And making and sticking to a budget has never been something I’ve been that good at.

The final area for improvement is management of my health, both physical and mental. This ties into finances, because even with insurance, doctors and therapists are expensive. And I am fundamentally lazy, so if I am more or less getting by, why bother take the time to schedule a physical, or what have you. But I know I have at least one, possibly more undiagnosed, untreated issues, so if I took the time to actually go through with a course of treatment, I might see significant improvements in my general quality of life.

I’d say “just make an appointment”, but a couple of things need to happen first. I need to budget for it, first. Which means figuring out where I can trim my weekly expenses to set aside some money to avoid taking on more debt as discussed above. Also, I would like to find a doctor I feel comfortable with. I tried seeing someone more regularly back when I was living in Saint Paul, and couldn’t find a clinic that felt right. I’ve gotten some recommendations, but it turns out that they were for providers that aren’t in my insurance network. And I don’t even know how you’d go about finding a therapist. But I know it can be done.

So those are my goals, areas where I’m not exactly succeeding as a fully-functional adult. If I don’t address them, they might even blow up into bigger problems in the future. So let’s see what we can do, hey?