First World Problems, Part 2

When I was a kid, my mom was not lax in seeing to my moral and spiritual edification. She made sure I learned the important lessons in life. She used to say things like "Don't buck the system" a lot. One of her favorite aphorisms was "Life's not fair." I learned two things very early on: 1.) that was some bullshit my crazy mom liked to say to get away with not having a good reason for shitting on my childhood and 2.) that didn't mean it wasn't fundamentally true. I mean I was a sharp five year old. I looked around me and saw very clearly that life wasn't fair. I also put together that it was about choices. Shit can only be as fair as people want to make it, which is not very fair at all.

Somewhere later in my development I got more articulate about that. Life's unfair, I reasoned, but that didn't mean I had to be. In fact, despite the awfulness of everything, I could be patient and I could be kind. And at least as I died I could reason "I didn't let the world turn me to shit."

I've had to shuffle a lot of personality pieces around over the years to stop being so damn depressed and angry at how much bullshit there is in the world, and just try to be happy that I get to go on adventures and read good books and get drunk with great people. But some things bring me back to that angsty place where I just can't understand how the world can keep turning with so much shit piled on it.

Tying this back to my previous post, what I am trying to say is that I've been fighting all week against systems built to treat people as inconsequential. I mean really thought out, tried and tested methods to make the majority of people who have a fair and righteous cause accept the futility of their fight.

The hoops I've had to jump through, for example, just to provide the insurance company with the information they requested so that they can continue to deny my claim for freezing some sperm entail endless phone trees and busy signal fax machines. It's a system built to stonewall.

And much, much worse, the total horseshit of canceling my vacation and being told my plane ticket is non-refundable even in the instance of being too sick to fly. Polite but firm representatives sympathize with my situation and tell me it's out of their hands. Point to fine print and hide behind policies. I mean,  consider the awful brilliance of US Airways Customer Relations department having no phone number that you can call! So that you can vent all you want with scathing e-mails and receive back cookie cutter responses apologizing for your inconvenience and repeating their refusal.

There are companies literally just pocketing my money for absolutely nothing. I paid for things I felt I had to do and things I don't get to do because the universe decided "you, buddy, you do NOT know a thing about suffering" and threw some cancer at me. While I shell money out for co-pays, earn less because I'm too sick to work, and watch my enormous student loan debt go into repayment; while I regret life choices for the one thing I said I'd never let decide my course, stupid stupid money; even while I get sicker there are people sitting on fat stacks of cash earned by just this kind of chicanery.

Sorry you think you should get the thing you paid for, or your money back. Sorry your reason is an illness out of your control, taking over your life and making you feel like shit for half a year. But I have your money now, so why would I give it back to you? Then I would have less money.

Persistence, right? Get mad! Never surrender. But it turns out I have a much more important fight to fight.