Category: Essays

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History is something that we make

Seeing all the retrospectives on Queen Elizabeth II’s life today makes me remember when my own family did that, at the end of my great-aunt’s life. (She lived to be 100 years old. We think she was holding on for that milestone, at the end.) She remembered when Amelia Earhart went down. She lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression. I don’t know if she ever had her own bank account.

I love this quote, from Terry Pratchett, about the speed of monarchic succession:

“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”

Terry Pratchett, Mort

And the title of my post comes from this video by John Green.

It has been a long century. The next one will also be long. History is something that happens to us. But it is also something we make together.

John Green

Read her obituary here in my local newspaper.

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Everything doesn’t happen for a reason

Years ago, I read this essay by Tim J. Lawrence, “Everything doesn’t happen for a reason.”

One of my extended family members goes into hospice this week, so it’s been on my mind.

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. 

He is one of the kindest people I have ever known. So was the first uncle I lost that I really knew well. (The first member of that generation to pass away in my family was an uncle who sustained brain damage at age 2, and as such I never really got to know him.)

I have already lost people my own age (though not in my family). I have already lost members of older generations. But the creeping onset of mortality is just getting more real, year after year.

But the goal, here, remains the same: Make your own purpose in life. And be kind to one another.

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Saving for your children

Today I saw this Tweet, and wanted to highlight it here:

There are a lot of responses to her (some in good faith, some not). I’m glad that she is also prioritizing her own retirement accounts! I’m guessing the account she mentions is a custodial (UTMA/UGMA) account; that’s a good way to save a relatively small (couple thousands?) amount of money for a child, but if you have Lots Of Money ™, you should really consider other vehicles, such as a trust. I suspect that as this woman’s nest egg for her daughter grows, she will take stock of the situation and adjust her investments accordingly.

Most 18-year-olds would not be able to handle a sudden influx of cash like that. However, if you do a good job of explaining money and savings and delayed gratification to your child, then this sort of savings can be a gift, rather than a burden or a source of regret and pain. While I’m hesitant about the idea of “here, have money!” upon turning 18, my guess is that someone like this Internet person would have done all the legwork to make sure that her kid would have the skills to handle that money, not just have the money itself.

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Budgeting isn’t dieting

Mandatory disclaimer: I am writing this post from the perspective of a middle-class person addressing other middle-class people. I do not wish to imply that Anyone Can Do These Things; only people with a certain ration of Income to Needs can solve problems like this by budgeting. If your reaction to this post is “but I can’t budget my way out of poverty,” then do not fret: this post is not at or about you. If your reaction to this post is “but not EVERYONE can budget their way out of poverty,” then I will reiterate the intended audience for this post: Middle-class people. Not Everyone. Thank you for understanding!

A few weeks ago, I read a secondary source (Reddit post about an article, haha!) that discussed the question of “Is budget culture as harmful as diet culture?”

Seeing this concerned me, because I’m well aware of (and pretty vocal about!) how damaging diet culture is, and how the whole weight loss scheme system is destroying generations of people’s bodies and minds. And at the same time, I’m a huge proponent of being conscious of your budget, making sure you’re spending carefully, and things of that nature. So my immediate concern was: am I perpetuating a harmful shame culture by being so enthusiastic about budgeting?

But today, I had a small analogy-epiphany about it. In my view, budgeting isn’t the idea of dieting that says consuming is sinful, taking up space is sinful, your natural inclinations are evil and must be punished, good things must be “earned” and aren’t there to simply be enjoyed.

Rather, I think that budgeting is much closer to the idea that I subscribe to re: bodies and food and exercise. Namely: you exist and you do things. Eating food lets you do things, food is fuel, you need food in order to let your body do all this amazing stuff. It’s not a perfect philosophy; for example, it doesn’t address the frequent moralizing about disability or the ableism that can permeate even fat-positive spaces. But in general, I’ve found it the best way for me to conceptualize food and exercise and weight. Having A Body is the thing that lets me Do Stuff. That’s awesome.

In a similar fashion, having a budget (knowing what you are spending money on, and making sure that you are spending money on what you want to spend money on) is Having A Finance that lets you Do Stuff.

In your life, you undoubtedly have goals. Are you hoping to purchase a house? Send your children to college without the crippling burden of student debt? Pay off your own debts? Save for your retirement? Having a budget lets you actively choose those long-term goals in addition to living your day-to-day life now. (And unlike calories, dollars really are a zero sum game: dollars in, dollars out. Finance is binary like that in a way that Bodies are not.)

My personal view is that the best first step is to look at your Descriptive Budget: what am I currently spending money on? How do those expenses stack up against my total household income? How many of those expenses are recurring (mortgage) or periodic (car insurance)? And is my income biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or irregular (e.g. book advance)? Taking all of those things into account for the Descriptive Budget will help you formulate a Prescriptive Budget if you find you are over-spending on some things (like travel, or cute enamel pins on Etsy, or whatever).

To bring the analogy back around full circle: The actual, harmful, diet-culture-equivalent thing for Finance would be something akin to the Prosperity Gospel: the idea that you are only worthy if your income, or net worth, or whatever is above a certain level. That is the unhealthy thinking, in the world of personal finance.

But the healthy thing – the thing I’m advocating for, in all of my “being the finance nerd” in my social circles, is this: We should focus on the Stuff We Want To Do (save for future? go on trips to broaden our horizons?), and then take actions so that we can accomplish that Stuff.

Don’t look at the number on the scale. Don’t look at the total net worth in your spreadsheet. Look at what you’re able to do, look at what you want to do, and remember those long-term goals when you are making short-term spending decisions!

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Teenage exceptionalism

When I was in high school, I think a junior or a senior, I read “Anthem” by Ayn Rand and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, more or less back to back. I loved those stories. They fed into my sense of being uniquely special, like I was somehow above the more pedestrian order of my peers.

As I got older, I started to understand the political irony of enjoying those two authors. (I never read anything else by Rand, though I did go on to read more Vonnegut.) But as I grow older still, I’m starting to realize that the ideological space between them is not as wide as I had thought.

This week, I was talking to a friend who was shocked and horrified that I liked Anthem. (She saw through the pandering when she read it.) We discussed other books from our childhoods that had the same theme of “you are the best, you are the chosen one, no one understands you.”

Some of that just feels like normal Hero’s Journey stuff, right? Like, it’s innocuous. But if you dig deeper, you start to realize that there’s a pretty significant difference between Ender Wiggin and Frodo Baggins. “The ends justify the means” type stuff. (To be fair, Card did cover that in the sequels, before he really went off the deep end.)

And I know it’s weird, but once I started to think about that, I started realizing that over-identification with Ender was kind of a yellow flag in people I’d known in the past. Not always a red flag, not always a guarantee of rigidity in thinking and a need to be always right; but a yellow flag for sure.

For myself, I categorize this growing realization as my process of shifting from a Ravenclaw to a Hufflepuff. I don’t have to be the smartest one in the room anymore. (And, more importantly, by letting go of that need, I’m able to recognize when other people *are* smarter than me, and to learn from them! Anytime you’re the smartest person in the room you’re missing a huge opportunity.) What I have to do is work as hard as I can on the stuff I am good at, the stuff I am doing, and try to hold everything together in a world that sometimes feels like it’s spinning out of control.

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Existing While Happy

I have a good relationship with my mother and with my daughter.

Today I’ve been talking with a friend about the difficulty of celebrating holidays like Mother’s Day, where everything is so fraught and there’s this constant background rhythm of “but what about the people with abusive mothers, what about the people who are infertile” and so forth.

I don’t have any good answers for this. This post is not an epiphany. But I think part of the issue might be the universality and inescapability of the Internet as a public square. I mean, think about Mother’s Day when I was a child. You spend the day at home with your parents, like you do. Maybe you go out to brunch. You telephone your grandma. If you’re missing a grandma, maybe you light a votive candle for her or something else in your tradition.

If you’re a person for whom Mother’s Day brings up painful memories, then you just avoid going out to brunch spots that morning. You don’t call your mom, for one reason or another different reason. It’s not possible to escape the Hallmark noise about mothers, but at least the raucous joy of your peers is muted for you, and you can have a quiet introspective day on your own.

But with the Internet, there is no quiet introspection; it is a binary. You can either have Everything All Of The Time, or you can have Nothing and sit in radio silence, alone. I think this goes triple during the pandemic; so much of our socialization is now online that shutting off the Internet feels like dying.

And along with that, I think there’s a subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to dial back our public-to-internet celebrations. But I think the distinction matters, between “I am celebrating in my own space” and “I am forcing you to celebrate in your space.” It’s just that the Internet blurs that distinction.

I don’t have any good answers for this. Like I said up top, there is no epiphany here.

  1. I love my mom.
  2. My daughter is the light of my life.
  3. I see the friends who have complex feelings today, and I respect their decisions regarding how to interact with the Internet during the month of May.
  4. GOTO 1.

Bonus content: this cat and her possum!

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdgsPDGJ/

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Old Bay and Crabs and Black-Eyed Susans

I live in Maryland. Despite my familial shellfish allergy, I really like it here!

But one thing that always bugs me is when people dump all over the state because they don’t like it.

Here’s the thing: A place, taken in isolation, is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The question of its value only comes in when somebody looks at the place and thinks: is this good for me?

I used to work with a junior airman who, one day, asked the world writ large: Why do they always build military bases in such shitty places?

After I stopped laughing, I explained to him that before the forts are built, these places are just random rural small towns. They don’t turn shitty until the local enterprising businessfolk realize there’s a profit to be made on the gullibility, fear, and desire of naive young men (and, nowadays, an increasing number of women!) concentrated in a single geographic region.

So when the base goes up, so do the tattoo parlors and massage parlors and strip parlors. Those places beget secondary effects, like payday loan places and pawn shops (which our quintessential junior enlisted might themself take advantage of). A military base is a force of concentrated poverty and desperation in a community, and that’s why we all think it’s bad. (And I am eliding, here, all the problematic things that make “us” think the stuff I listed there is “bad;” the only truly bad things I see in my list are the predatory ones. But that’s not the point of this post.)

So when I see people say “I hate Maryland,” I have a very different reaction than I used to. Before, I would get indignant and defend it. Tempers flare, as I’m sure you’re all shocked to hear. But now, I try to be more measured; and I try to make the point that it’s okay to prefer different geographical locations. It’s okay that you want to live in the Rockies or whatever, and that doesn’t reflect on my love for the Appalachians in any way.

Just please own that preference instead of acting like your preferences are the objective truth of the world, yeah? Thank you.