You pay into the system your entire life and you are finally old enough to ask the government for some of the money back. You jump through the hoops they have set up, hoops ringed in fire (it seems) and you do everything they ask. You fill out the forms, you cross your fingers and trust the mail delivery, you stand in line and you wait for their decision. Will I be worthy? Will my 50 year work history make me redeemable according to the Government Lists? Will they grant me a small, tiny stipend each month or cast me out like old banana peels, into the wasteland?
Yes, it is a bit dramatic but if you have gone through any government agency for monetary help, like social security or unemployment or disability, you will know what I mean. At times you feel like a small hamster, rubbing your teeny paws together, hoping the Big People will give you something. A small bite of an apple. A pellet. Anything.
And so this week I received what I call the "Granting Your Wish" letter from Social InSecurity telling me I will indeed get "wife benefits" (lower case) and they will start, perhaps, if I am lucky, in July. Or sometime, whenever those government people think it's the right time. I cannot convey how happy I am to get this. For me at my lame-ass wages, it's like getting another paycheck every month! Now, if you know me at all, you know my income is pretty small, netting out at about $28,000 each year, so this extra income is awesome. YAY! That's what I say: YAY!
I will be working for a long time, of course, but my work will fund my own SS account so when I am 70 my benefits will be more than what I am getting now (half of John's) and thus it will be even better. Yes, I will be older then and more tired, but still, any extra $$$ is always welcome. I figure I have until 76 before I have to start thinking about slowing down. And even that is speculative.
Because of this, I can plan on taking some sojourns away from here. Because of this, I can perhaps qualify for a better place to live, ON MY OWN, sooner than later. Because of this I won't have to work six days a week for the rest of my life. Because of this, I will feel safer, financially. It's a huge thing.
Thank you, FDR, for this amazing government entitlement program that still works. I am so grateful.
more to follow......
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Yes, everyone has already seen this movie but it took me this long to find it for free on TV.
I must say that it was different than what I expected. I guess all the reviews I read didn't stick because I was expecting Beach Boys with Brian Wilson and the movie is Brian Wilson. And some Beach Boys.
But it was good, although dark and sad and what a waste of a chunk of a guy's life. The end notes tell of a happier time for Brian Wilson, married to Melinda, five kids, still playing and singing.
As a teenager, the Beach Boys were, in some ways, a bigger influence on me than the Beatles. Growing up in a surfer beach culture, the Beach Boys transcended music, they were iconic to us little wanna-be surfer girls. The Beatles went on to change music and how it was experienced, but at high school sock hops we never heard crappy Beatles covers. It was all about crappy Beach Boy covers and Jan and Dean and the Drifters and even the Dave Clark Five, but not the Beatles. The Beatles were huge in my high school days but I suppose it was because we lived close to the ocean, surfer bands were what we identified with. So strange to think about that now.
Anyway, it's a good movie. Check it out.
Oh, alone life, how I have missed you!
Steve is on a rafting trip for five days. I am house and dog sitting for him in Kenwood. It is, to me, paradise. I am alone there and I wish I didn't have to go to work, it would be 100% even better.
Kenwood is just a small village-like town, faced on Hwy. 12 with at least 15 tasting rooms and wineries, but when you leave that behind, when you step away from the commerce and the congestion, it's a lovely place to live. Neighbors know each other, there are gorgeous gardens and huge shady trees and it smells really nice. Steve has a small house with a very nice covered porch and there I spend my time. I woke up at his house on Friday morning and I did nothing except read and walk the dogs and I made a very short foray into Glen Ellen to get some groceries. I didn't even take a shower! (But I did wash my face and brush my teeth.) At one point I sat there and just looked at the trees in my line of sight: blooming magnolias, fruit trees, Acacia, Hawthorne, old oaks, buckeye and walnut trees, and so many more. Steve's backyard has 50 grapevines planted and the rest is a mess, rangy and weedy but with a ton of sage that attracts bees and hummingbirds. When the sun hits the sage the entire yard smells so delicious. Red poppies, orange poppies, purple and yellow sage, red and pink roses, it's beautiful in its wild way.
This morning a hawk was on the phone wire for about a half hour, and a small squirrel wanted to cross another phone wire in a parallel line to the hawk. The squirrel would get about three feet from the hawk and the hawk would flap its wings and jump forward a bit, scooting the squirrel back, not letting it pass. The squirrel was persistent, trying several times until it retreated to its corner and waited. Finally the hawk flew away, after some hummingbirds buzzed it, and the squirrel cautiously scampered across the wire. Cooper watched this, of course, hoping with his entire small body that the squirrel would miss a step and fall down into his waiting arms mouth. He stood under that squirrel for ten minutes before he gave up.
This short sojourn of living alone has reinforced in me the need to get my own place. Steve is a slob in many ways but his house has his touch in it, has photos and paintings that he loves, has some cool furniture. My house has none of that. I put away most of my things when the roommate moved in and because the house doesn't feel like mine, I am not going to put it back out. But I want a place that feels like mine. I want a place of my own.
And by the end of the year, I will have that. It's a promise I am making to myself.
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Seriously, a few weeks ago I wrote a blog and the title included "Thelma and Louse" and no one called me on that? It should have been"Thelma and Louise" not LOUSE.
But maybe you all read that blog thinking there would be something about Thelma and a louse, instead of Louise. Could that be the case? Did I miss an opportunity to write a great essay about how much of a louse Louise was as compared to Thelma? It could be the basis of an entire thesis, I suppose..... Thelma, the meek little housewife who jumps for joy at getting to go on a "fishing trip" with her worldly friend Louise, who shoots the guy who tries to rape Thelma in the first 15 minutes of the film and then refuses to let them drive safely to Mexico because she is such a LOUSE that she won't let them go through Texas. And so they die. That is pretty lousy.
Wow. I don't actually think I was going down that path but who knows? But no, I wouldn't have thought that no matter what. I loved that movie, and I loved Louise, and Thelma, too. But you sit yourself down at the computer and start typing quickly and I bet you will type Louse instead of Louise a couple of times, incorrectly. At least I have done it. And thus the Thelma and Louse legend was created.
OK, this is obviously about nothing so I am quitting now. Thelma and Louse need to go to bed as well.
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This will actually be a house of my own for a few days. Steve is taking off on a rafting trip in Oregon (thanks to my encouragement) and I am house and dog sitting for him in Kenwood. Can I explain how happy this makes me? Probably not, but let's just say that I am mentally jumping for joy. His house is perfect for one person (or two, since he and Martha designed it) and it is less than 5 miles from where I work, it's in a great neighborhood and his dog is charming and likes my dog, his garden is lush and overrun with wild sage, herbs and poppies and he has a 50 plant vineyard in the yard, the house stays cool even in hot weather and there is NO ROOMMATE and there is a Weber grill, a great kitchen and a huge comfortable bed, there are restaurants abounding withing a few miles and the guy who works on my car is a block away and will do my oil change while I am there and I could go on and on but that's enough.
At least five nights in a house by myself. And he has real TV so I can watch the Warriors and the Giants and junk TV at will. And he has a wine cellar that will not tattle if I pull out a great (but not too great) bottle of wine and drink it because he won't know until he returns. And so much more. AND NO ROOMMATE!!!
Ah, the joy of living alone, even for 5 nights, YAY! There is nothing else to say other than YAY.
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Check it out, streaming on Netflix, the story of Hilly Kristal opening what he thought was going to be the next Country Bluegrass Blues club (hence CBGB) but turned out to be the birthplace, in many ways, of the huge Punk and Rock scene of the 1980's. Kristal let pretty much anyone come and play and bands like Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Sting, and so many more all played there. It's not a documentary so artistic license is taken in the time line and the style of the place but from what I have read, it's fairly accurate.
It's a great look at that punk music scene. Whether you liked Patti Smith or the Ramones or any of the music in the movie, it doesn't really matter. It's a great look at one spot in New York at one specific time. And hey, the music kicks ass. Come on, who doesn't like David Byrne and the Talking Heads?
Check it out. Plus, it stars the great Alan Rickman as the almost sleazy Kristal, and it has Donal Logue, one of my favorite second string character actors. Anything that Alan Rickman is in counts as totally worth watching, at least in my book. If you like music of any kind, you might like this. No, if you like music of any kind, you will totally like this movie. Two thumbs up.
On the current best seller lists, "The Nest" is decent enough trash fiction. (Really, though, who buys all these trash fiction books and makes them Best Sellers? There must be a lot of people out there with tons of discretionary money, that's for sure.) Not a bad book, of course, but not a very good one, it is at least compelling enough to make you read on. The characters, mostly siblings in a very odd family (we could say dysfunctional but, hey, aren't we all in some ways?) are all eager for what they think is their share of the Nest, the money their dead father left them in trust. But what they find out is that one of the kids, the biggest screw-up, has managed to get his hands on most of the dough and thus there isn't much left for the rest of them. Oh gosh, what a pity. Everyone is pissed off most of the time and they aren't very likable and the writing isn't all that great but hey, I did finish it. But books like this make me wonder why they get all these stellar reviews. It isn't terribly well-written and the plot is rather old and over used. But I had a free copy, so I read it.
A much better book is one that will be released in a couple of months, a new one by Ann Patchett, one of my favorite writers. "Commonwealth" is again about families, not very solid ones, and again these characters are often fucked up and bordering on being intolerable. But since this book follows them from childhood to later adulthood, at least these guys have a chance to change and morph into something more than despicable and greedy. Patchett's writing is superb, of course, but in my opinion this wasn't as good as "Bel Canto" (well, not much is that good) or "State of Wonder." But of course there are moments of brilliant prose, like this: All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Or these two simple sentences: She could feel her own brittleness as the frozen air did battle with her coat. It was no worse than Chicago and still it was like walking into a wall of broken glass.
I will read anything Patchett writes, anytime, any day, any where. Even if it isn't my favorite of her novels, it makes me so grateful that writers like her exist and that they write things down and give them to us, the readers. What a gift we get by just reading their books.
Another book: "The Association of Small Bombs" by Karan Mahajan. Got a great review in NY Times and other places. It was good but I didn't love it. It almost felt like an apology of sorts, like "hey, I am sorry these terrible tragedies happen in our world, so here's a book about some of the people who were involved, I hope you don't hate them." I know, that's rather cold on my part, but it was like that for me. A bomb goes off in a market in Delhi, some people are killed, and yes, it's a book of our time. Bombs are going off everywhere, it seems, in Paris, in Beirut, all over the Middle East, and we here in the West can distance ourselves from it all. This book tries to make the distance smaller. It works, but it didn't move me as much as I wanted it to.
And some other books.... nothing really good other than some good junk from the library. My next challenge is to listen to Rachel Maddow reading her own book about the US military, "Drift." I wanted to read it but never have and lo and behold, it's on disc and is currently in my car, waiting to be heard.
OK, over and out for now. Time to call and order a pizza, something I do about 4 times a year. This is one of those times. Yummmm........
As I have whined about so many times, I work six days a week. Normally that means I spend my one day off, Friday, running errands, doing laundry, grocery shopping, just getting stuff done. But yesterday my roommate announced that she was going to be gone all day. All Day! I tried very, very hard to not burst out with "Awesome! That makes me so happy!" But that's how I felt. Therefore, I put all my chores on hold and decided to just take advantage of having the house to myself.
First I drove to Guerneville to have coffee with Jenn and collect some money she made for me from selling some of my crap at a garage sale on Memorial Day weekend. We had delicious coffee, split a bagel with cream cheese and tomatoes, chatted on the deck. Great start to a day.
Then I came home and did nothing. Nothing..... I finished one book and started another. I was reading on the couch and about 2:00 I just sort of fell over onto the couch and had a two hour nap, something I can never do when she is home. I grilled a bunch of stuff for dinner, read some more, sweated a lot (it was a very hot day,) ate dinner and watched some trashy TV, drank some nice rose wine, went to bed. It was a very nice, very quiet, very solo day and my laundry did not get done, my library books did not get returned, errands remained undone. Peaceful and quiet and so very nice.
And I know, what a pathetic blog post, so boring, but there you have it.
