Money and control

Paying bills has sort of overshadowed the goodness of having family around. I have everything covered up to the end of the month, but . . .

I was talking to my sister yesterday about this sort of thing. She'd just spent $60 on a wedding present and was jokingly complaining about the cost, and I told her that if it made her feel better, I'd be paying five times that much in bills today. (It actually came out to around $525, plus setting aside about $100 for the bills that are automatically paid or that I can't pay yet. This is, I should point out, an abnormally large bill load for me, due to putting some things off over the last month; my net pay comes to about $1500 a month these days, and bills and gas usually take up a little less than half of that.) Anyway, the discussion really came down to this: I don't resent paying the bills so much as I resent having no choice but to pay them; it isn't the money so much as the control.

That's actually true of a lot of my life. I resent events, people, places, anything that takes control away from me, unless I'm voluntarily giving up control.