Help! My Girlfriend Bought Me A Million Dollar House And Raised My Kids And All I Got Was This Million Dollar House And Someone To Raise My Kids, When Is It Finally Going To Be My Turn To Get A Break??????
Pay Dirt, Slate, 17 April 2023:
Dear Pay Dirt,
My longterm girlfriend and I disagree about whether a $30,000 inheritance left to her by her great-aunt should be “her” money or “our” money. She wants to spend a large part (almost a third!) of it on expensive supplies for her hobby. I think that we should save most of it and use some of it on a vacation since we both find traveling extremely romantic.
My argument is: 1) I don’t care about her hobby, but we’ll both enjoy a trip abroad; 2) we’ve lived on only my (admittedly low, since it’s academia) income for over a decade, so according to her own rule about entitlement to “her” windfall, shouldn’t she technically have been entitled to none of my wages all these years?
Her argument is: 1) she had to put aside her hobby for many years to raise our children (it’s not a safe art form for young kids to be around) and yearns to return to it; 2) she paid entirely in cash for our $950k house at the beginning of our partnership (though my income pays the property taxes and maintenance costs), therefore she alleges that we haven’t actually been living on solely my income because I’ve been saving on rent all these years.
I feel resentful of the double standard about control over finances and hurt that she would rather prioritize her own joy over our shared joy. She feels impatient to reconnect with her hobby and hurt that her contributions to our lifestyle are unseen.
How do we reconcile our different viewpoints? How should the money be allocated? Is there something that we’re missing?
—I’m About to Glass(Blow) a Fuse
Dear About to (Glass)Blow a Fuse,
I hope you don't mind that I corrected your very clever parenthetical sign-off! You're understandably dealing with a lot of hurt right now at the hands of the cruel and self-absorbed girlfriend who bought you a million-dollar home and abandoned her beloved hobby to raise your children, so I totally get why a brilliant, overworked, and under-appreciated academic genius such as yourself would fuck up something so incredibly simple and obvious, you poor thing. Really speaks to the distress you're in as the victim of this woman's sordid scheme to steal every ounce of joy from your life by experiencing some of her own after decades of managing your household for you for free.
Great relationships are built on the exactly equal division of all resources, and it sounds like your girlfriend has trouble grasping this because she seems to believe that the home you live in and the time she has invested raising your children for you have value, when of course they do not. The only thing that has value in this world is cash money, which is why we call it money. If parenting were valuable, you'd be able to trade it on the stock market! And what was your girlfriend going to do, not live in a house? These are things she'd have done with her life anyway, and they don't get to count toward her contribution to the household just because she did them for and with you instead of expressly and specifically pursuing her art. Whereas who knows what you could have done with your life if you hadn't been locked into a free house and a partner dedicating herself full-time to keeping your children alive for you?
Now, after all these years of being nothing but a worthless freeloader whom you support out of the generous goodness of your kind heart, your girlfriend has finally acquired something of value, and she wants to keep an entire third of it for herself? To do something that doesn't directly benefit, enrich, or entertain you personally? That's not equity, and it's certainly no way to repay you for periodically writing checks to the plumber. Isn't it about time you finally got something out of all of this for your trouble?
What benefit is there for you in having a partner who enjoys the sweet satisfaction of creative fulfillment after years of yearning to express herself? What kind of weirdo wants their girlfriend to have her own interests? And what kind of ungrateful hussy doesn't jump to spend thousands of her own money on a romantic vacation with someone who actively resents even entertaining the possibility of the idea of her doing something that makes her artistic spirit sing?
The balance sheet of this relationship is indeed all out of whack, and it's too bad that it's taken this long for your girlfriend to see just how uneven your bargain has been. If we're going to get technical about what has "value" in a relationship — and it does seem like your girlfriend is an inveterate bean-counter in the worst way around this stuff — the best way to reconcile your mutual account, as it were, is to present your girlfriend with an itemized bill for all the services you have provided her over the years, such as allowing her to buy you a home, permitting her to forego a wage-earning career, and gifting her with the opportunity to abandon her favorite hobby. That should pretty swiftly put everything you're "missing" in stark relief, and solve the question of how she should allocate her money in the future.
re: that post about the lack of enrichment in trucks
i bring yet another megop au where op is another depressed fellow whose EM field is always emitting gloomy and tired vibes. vs megatron who is at his happiest when hauling materials and messing with his coworkers/friends
they haven't seen each other in years since the war ended and they signed all these treaties and paperwork !
I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.
I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.
The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...
Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.
I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.
And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?
It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.
To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.
In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.
Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.
So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.
What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.
Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?
I was permanently banned from r/anti_restaurant_work because I said American tipping culture was insane on a post where some server complained about a 10$ tip being "too little" because it didn't complain with their bullshit "you have to tip 18%-22% percent of the meal" rule. I know this is anti worker solidarity or whatever but American tipping culture is insane.
I gave this some finishing touches (which no one except for me will notice 😝) and added some background voices towards the end.
Also, don't you also think this feels like VLDL has come full circle? They've started out producing parody songs, then branched off into various comedy shows, creating a bunch of weird but ultimately lovable characters, and now their fans are making parody songs about these characters...
I’m sorry you feel like your brain is soup, but for what it’s worth I’ve been following you since I was like 14 on deviantart and the stuff you have created has always been a major inspiration for me; i love animals and fantasy and your ability to capture realistic proportions and anatomy while creating this beautiful movement in your artwork has always blown me away, it’s so full of life and beauty. I just wanted to tell you 🤷 you really inspired this random Australian kid and I hope you can find joy and rest and kindness for yourself k bye
Aaaaaa this is so wholesome! I haven't been enduring as much of my usual mental health struggle since I've started meds/therapy, but my creativity/productivity has regrettably taken a hit as a possible result? So even if I'm on indefinite hiatus, it's nice to know I've had a positive impact on at least one person somewhere down the line. Someday I'll get back into healthy habits and express through art more reliably again (I mean art has been my escape portal for most of my life)! Just gotta bust off the rust and focus/practice again, even if I'm anxious about all the work that requires.
Anyway, I'm rambling: thank you so much!
what if portfolio day but its as slick and professional looking an image every given non-coward artist can muster of a character they made or have worked on saying "ceasefire now" or "they got money for wars, but can't feed the poor" and clogging the tag to total uselessness with it
Spotify pirating setup! AWA CD-700 cassette deck from like 1976 that still runs like a dream (albeit with a temperamental fast forward due to stretched belts) and a Sanyo M-GR78 from the 90s that is a piece of shit but was also dirt cheap and works just fine for my purposes