Looking back at August, the first uniform month of 2018.
We come to bury August, not to praise it.
Actually, August was pretty okay - just not especially exciting. That was sort of the goal, to be honest, so here we are in September - probably the best transitional month, imo. That's a wrap.
August was the first month this year with no big split between the beginning of the month and the end. It was uniform throughout, and pretty much characterized by being my first full month on the job. There's really nothing interesting to say on that count either; I'm not great at it yet, but I'm a functional member of the team who can (usually) be trusted to complete assigned work without too much oversight. And, like, that's fuckin' it. That's the whole goal - to get a job and come home and not take it back with me. There's always some bleed, but it's pretty contained.
I think my beginning at any job is characterized by being found out as incompetent and summarily terminated, knocking any sense of safety out of my grasp, but that doesn't happen very often. It's one of those concerns that crops up explicitly because it actually has happened to both Kay and I, but it's also a steep minority of cases. I think that if, maybe, both of us hadn't had so many jobs where that kind of rapid turnover equates directly with a kind of insecurity, we wouldn't be so jumpy - but we have and it does. The best we can sort of do is just realize that the jobs we have right now are pretty likely to be reasonably secure and even if there's not, there's little we could do about that.
There was a hope that actually began last year around this time that we'd be financially stable and, frankly, we were a year off in that realization. We're not, strictly speaking, a year deeper into difficult financial situations - save student loans - because my intermittent teaching staved a lot of that off, but we haven't improved our situation either. I'm making about double what I was, though, and Kay effectively added another thousand a month on top of that, so we're actually for the very first time, able to make headway.
August really made me think about what I'd read in a lot of op-eds and news stories where millennials are effectively an entire decade behind boomers financially. And I don't blame the generation as a whole - but I do blame the political condition that was fostered by the conservative movement beginning with Regan, post-Carter.