Possibly part one of oh so very many.
Like I say in the vid, I could go on and on.
I was surprised at just how cathartic making that video was. It did me a remarkable amount of good to get all that off my chest.
So much so that for that reason alone, I am probably going to revisit the subject. I clearly have a lot of deep seated issues regarding the Boomers and being the brilliant communicator that I am, I might just be able to explain them in a way that my fellow Gen X people will enjoy and maybe even find cathartic themselves.
Who knows, maybe I can become the voice of my people!
What, it could happen!
There’s money to be had in being the most eloquent complainer. I think.
I posted my vid to r/GenX on Reddit. I’ve been hanging out there lately. Feels good to communicate with people who speak my language, so to speak.
Perhaps I have felt generationally displaced for a long time without knowing it.
Thank God I have my Gen X friends to talk to and share my brutally cynical and darkly satirical POV with. As the vid of the day shows, I have a lot of observations about the world that I am guessing subsequent generations would find quite toxic.
Although who knows. Maybe with the right packaging, I could be a sort of dark guru to Gen Z kids, telling them what is really going on and shedding some (black) light on the things in their lives that don’t make any sense.
They do make sense, kids. It’s just a really harsh kind of sense. Buckle up.
Today’s been alright. I am fairly certain that I can afford to order in tonight, although I haven’t crunched the numbers yet so I can’t be sure.
They’re not very crunchy numbers. Could do it on pen and paper if I wanted. But I will crunch them all the same so I know what I can get away with.
Haven’t run out of cans of pop yet. So the consequences of my deciding to not get a fridge buddy this week hasn’t had consequences yet.
It could be that there won’t be any. I might have had enough cans “in the pipeline” to see me through the week. Ya never know.
Without actually going to the kitchen and counting them, anyway.
But whatever. This entire experiment was predicated on the idea that if I went without the cans for a week it wouldn’t bother me all that much.
And I really miss ordering in. It’s the thing that most makes me feel like I am a real, competent, grown up type person who can participate in society.
Poverty isolates you from that. When you can’t do the fun things everyone else does because you can’t afford it, it really gives you that “Tiny Tim looking at the toy carousel through the toy shop window” feeling of being shut out of normal society. .
Poverty can make a ghost out of anyone.
So hopefully tonight’s ordering in will make me feel better, assuming that it doesn’t end up outside the door to the building or some other such catastrophe.
Worst case scenario, I can nuke a pot pie, but losing that money would break my fragile heart. I have way too much invested in this little treat.
Both financially and emotionally.
But oh well. I can’t control whether my DoorDash dude is a fucking idiot or whether some unpredictable and suspiciously improbable series of events will somehow fuck me over and it will be all my fault, technically.
But I have to try. I need a little sunshine in my life right now.
I’ve been in Siberia for far too long.
More after the break.
It made it!
I ordered Donair Dude and it arrived without issue.
Halle fuckin’ lujah.
I crunched the numbers, and they were crunchier than I thought they would be because I apparently slipped a mental gasket and forgot what calculation I should be doing and it took me some time to re-sync with my higher brain functions.
No, take beginning of the month income, divide it by five for the five weeks (grr) of this month, that gets you your per week budget, then multiply that by four to cover the four weeks remaining, now you have how much you should have come this Wednesday.
The difference between that and how much you have right now is your spendable.
Take out the remaining expenses of this week – $30 for Denny’s tomorrow, $20 for McD’s on Tuesday – and whatever remains of the spendable can go to ordering in.
And that covered my Donair Dude pretty much exactly. Woohoo!
Ya know, now that I have written it all out, I can see how that would seem like an impenetrable wall of number talk to someone less mathy than I.
I swear, it seems a lot less complicated in my head.
But I get it. Not everyone has the circuits in their brain to deal with complex quantitative reasoning. The fact that they can, in theory, do all the basic arithmetical calculations needed for the spiel I went into just now does not confer the ability to treat quantity like a baker treats dough.
Luckily, there’s people like me around who understand that kind of thing and unlike many corrupt products of the modern financial industry, I’m actually on your side.
I should have become an accountant. Or a lawyer. Or both.
Or at the very least a lawyer who does his own accounting.
Oh, I suppose I could still go to law school. Do pre-law at some decent undergrad institute (so not Kwantlen) then law school (in Halifax, so I would be close to home) then study to pass the bar and finally become a halfassed lawyer right before I died.
Might not be a bad way to go out, though, if I can get the right kind of cushy scholarships so that I can live a comfortable student life.
At least I’d be doing something with myself!
Of course, that assumes the Onion doesn’t snatch me up.
In that case, fuck law, I’m too funny for that shit!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.