💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 7-28.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 14:38:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
At the start of the pandemic, we weren't worried about toilet paper, having probably 200 rolls in giant packages in our linen closet. Maybe more. My father-in-law spends his retirement keeping an eye out for deals, calling us when things fall into the "buy" range. This of course was useful; while coworkers complained about running low, or their kids burning through rolls, I knew I didn't have to buy any more for years.
My student poverty years, decades past now, instilled a fear of running out. The pandemic added a new layer to this: supply chain issues. And as the world catches fire, as food supplies in Ukraine are destroyed by Russia in missile strikes...well, you get where I'm going. My paranoia, never particularly low to begin with, is ratcheted up. I'm wondering if I should buy an extra sack of rice. Set up additional shelves in my basement, buy cans good enough for years, let myself drift somewhere between cautious and prepper.
I had our furnace and AC inspected back in April, when the snow had melted and temperatures were starting to warm into spring. Everything was fine, but the technician noted a capacitor that was operating right at the bottom of the acceptable range. _You might want to replace this early_, he told me, _it could hold out another couple of years, or it could die in a few months._
_Hard to say. But if it goes, the AC won't be able to flip on.__
Here we are in late July and while the heat here hasn't been nearly as bad as elsewhere in the world, I'm still very cognizant of not wanting my AC to go. I didn't have central AC until this house, just an okay-ish portable unit that turned our bedroom into an icebox. I didn't quite realize how important whole-house AC was. Then again, the world wasn't burning then, not the same way. So mindful of the unknowable expiration of that one capacitor, I made an appointment for them to come in and replace it today. A few hundred bucks. But, peace of mind. The temperatures here go to the high 30s in the summer, the worst cold snaps -40 and below.
One of the great privileges of the past 17 years for me has been sufficiency. Done with school, I got a job that paid less than comparable ones in the area, and definitely less than the big cities or especially down in the states. But, it was my first job, I didn't know better, and it was a legitimate cashflow that allowed me to start my post-academic life. We lived in a little post-war home surrounded by three huge pines. Our mortgage was miniscule. For the first time since I started buying my own groceries after moving out, I could generally think "what do I want to eat this week?" instead of "what can I afford to buy?" It's a stark difference, and once you've dealt with the latter for any significant period of time, it's hard to rewire your brain otherwise. It sits there, latent. But week after week, we made meal plans. I got better at cooking. I allowed myself to look at ingredients other than soon-to-expire meat (to be frozen), cabbage, potatoes, rice, canned vegetables, bulk packages of no-name ramen.
When I lived alone east of here in the mid 00s, my relationship slowly and palpably withering, I barely had $30/week for groceries. I always included a can of OJ on the list to ward off scurvy. I made do, but barely. I had enough to eat, but barely. I was sick more often than I told my girlfriend, drank pot after pot of hot, black tea.
All this to say, if I had a good period of a mostly settled mind, the last three years have done a number on that. I worry things will break. I worry I'll run out. I worry things won't be able to be replaced. And I worry even though I know I'm in a position to buy a few extra things, to take care of things early. I try to help out others too, contribute to GoFundMes, mutuals' emergency fund requests. Remembering when I ran out of money myself once, having to phone my dad, asking if he could send me a couple hundred bucks. I remember feeling bad about it but also knowing all I had to do was ask. That he'd be there for me.
Given that the coming decades are going to be wild in ways that I can't foresee, I'm somewhere between pessimistic and cautiously optimistic on whether we can come out of it in a sustainable way. Maybe. Maybe. And given the uncertainties, my mind gets to worrying. About having enough. About being able to handle most likely outcomes. The many less-likely ones punching to the fore.
So that's this morning. A new part allowing hopefully a bit of rest for my overactive brain. Tonight we've got plans, doing some stuff in a little town an hour or so out of the city. Some normalcy even as my mind tells me to enjoy it, to remember what it is to do something nice, briefly forget when times were grim and lean, putting aside, at least for a few hours, thoughts of the world to come.