Living in Financial Fear

Carol and I enjoyed a peaceful night last night.

We played cribbage on the screened in porch and talked about..................stuff.

I am forcing Carol to play as much cribbage as is humanly possible.

I am The Cribbage Idiot. Kind of like The Village Idiot, only card related.

We play once a week with an awesome crew of psychopaths. We laugh a lot.

There are five of us. The other four are lightening fast; they compute their hands and their cribs like butter. Effortlessly. Like cribbage is them and they are cribbage.

I, on the other hand, lay my cards down and add them up like a person who has never been exposed to math, a person who doesn't even know what order numbers progress in. Tortuously slow. Like cribbage is calculus.

I miss a lot. I miss something on almost every hand. Something that someone else has to gently point out to me.

It is embarrassing.

I am committed to overcoming my cribbage cretinism and am studying and playing hard. It is possible I will never learn how to play the game intelligently. Not everybody can do everything. 

If I never get any better, at least I will know I have tried as hard as I can.

I don't really force Carol to play. We enjoy it. It allows us to interact rather than falling asleep in front of the TV.

Talking money last night. The mythical "extra check."

Three paychecks last month. Carol was talking about some extra cash and how she was going shopping for some clothes. I told her I am going to buy a used tablet.

We were feeling good.

She called me from work this morning in a controlled panic to tell me she miscalculated, we don't have any extra money and the mortgage must be paid out of today's check. So don't go out and buy a tablet.

I don't believe in extra checks. If we took that money and enjoyed an extravagant dinner, a movie, spoiled ourselves a little with some new clothes, I would believe in an extra check.

In reality that check goes right down the toilet and into the hands of our creditors.

Means nothing.

This is how we live. This is how you live. This is how most of everybody lives.

Looking over our shoulders, tied through fear to a budget that strips away any chance at dignity.

And fun.

It is not defensible to whine about it though. As long as we are alive the opportunity exists to change the balance of power.

To get more money.

I am pretty sure we can get more money. I am just not sure how. But the belief that I can do something to get more money is the only thing that keeps me going financially.

Typically I say "Let's get a pizza", and Carol says "We can't afford a whole pizza. We can afford two slices as long as we don't buy drinks. Water works just fine."

I would like to change that to "Hey let's go out for dinner to that fine Italian joint we love, then we can go to a movie. And before we do that let's stop in to Neiman Marcus to pick up that killer cocktail dress you've been coveting."

Life is all about reducing fear.