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*stares blankly at the wall*
I opened this window to do something, I was going to write about– huh. assorted things. i think. my goodness i am tired. health insurance and housing, and confusion.
well #1 I need to get my supervisor to write a letter I can send to the health insurance people explaining my income because since I’m part-time seasonal my last two paychecks, which happen to be nearly-full-time, are not representative of my income and will not entitle me to the degree of subsidy I ought to be able to get through NYS’s health insurance exchange, so I sat all day long and could not make my mouth open to mention it to him, so I’m going to have to send him an email and hope he doesn’t think I’m super weird that I couldn’t say it out loud. my god it would not come out of my mouth, i even rehearsed the words to say, and could not do it, I don’t know what’s up with me and verbal communication but it’s just fucking unreal. I even wrote the damn letter, did all the math to work out what I need, the whole thing. Couldn’t say anything. Ugh.
and #2 Dude’s mom owns the house we live in, and had been planning on leaving it to Dude and his only sibling (sister) in her will, but was like, why should I wait until I die, let’s just do this now (she recently went on some kick where she figured out that her mother had died when she was 12 years older than she herself is now, so in her mind she’s got 12 years left to do Everything, I don’t ask, she’s a weird dude and very similar to my guy so I’m generally amused but sometimes a little alarmed), and Dude to me was like, is there any reason we shouldn’t buy out my sister’s share in this house we’ve lived in for ten years, and I was like, no; I only live here part-time but there’s still no reason not to own it. We pay basically nothing in rent and so it will cost us more to actually sort it all out properly, but, then we’d own it and could sell it etc so that makes sense. So, sure, no big; then we could actually make repairs to it instead of sort of letting it gently fall down around our ears. I mean, it’s not, but it needs work that we don’t want to ask his mom to do but also don’t want to do if we don’t own it.
But. I sort of told myself that not being married to Dude was fine because we don’t have kids or own property, and then we’d own property. Or, he would, and then I’d sure feel weird about that. But, if we’re married, we’ll owe more in taxes– we just will, the marriage exemption is a farce– and then I won’t be eligible for low-cost health insurance anymore, and his company doesn’t actually provide it, he has to buy unsubsidized insurance on the exchange. It’s astonishing how much that costs. I’d be right there with him. You’d think there’d be some discount on insurance for two people but there isn’t, not really– I think they’re assuming you’ll be having babies, so it’s mucho expensivo. So we literally can’t really afford to get married. And anyway, he doesn’t want to, he turned me down when I asked (he just said why? thanks buddy) and I’ve kind of felt like shit about that ever since. I’ll be fucked if I bring that sore fucking topic up again. So i’m just going to either not have my name on the deed or just co-own a house with a dude, no big. I don’t even know.
anyway isn’t it great that I’m super terrible at being a fucking adult. mentioned the possible house deal to my parents and they offered $$$ to help, and that’s fine, I know my parents try to be scrupulously fair about giving assistance to their offspring, and have given my older sister a lot of time and expense in travel for babysitting, my middle-little a ton of cash to pay for grad school and similar, and Farmsister, well, tons of incidental money and short-term loans and also co-signing on their mortgage and babysitting their child two whole days a week, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to accept assistance in buying a house, nor would it be unfair, because I haven’t really needed anything from them since college, and I’m incidentally super pleased that my parents have spare money now they’ve retired because they sure as fuck didn’t the entire time I was their actual dependent (I mean that, it was hard on them too), but also, I think, that is a lot to think about and I think Dude will be vaguely insulted by offers of money but you know, my guy, I put your skinny ass through college on my fucking credit cards, do not roll your eyes at me. (I paid them off. then he got a job that paid good money. In that order. Important.)
I feel like these two issues are such a good encapsulation of the trap of my generation/socioeconomic caste, though. Like, I have money, I can get money, good for me, I’m not complaining, it’s a damn sight better than many, but I don’t really have like, regular money that I can count on, nor do I have any real guarantee of stability. Dude makes a great salary at his job, it’s literally five (six?) times what I make per hour, it’s a great job. (Software engineer.) But he’s also aware that jobs in his industry rarely last more than three or four years at the outside, and also that programmers older than forty, mayybe 45, rarely get hired. He’s 37 and staring down the barrel of being unemployable. Ageism is impossible to prove, but he watches it happen all the time. By now he’s the old man on any given team. And his company is great, but they’re expressly a startup looking for a bigger company to buy them out; that’s happened numerous times to Dude, and it always, always sucks for the actual dev team when that happens, and is often the reason why jobs don’t last more than three or four years.
It’s grim. You don’t want to make any promises. You don’t want to do anything that moves you away from the things you’ve used to survive. I’ve spent my entire life insecure and never believing that anything I had would really be mine next time I checked.
I’m so tired. And I can’t fucking concentrate. And I keep running into things where I’m paralyzed and can’t just– do the thing that would fix it. It’s exhausting.
I’m lucky.
I can’t keep up.
Hey though I just managed to take a shower, which I’ve been trying to get myself to do for a solid couple days now, so there’s that. (I mean. I didn’t smell bad, and I never wash my hair more than once a week, so that wasn’t any worse than usual, but. I really wanted a real shower, you know? Why is that hard? I don’t know, but I’ve been fucking paralyzed about it.)
*stares blankly at the wall*
I opened this window to do something, I was going to write about– huh. assorted things. i think. my goodness i am tired. health insurance and housing, and confusion.
well #1 I need to get my supervisor to write a letter I can send to the health insurance people explaining my income because since I’m part-time seasonal my last two paychecks, which happen to be nearly-full-time, are not representative of my income and will not entitle me to the degree of subsidy I ought to be able to get through NYS’s health insurance exchange, so I sat all day long and could not make my mouth open to mention it to him, so I’m going to have to send him an email and hope he doesn’t think I’m super weird that I couldn’t say it out loud. my god it would not come out of my mouth, i even rehearsed the words to say, and could not do it, I don’t know what’s up with me and verbal communication but it’s just fucking unreal. I even wrote the damn letter, did all the math to work out what I need, the whole thing. Couldn’t say anything. Ugh.
and #2 Dude’s mom owns the house we live in, and had been planning on leaving it to Dude and his only sibling (sister) in her will, but was like, why should I wait until I die, let’s just do this now (she recently went on some kick where she figured out that her mother had died when she was 12 years older than she herself is now, so in her mind she’s got 12 years left to do Everything, I don’t ask, she’s a weird dude and very similar to my guy so I’m generally amused but sometimes a little alarmed), and Dude to me was like, is there any reason we shouldn’t buy out my sister’s share in this house we’ve lived in for ten years, and I was like, no; I only live here part-time but there’s still no reason not to own it. We pay basically nothing in rent and so it will cost us more to actually sort it all out properly, but, then we’d own it and could sell it etc so that makes sense. So, sure, no big; then we could actually make repairs to it instead of sort of letting it gently fall down around our ears. I mean, it’s not, but it needs work that we don’t want to ask his mom to do but also don’t want to do if we don’t own it.
But. I sort of told myself that not being married to Dude was fine because we don’t have kids or own property, and then we’d own property. Or, he would, and then I’d sure feel weird about that. But, if we’re married, we’ll owe more in taxes– we just will, the marriage exemption is a farce– and then I won’t be eligible for low-cost health insurance anymore, and his company doesn’t actually provide it, he has to buy unsubsidized insurance on the exchange. It’s astonishing how much that costs. I’d be right there with him. You’d think there’d be some discount on insurance for two people but there isn’t, not really– I think they’re assuming you’ll be having babies, so it’s mucho expensivo. So we literally can’t really afford to get married. And anyway, he doesn’t want to, he turned me down when I asked (he just said why? thanks buddy) and I’ve kind of felt like shit about that ever since. I’ll be fucked if I bring that sore fucking topic up again. So i’m just going to either not have my name on the deed or just co-own a house with a dude, no big. I don’t even know.
anyway isn’t it great that I’m super terrible at being a fucking adult. mentioned the possible house deal to my parents and they offered $$$ to help, and that’s fine, I know my parents try to be scrupulously fair about giving assistance to their offspring, and have given my older sister a lot of time and expense in travel for babysitting, my middle-little a ton of cash to pay for grad school and similar, and Farmsister, well, tons of incidental money and short-term loans and also co-signing on their mortgage and babysitting their child two whole days a week, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to accept assistance in buying a house, nor would it be unfair, because I haven’t really needed anything from them since college, and I’m incidentally super pleased that my parents have spare money now they’ve retired because they sure as fuck didn’t the entire time I was their actual dependent (I mean that, it was hard on them too), but also, I think, that is a lot to think about and I think Dude will be vaguely insulted by offers of money but you know, my guy, I put your skinny ass through college on my fucking credit cards, do not roll your eyes at me. (I paid them off. then he got a job that paid good money. In that order. Important.)
I feel like these two issues are such a good encapsulation of the trap of my generation/socioeconomic caste, though. Like, I have money, I can get money, good for me, I’m not complaining, it’s a damn sight better than many, but I don’t really have like, regular money that I can count on, nor do I have any real guarantee of stability. Dude makes a great salary at his job, it’s literally five (six?) times what I make per hour, it’s a great job. (Software engineer.) But he’s also aware that jobs in his industry rarely last more than three or four years at the outside, and also that programmers older than forty, mayybe 45, rarely get hired. He’s 37 and staring down the barrel of being unemployable. Ageism is impossible to prove, but he watches it happen all the time. By now he’s the old man on any given team. And his company is great, but they’re expressly a startup looking for a bigger company to buy them out; that’s happened numerous times to Dude, and it always, always sucks for the actual dev team when that happens, and is often the reason why jobs don’t last more than three or four years.
It’s grim. You don’t want to make any promises. You don’t want to do anything that moves you away from the things you’ve used to survive. I’ve spent my entire life insecure and never believing that anything I had would really be mine next time I checked.
I’m so tired. And I can’t fucking concentrate. And I keep running into things where I’m paralyzed and can’t just– do the thing that would fix it. It’s exhausting.
I’m lucky.
I can’t keep up.
Hey though I just managed to take a shower, which I’ve been trying to get myself to do for a solid couple days now, so there’s that. (I mean. I didn’t smell bad, and I never wash my hair more than once a week, so that wasn’t any worse than usual, but. I really wanted a real shower, you know? Why is that hard? I don’t know, but I’ve been fucking paralyzed about it.)
