thene | (no subject)

-I told some of you already; we just extended our lease by 3 weeks to give ourselves more time to find a place to live. We are fortunate that our current landlords hadn't managed to let out our unit yet. The moment we'd done this I realised it was exactly what we should have planned on all along and now I feel totally stupid for cutting down our income stream so damn early. Hi, I am going to be doing tax filing, I won't be working in Boston until January 13th, so why the frick didn't we just ask for a lease extension back in October?

Well, at least rent here is way less than rent there, and it's likely we'll both still be working for a few days a week at least until xmas. I need to sort out my goddamn PTIN though, and possible call D.M. and ask about IRS updates, argh forever.

-Have I mentioned all the completely useless agents who never get back to us? Well. I actually got replies to two emails about rentals that I sent out yesterday. One of them now appears to be a scam, and the other is, on the surface, a batshit insane fundie but may also be a scam. I LOVE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I PUT EFFORT INTO THINGS, IT IS ALWAYS SO FUCKING REWARDING.

-there is nothing quite as depressing as running into a really attractive 19/20year-old who used to be your coworker, and who is known for her very sensible approach to life, and having her introduce you to her baby bump and explain that this is why she's put off her planned radiography degree. And then say it was an accident, and unconvincingly pretend to be happy.

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I'm trying to find the brightside but...it's just not forthcoming at the moment. :( I guess just lying about not having dogs isn't an option? Especially since Grendel is large and presumably difficult to hide. (hi, I lied on my lease about not having three cats ;_;)

That always sucks. Argh, why is America so stupid about contraception? There will always be people who are bound and determined to be idiots, but so many women's lives could not be derailed if real sex ed was taught in schools and doctors got the fuck over themselves and started letting nulliparous women have IUDs.

More recently we've been doing better at targeting dog-friendly people but they never call us back. Ever. It isn't even anything ABOUT us at this point, they're just ALL COMPLETE FLAKES.

mmm, they've been going the opposite way in the UK - last time I needed a new IUD I had to wait for ages for an appointment because they've been trying to get as many people to use them as possible. An (older, male) gyno in GA once told me they were Bad if you Hadn't Had Children Yet, which is a piece of medical advice I then repeated to all the medical profession folks I met in the UK just to enjoy their headdesking. (Kinda worth noting that damn near all of the women among this group - both of the two gynos I had to see, a bunch of med/nursing students, a few medical secretaries - used one themselves.)

I kind of need another new one asap and it will be interesting to see if doctors up in Boston are equally stupid. Obv I am not going to take no for an answer, so this could be fun!

oh for fuck's sake. Why would they not be interested in taking money from you.

You should check out the LJ comm iud_divas when you're ready for a new one; I'm sure they can help you can find an open minded gyno in Boston.

ooh, thanks! How do you know these things o__0

First rule of Livejournal: there is a community for everything.

It keeps logging me out, though, and messing up OpenID. :/

More recently we've been doing better at targeting dog-friendly people but they never call us back. Ever.

It's not just you, or even just America: I think this is the secret handshake of that type of industry - when you realise that you have to keep calling them, you'll make it into the inner sanctum. :s

ugh. thanks for the advice. hate phones so goddamn much esp when they are being this fucking depressing.

Yay, three weeks' worth of breathing space! Now if everything else about the renting process would just cooperate, you'd be set.

Also, ugh, the high school I graduated from (in Georgia) had a graduation rate of just under 50% at the time. There were plenty of other factors at work besides pregnancies, but those sure weren't helping, and comprehensive sex ed and accessible birth control could have made a pretty big difference. :/

I don't want to dress up the fact that I have a very, very entrenched and classist British attitude to this which says that teen pregnancy is unfortunate (but straightforwardly curable) and teen childbirth is the resort of people with no other aspirations. Some people at my high school had abortions, but never babies. One of the most surprising things about Southern culture is that I regularly meet perfectly intelligent, together women who had children in their teens - this goes against my cultural expectations. When I was last living in London I worked in a street-corner laundry; one of my coworkers had a learning-disabled daughter who became pregnant, relished the attention this brought and had a baby boy, and her mother quite fervently believed that the daughter needed to be sterilised for her own good.

Whereabouts in GA were you? I have spent the last few years on the north side of the Atlanta sprawl, aka Gingrichland. It could be a lot worse, given the things I hear about Alabama or south GA, but it is not exactly fun.

I was in deep southeastern GA (almost Florida!), which, yeah, rather worse.

I knew a few fellow high school students who seemed genuinely happy to have been unexpectedly impregnated by men more than a decade older than them, which completely blew my middle-class Yankee mind. I also talked to a few students who couldn't imagine NOT having babies before the age of 20. It is very difficult for me not to be judgmental about that, but those people were also coming from a very, very different place than I was. Even the students I knew who were unhappy about their pregnancies never, ever talked about abortion, and I heard a lot of alarming things about birth control, like girls saying that they loved their boyfriends too much to use condoms.

When I worked at a two-year college in southwestern GA, I met a lot of women ("a lot" as in, these were the majority of the student body) who had children young and decided to pursue post-secondary education when they were in their 30s or 40s. Many of those were coming back to school because their family could no longer survive on a single income or because they'd divorced and needed a degree to get a job paying more than minimum wage, and they were almost all bright, organized, responsible, very together women.

I had a conversation about Pregnant Lady with another coworker, who is in her early 40s and has three teenage kids, and she was telling me I truly want to have kids no really because now her kids are teenagers she and her husband 'have our lives back'! They can even go away for the weekend and leave the children at home!

Uh no I think I would rather keep those 20 years of my life for myself, call me selfish, am barely mature enough to look after my dogs, etc.

Ha ha, that is totally how I am about it, too. "Soooo, I could wait 20 years to get my life back, or I could just keep my life for those 20 years? OH GEE LET ME THINK."