dianaschnuth

I’ve been feeling a little guilty this year. —No, guilty isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, but it’ll do for now.

The economy has gone to shit. I know people who have lost their jobs. I know people who have lost their houses. Yet, here we are, myself and my husband, enjoying our pricey Starbucks every weekend, splurging on sushi at least once a month (if not more), and flouncing off to Tokyo this past May. We’ve also planned a weekend getaway to Chicago for Labor Day Weekend, and have every intention of going someplace especially awesome again next Spring.

Like I said, part of me feels uncomfortable with our conspicuous consumption. Yet, on the other hand, I’m proud of us for being able to afford our few extravagances.

Aaron and I were so used to scraping by. When we first moved in together, Aaron was working part time, and I had a shitty-paying job that had nothing to do with my degree. We opted to keep our finances separate — an arrangement that we still keep to this day. We each paid our own personal bills, like student loans and credit cards, but split the rent and car insurance and utilities and such.

When Aaron went full-time, that definitely helped us financially. With his higher pay, we were able to afford our new car (to make us a two-car household), and our wedding, and our house. He started paying more than half of the bigger bills, like the rent/mortgage payment, and footing the bill for most of our leisure activities, all of which made my life a lot easier.

Then, two years ago, I got laid off of my shitty-paying job (which, surprisingly, gave me a respectable severance package), and subsequently found my current job. Aaron and I are now on equal financial footing again, as far as income goes, and are doing well. Our aforementioned “new car” has been paid off for a couple of years now. My severance package paid for one of our vacations, and I was happy to pitch in some savings and some credit to help fund the other two. I rolled over the 401(k) from my old job into my new job. I squirrel away money into my savings every pay period automatically, so I barely even miss it.

Have we been lucky? Absolutely. I don’t deny that.

So, what if our luck runs out? What if I find out that, on top of not getting a merit raise this year, I’m getting a cut in salary — or, worse, that one of us is getting laid off permanently?

I have almost a three-month emergency fund saved up in a high-yield savings account, so we wouldn’t be S.O.L. right away. And that’s assuming we wouldn’t make any lifestyle changes, like canceling our cable internet, or going back to eating ramen noodles like the old days. I’d go back to paying the minimum on my credit cards, and I’d look into getting a forbearance on my student loan. I’m sure Aaron would do the same. And whichever of us was still gainfully employed would pick up the slack. That’s part of what being married is all about, after all.

I’m not trying to sound condescending or smart, and I hope this doesn’t come off that way. I’m trying to point out that, even after I got a new job with a salary that was waaay beyond what I’d expected, our financial reach didn’t exceed our grasp. Sure, I still have a massive student loan debt to pay off, and I carry credit card balances. I’m not debt-free, not by a long shot. But it’s manageable.

And I refuse to feel guilty for enjoying myself every once and a while.

All it took was a tweet from Talcott: “How wrong is it that I find the analog signoff montage from the PBS station I grew up with kinda touching? http://tinyurl.com/putgp6”

And, damn it all, that got me YouTube surfing. That’s never a good thing. Well, it is, but not if there’s anything else you want to get done. I’ve been surfing YouTube for an hour now.

First, it was analog sign-offs. I was looking for nostalgic or classy ones, but found a lot of Action News-style ones that ended with, “push the button, Fred—”

Then, I started looking for my favorite version of the PBS ident montage.

(The one at 0:35 is the one I remember from my childhood.)

From there, of course, I moved on to Sesame Street clips, discovering by reading comments along the way that I was not, in fact, the only kid to be scared by the “funky chimes” ending credits.

Then I found this one, with Olivia and Linda (although I usually think of Bob and Linda doing this one — they were a couple, after all). I’d be willing to bet that my Mom still knows all the signs to “Sing.”

I also had never heard Luis sing it en Español while playing the guitar.

Aaron thinks it’s bizarre that I remember so much music from kids’ shows. I could still sing you any regular Mr. Rogers song, or most of the standard Sesame Street songs (late ’70s to early ’80s, and some mid-’80s when my cousin Michael watched).

Watching all these old clips makes me kind of misty. I hate to think I’m nostalgic for the days of half-day Kindergarten, when I’d come home and have a lunch of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and a naked hot dog, and lay on the floor in front of the tiny color TV in the living room to watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers (and The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact). Age five or six is an odd age to be nostalgic for, don’t you think?

I don’t remember exactly how I came across it, but I found a Facebook group that someone had set up for alumni of my high school band — specifically, people who had been in band in the ’90s. As I graduated in 1994, most of the group wasn’t quite relevant to me, although I did see a few posts from people I knew. Mainly, though, I saw younger siblings of people I’d been in band or choir with, or people who had been in 8th or 9th grade when I was a Senior.

As a general rule, I look back on high school and junior high and only remember the weird ostracism and depression I experienced. Somehow, though, reading through this group’s posts and photos made me remember that it wasn’t all so bad.

Afterward, I went to my own photo albums and scrapbooks for photos to add to the mix, since the early ’90s weren’t so well represented — and happy times hit me smack in the face. All of us band geeks would hang out together before school by the band room, since that’s where our oversized lockers were. We’d also hang out there after school and during lunch, and I have the pictures to prove that we were all enjoying ourselves. All of us. Even me.

Senior year wasn’t a cakewalk. Sure, I had some weird teacher crush on my band director, which hit me square in the face when he got married that winter. Sure, one of my friends got asked out by the guy I’d been crushing on since Freshman year. I definitely did have a massive case of Senioritis. I was also spending so much time on music that I neglected my studies, which led to some very awkward moments in the second half of the school year, culminating with my not participating in the graduation ceremony with my class. But those things don’t have to define how I remember all of high school, or even all of my Senior year.

High school still feels like a completely different life, lived by a completely different person. (Hell, even college feels like that a lot of the time.) But it’s good to be reminded that, while high school wasn’t the Best Years Of My Life like some people claimed it would be, it wasn’t as bad as I tend to remember it.