yesterday's buds of tomorrow

[fflo]

From yesterday, on the way out of the office. Just about to burst with it, aren't they?


In yesterday's mail was one of those This Is Your Life in "Earnings" things the Social Security Administration sends out. You know the things I mean, right? Shows you in a little list how much money you made in every year you earned money that had Social Security taken out of it?

I used to look at the thing and think how little money I've made, through the years, and maybe feel a bit like a fuck-up, or have crop up some of those worries of it all catching up with me, having not been Responsible. Look, here's the evidence of one major version of that in digits in type in a couple of inches of a column of a sheet of paper totalling up all that I have officially earned.

This time it seemed all about ebbs and flows. My first year of income was a 3-digit figure (before the decimal). It's gone up to as many as 5, but not been steadily there through my adulthood.

Yesterday before I went in to the duck drama I sat in the car looking at the curve the changing lengths made, and noting the corresponding years, thinking about what was happening in the rest of my life (there is life apart from earnings, I maintain) as the numbers went up or down.

Don't guess I'm going to get to quit working and go driving around the country again. Those were the best of times & the worst of times.

But I might well have more best of times and worst of times.

One can hope.

Anybody have feelings about those statements? I realize I've never talked about them with anyone other than a co-habitating partner.

Comments

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

I have received those statements in past years. (Not last year for some reason.) In my younger years, up to about age 38, I spent a lot of sucky time unemployed. It was a great relief to get one of those statements that said I had worked my 40 quarters and was eligible for Social Security when I was 62 & 1/2. In recent years I have seen a steady and regular increase in income.

The painful thing I have noticed is how rarely time, money, and health all come together at once to really enjoy life.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

That's a hard one, that one about having money at the same time you have time. And health. Including the mental version thereof.

I do take some comfort in the string of recent years of gainful full-time moneyraking, if with pointed awareness of the irony that the need to be frugal is greater now than pretty much ever, for me. And the old difficulty of accepting the trade-off of half of my waking hours on most of my days.