Bravely stifle your tears, just as Melissa Manchester taught you — for the first time in 89 years (though it probably feels like 800), I’m not sharing any photos of strange objects tonight. But I’ll be back at it soon enough, because a post I’m currently working on includes an anticlimactic reveal of the sayonara-to-student-loans splurge that was lost in USPS purgatory.
I’ve been reluctant to write much here about personal finance because the ‘personal’ part means it’s a loaded subject for some, as I learned firsthand when I started dating Crankenstein and some of my relatives became fixated on, and resentful of, my imagined proximity to her nonexistent wealth. But it’s also a topic that’s been important to me for a very long time, for unsexy reasons I’ll explain in that upcoming post.
In a similar vein, I’ve been hesitant to hit ‘publish’ on Same Trailer, Different Park because it’s filled with potential emotional landmines that I’d rather not leave vulnerable to detonation if my family finds this site or if my former partner follows along here out of morbid curiosity.* I was also hoping against hope that my sister would come to her senses and not muck up a bunch of lives for no good reason, which remains unlikely to happen, so it’s time to dust that one off and finish it.
Circling back to Melissa Manchester, my sisters are in their late twenties and early thirties and sometimes ask appalling questions like “Who’s Ted Danson?”, so neither would understand this reference without first googling it. But if I could hop in a time machine and give them useful advice at the onset of their teen years, it would be something like, “Comport yourself in such a way that no one ever hears the opening lines of ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ and thinks of you.'”
* Family, if you find this, do me the courtesy of not telling me. Ex, if you find this and are less unwell than you were last time our paths crossed, this would be a good time to check in and clear the air.