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

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i've had some thoughts similar to some of those, fer sure. jealous of your debt load, too.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I have to give my ex credit for reforming herself into a cheapskate (as did I) for the last few years of our marriage. We spent three or four years successfully beating down something close to $40,000 of credit card debt. I recall the strategy involved a rather severe definition of frivolous vs. necessary spending, and a small but real frivolity budget in the form of cash in pcoket. We split ourselves into adult halves and a kid halves. The adult halve only bought boring survival stuff with checks or debit cards. The kid halves relearned to save their alloweances for fun stuff. And we kept a big ol' graph of our credit card debt on the refrigerator. Watching it go down was satisfying, and I remember even holding a ruler up to it to see when it would cross zero.