Fast foward/previously, on blog/since last we spoke catch up: We bought a house. It's not everything I dreamed but it's pretty damn awesome, I can hardly believe this place is ours, and I love living here with my husband and the cats. It felt like home right away (except the basement, more on that later, yay for you!), and being able to do laundry or dishes or pretty much whatever we'd want or need to do without fretting that we might disturb our neighbors is great. Our very shiny fridge has an icemaker! In the door! I am in perpetual marvel that this is where I am in life, that I am here with my husband, that I am with my husband, and that despite the fuck ups of my young adulthood I am writing a blog entry on my laptop on my table in my dining room in my house in a neighborhood I like in a city I love, listening to powwow-step music and grooving like a crazy woman in one of six chairs that go with the aforementioned table.
Today I went to Target to get what I needed to make dinner. I didn't have to worry about the card I use for groceries and household supplies being declined. I didn't have to worry about the store being closed. I didn't have to walk, because as much as I rag on it the Buick continues to run, and I didn't have to worry about putting gas in it either, because husband extraordinaire was kind enough to fill up the tank for me when he drove my car last weekend.
I'm saying my life is cushy. Remarkably so. I am lucky in ways I sometimes have trouble articulating, and often believing. I don't rely (directly) on the federal government to employ me, and there has been no talk of furlough from either of the jobs I do have. Reading that many "nonessential" (jesus, what great terminology to apply to people) personnel will have four hours in the morning to get their shit together and get out of their offices for an UNKNOWN amount of time is gripping me in my cushy dining room with a sort of fear, nonetheless. Government means stable, right? Stupid, made up of fractious individuals, tripping over itself... but still stable. Tripping, not shuddering to a stop.
But we're stopped. I was even more cushioned the last time the news says this happened, when Clinton was president. I was a child and I had no idea this was happening then-- or that it had ever happened. That it has calms my panic (and I don't mean to make it seem like this is crushing me or I am personally on the brink, because here in my dining room I am quite safe even as this scares me; it scares me, but I am not in any peril, I know), in a morbid way. And it makes me squirm, but a childish part of me has been reading about some of the lead up to this and thinking "Just shut it down, you fucking fuckwits. Stop prancing about and blowing hot air about saving the people and shut it all down so we can see you're not going to do a damn thing to save them, or keep the government from shutting down. Let your constituents see how you voted and what you said while this happened. Let them know your own comparatively gigantic income was never under the slightest threat. Let the country know you think the Smithsonian, the National Zoo, Yellowstone, and all the monuments and especially all the people who work there can collectively go fuck themselves, whatever, you're in an even cushier spot than I am and you are not giving the slightest impression that you give the most infinitesimal of real, actual fucks about this. Your posturing only proves what a pathetic fraud of a public servant you are."
But now that they have done it (by not doing something, anything else), I'm shocked. And sad. And worried. Again, not for me, not directly. I'm not trying to brag about this privilege. I have not earned its benefits. But they are mine, and that makes a difference in the way I experience what's going on. My husband's income allows us to live in the very comfortable way I've discussed. My income alone would not. I am quite sure that the combined income of many families is not enough to live the way we do. I am certain that there are people with children who will be going unpaid as of tomorrow.
What the fuck is that?
