Another week, another Five....
Mar. 2nd, 2018 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magnetic_polePulling up another Five from the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thefridayfive archives this week...
1. What is something amazing that has happened in the last five years? I'm going to keep this light, personal, and mundane: my couch. We'd had a futon for years (twenty, to be precise), and while it served us well, I'm a lounger, and futons are for more upright and virtuous people. Two years ago we got this one in coffee brown with a large matching ottoman. Couldn't be more comfy. It looks crisper in the photo than in real life, where it's a bit smushy.
2. What is something you would love to happen in the next five years? On the macro scale? Open doors and social support for immigrants and refugees everywhere. Universal heath care here in the US. On the micro? Yikes, now everything micro seems petty. Peace, love and good health, all around!
3. Do you make "life plans" or do you live spontaneously? Life is what happens while you're busy making plans. Unfortunately. If I had my way it would be all life plans, all the time, but experience proves me wrong over and over on this point.
4. Do you think about what you might do when you retire? All the time! More or less what I do in the summers and on weekends right now but with no student papers to grade, *ever.* I hope I'm in good enough health to appreciate it. (And I hope we actually have enough money to quit working at some point; I really worry about this.)
5. Is your lifestyle similar to your parents, grandparents, or something utterly different? Similar in certain ways--I went into the same profession my father did, after all, and I inherited (or acquired) his bookishness and introversion and slight obsessiveness and my mom's love of detective stories and baked goods and chatting. But very different in the sense that I don't have kids, or a car, or house in the suburbs. Both my grandparents and parents led very child-centered lives and were never very interested in venturing far from home even once the kids left the nest, and I'm happy not having kids and want to travel the world and get to know folks who are different from myself. Growing up, I would have said my brother was the black sheep in the family--he seemed most different from the three of us temperamentally--but he's gotten more and more like my father over the years and created a family life very similar to theirs, and I've drifted away from the three of them in all sorts of ways, large and small.
Added bonus this week: Animals! Two videos that made me laugh out loud: happy dog with happy soundtrack and a cat watching a particularly stressful scene in a horror movie. Click though--you won't regret it.
Want to play along? Text box below!
thefridayfive archives this week...1. What is something amazing that has happened in the last five years? I'm going to keep this light, personal, and mundane: my couch. We'd had a futon for years (twenty, to be precise), and while it served us well, I'm a lounger, and futons are for more upright and virtuous people. Two years ago we got this one in coffee brown with a large matching ottoman. Couldn't be more comfy. It looks crisper in the photo than in real life, where it's a bit smushy.
2. What is something you would love to happen in the next five years? On the macro scale? Open doors and social support for immigrants and refugees everywhere. Universal heath care here in the US. On the micro? Yikes, now everything micro seems petty. Peace, love and good health, all around!
3. Do you make "life plans" or do you live spontaneously? Life is what happens while you're busy making plans. Unfortunately. If I had my way it would be all life plans, all the time, but experience proves me wrong over and over on this point.
4. Do you think about what you might do when you retire? All the time! More or less what I do in the summers and on weekends right now but with no student papers to grade, *ever.* I hope I'm in good enough health to appreciate it. (And I hope we actually have enough money to quit working at some point; I really worry about this.)
5. Is your lifestyle similar to your parents, grandparents, or something utterly different? Similar in certain ways--I went into the same profession my father did, after all, and I inherited (or acquired) his bookishness and introversion and slight obsessiveness and my mom's love of detective stories and baked goods and chatting. But very different in the sense that I don't have kids, or a car, or house in the suburbs. Both my grandparents and parents led very child-centered lives and were never very interested in venturing far from home even once the kids left the nest, and I'm happy not having kids and want to travel the world and get to know folks who are different from myself. Growing up, I would have said my brother was the black sheep in the family--he seemed most different from the three of us temperamentally--but he's gotten more and more like my father over the years and created a family life very similar to theirs, and I've drifted away from the three of them in all sorts of ways, large and small.
Added bonus this week: Animals! Two videos that made me laugh out loud: happy dog with happy soundtrack and a cat watching a particularly stressful scene in a horror movie. Click though--you won't regret it.
Want to play along? Text box below!
no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 09:35 pm (UTC)We've managed to find common ground on the whole "living on Earth, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide" front, but that's about it so far.
:)
I can't imagine how this next generation is going to retire. My grandfather worked in a grocery store, raised a family, sent three daughters to college, retired in his early fifties, and got a pension for life; I'm in a relatively decently paying professional job and have been lucky enough to avoid illness or other catastrophe, and can't see myself retiring at all. *sigh*
Thanks for commenting! Would love to see your replies, if you're in the mood.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-04 12:03 am (UTC)Regarding retirement...yeah, I'm trying to make peace with the idea that it may prove to be a brief post-WWII historical anomaly. I doubt many people in my family tree even made it to sixty let alone retired - up until my grandparents, who were miners and cleaners who left the workforce in the 1980s on fixed but manageable small-town budgets. My parents, a nurse and an electrician, made quite a bit more money than I'm ever likely to and both recently retired very comfortably with their current partners - houses paid off, buying cottages and new cars - but I do worry they're not set up for the decades they may have ahead of them.
As for me, I don't think my pension's ever going to support me willingly leaving the workforce unless there are some big changes to the economy or social benefits here. I'm thinking the best thing to do may be to find a job with a good enough work/life balance that I wouldn't mind so much doing it until I'm unable to work any more. *echoes your sigh*
no subject
Date: 2018-03-04 06:29 pm (UTC)I hear you on the post-WWII anomaly. I'm not usually one for pop sociology, but the books out lately about the upper 20% separating from the rest of us seem to be onto something. I've had enough of a privileged background (fancy colleges, mostly) to notice how important family money is in the lives of upper middle class people who appear to be making it on their own, as professionals of one kind or another, and to wonder if that extra buffer is keeping a politically powerful part of the electorate from revolting against current policies. (Here in the US, at least.) Because clearly the current system isn't working for most of us but isn't in crisis to the point that anything looks likely to happen to change it.
Anyways, enough of my own pop sociology. And hear! hear! for work/life balance even at this stage in our lives, so we're still able to keep working later on. :) Thanks for reading, I'll keep an eye out for your answers to these questions! M.