the future is election day
We're living in the future, apparently, because this political video takes all your personal information and photos from facebook and uploads them to the Matrix, and by the Matrix I mean a Move On dot Org ad staring the boobs of that girl from House. It's worth signing in and watching, if only to be tickled by your own cute mug thrown into the Terminator ride at Universal Studies. Oh, and don't forget to vote.
wow you guys
To whoever anonymously sent us a Trader Joe's gift card in the mail:
Wow. Thank you. That's crazy nice.
Also, I feel rather sheepishly embarrassed, as this means that my level of outward groaning to the poor souls who count themselves my friends has unfortunately matched my inner din of woe and anxiety. We had a rather difficult October finance-wise, you see. Some big bills came in, cash flow has been an issue, and for a while I've been checking my bank account balance before every trip to the supermarket.
Don't get me wrong; we're not going hungry. We have enough money to buy the ingredients to many meals of the rice or pasta or cheesy variety. It's only with the fancier food that I like to serve Harvey and my pregnant belly, like chicken and fresh fruit, that sometimes makes me feel like I'm some sort of shabby Dickinson character standing in the cold staring in a frosted window, a frosted window that looks in at the Whole Foods deli department.
The stress over our groceries lead me to look into the state-run food assistance programs SNAP and WIC. These programs offer assistance to families living at twice the poverty line, and it turns out we make like five hundred dollars a month more than that. Which is, obviously, a good thing. We should be able to afford everything we need in that case. Why can't we? Well, there's that pesky student loan debt that holds us up for a thousand bucks each month. Then the house that we own that amazingly costs money just sitting here getting more broken. Then insurance on the stupid cars - when is the tea party movement going to take up that issue, huh?
Which all reveal, and this is why I feel sheepish for my complaining, that we've made some lifestyle choices that brought us here, and if it's difficult sometimes I should just lie in the bed I've sold out from under us. I could have taken the high-travel job and flew away from my family one week each month. I couldn't bear it. I took the layoff instead. Then we chose to get pregnant again, effectively rendering me unemployable. That wasn't without conscious effort. And then we spend almost $500 a month on maternity care so that we can stay out of the hospital. All these are totally stupid choices by conventional American standards, yet totally unavoidable choices for us.
And yet, says the complaining part of my brain, haven't I given it a good college try? Haven't I given up everything to try to raise my child? I quit the gym. I haven't had a haircut in over a year. I make Harvey's clothes so we don't buy new ones. I wash my face and my hair with baking soda.
Literally, the only thing we spend money on outside of unavoidable bills is food. Is it so bad to want a fricking pineapple when you're growing another human being on the inside of your body?
Okay complaining part of my brain, turn off please. We're not starving to death. I've only made jokes about us starving to death because even though we aren't literally starving to death sometimes it just feels like I have a mental framework of starving to death.
So thank you anonymous friends for the gift card. It comes at a very very welcome time. I promise I'll stop griping.