Tag: #laidoff

  • What Will We Remember from This?

    I had a video chat with a good friend the other day, who lives in Kansas City. He has a three-year-old son, and any day now, will have a newborn on his hands. Besides talking about the general insanity of the world, we started comparing notes of how we have been surviving with cuts to our income. I being laid off, and he having his salary cut. We both have been finding ways to make food last as long as possible, and we throw nothing out. We both joked to each other that we sounded like our grandparents talking about living through The Great Depression.

    When I was little and did ask my grandparents about the Depression, and mind you all of them were in their early 20’s when it happened, they all sort of laughed it off, but also, they did talk about not having a whole lot of money, and making every dime last. I especially remember all of them telling me that thy learned how to fix everything if it broke.

    I might have grandkids one day, and they might ask me about this, but what I really wonder about, and so did my good friend, was what will our little kids take away from this? My five-year-old knows that there was a lifestyle before Covid, and she is already telling me she can’t wait to return to normal when Covid is over. But is she going to remember the anxiety, the uncertainty and the feeling of discord from around the country? How much of this daily, just dumb fuckery will stick in her mind? How will this influence her for the rest of her life? For my grandparents, the Depression made them thrifty, inventive, and they had a sense of common purpose with all Americans to solve big problems.

    I hope we can do the same.

  • Pretty Much Back

    So… It’s been close to three months that I have been off of the blog, which is a very sad shame on my part.

    I feel compelled to update:

    I had a job, then my wife got a job, and we discovered that it was psychologically damaging our daughter to have both of us working from home, and both of us half-ass trying to help keep up with the kid’s school work. Then I got laid off from my job (thank you, Coronavirus) and I have become the stay at home dad now. I got the kid through her classes, and she has been promoted to go to kindergarten, and I am trying very hard to keep her skills up by working on her reading, writing, and math over the summer. I also quit drinking over the month of June, and did not gain any helpful benefits from doing that, and in fact, I put on more weight. My unemployment claim was denied. People are moving out of New York City left and right, and the town feels like a husk of its former self, and pretty much every day, the world feels like it’s coming to an end, but we are protesting with the hope that up until the end, if we survive, we’ll have a better world to live in.

    Oh, and I don’t have health insurance, and I started a novel, but hey, I bet half of NYC can say the same thing right now.

    How are you?

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  • New Stress

    I have been gone for some time, and the reason is that life has become a little difficult.

    Mainly, my wife lost her job. She was laid off the week we returned home after being evacuated for the wildfires, so that was a particularly awful week. We have been dealing with it.

    It has made us face some of the very harsh realities of living in California. Unfortunately, we aren’t in a position where we can get by unless we are both working. They gave her a little severance, which has made things easier, or at least manageable, to get through the Holidays.

    What this feels like is that we have been under constant stress for a solid month now. First, the thought of losing everything we owned, then being faced with the fact that we don’t have a support system in the place where we live. It made us feel very isolated, and that feeling has been shucked off still. With her job gone, and that was one of the big reasons we moved here, it has created a “come to Jesus” moment for us; why are we here, and is this really what we want to be doing?

    It has been a month where we have been fighting more than normal. Nothing serious, but we have increased the frequency that we pick and nag each other. I even noticed that the kid has also started acting up, when she would never do that before. The stress has affected and infected all of us.