My aunt is, for better or worse, usually right when she makes observations, and as we talked about fundraising yesterday, AA suggested that the mysterious benefactor’s $2,000 donation might actually make raising funds for the Traverse City trip more difficult, because people might think that those kinds of donations happen all the time.
She’s not wrong; over the past two days, we’ve raised about $50, and the GoFundMe has stagnated.
We’ve also been discussing the state of our 17-year-old Chrysler Pacifica, whose power steering is acting weird, whose right rear passenger side brake whines, and which needs an oil change rather desperately after spending so much time on the road due to Aunt Annie’s hospitalizations over the past year.
I’ve got to get my Pacifica into Norm’s Total Auto for a once-over before I leave, and it’s not going to be cheap, no matter how little we ask him to actually fix.
But there’s something that I want to address on a larger level, too.
After spending much of yesterday with the covers pulled over my head due to an anxiety attack, I got up and wrote a sprawling explanation of the fact that Aunt Annie and I live a spartan life, and that we really are absolutely blessed by a once-in-a-lifetime gesture by our mysterious benefactor.
Look, put bluntly, it takes a lot of financial sacrifice to keep Aunt Annie at home. We’re both Medicaid recipients–I wouldn’t get my $600 paycheck from the State of Michigan’s Adult Services group if she wasn’t on Medicaid–and we do receive food assistance. I take care of her, I work the blog so that we can pay the bills, she has her Social Security, which isn’t much, and that’s how we try to balance our monthly budget.
We live a spartan life. Our version of luxury is a couple of strategically-placed trips to take-out restaurants in town each month, and we don’t do much else to bust the budget. We have one too many streaming subscriptions, and Aunt Annie’s allowed to puff on her JUUL so that she doesn’t smoke, but that’s really it.
We’re okay with the fact that we’re not people of means. She’s got a litany of chronic illnesses, and I deal with moderate-to-severe anxiety and depression. We can live independently, and, thanks to the blog, pay our own bills at least most of the time.
Sure, there are ways in which the blog can grow (AA is one of the many people nagging me to start a podcast), but I’m a middle-market blogger, and that’s pretty good given my health complications.
Long story long, we are not people of means. We are going up to Traverse City because you are supporting us, in what may very well be a one-time endeavor, and I’m taking an 81-year-old in tow for the very real reason that nobody takes care of her like I do.
I’m going to be trying to balance the responsibilities of being a full-time caregiver with a full-time blogger, and I don’t know whether I’ll be successful. I’m scared and nervous, honestly, because this kind of stuff just doesn’t happen to us, and I don’t want to screw up with so many people depending on me to deliver product.
Realistically, this fundraising story is just the story of two people trying to find balance during an unexpectedly fortunate situation. It’s going to be hard on both of us to try and live together for two weeks in a hotel, and I know it, but you’re asking me to get up there and do some work, and I want to do that for you.
That takes money. It’s annoying, but that’s just the reality of the situation. And those $5, $10, $25 and $50 donations pave the road up to Traverse City and pave the road back down as much as the bigger ones do.
If you can lend a hand with our overall expenses, we have an old-fashioned GoFundMe here https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-george-annie-attend-prospect-tournament, you can use PayPal at https://paypal.me/TheMalikReport, Venmo at https://venmo.com/george-malik-2, Giftly by using my email, rtxg@yahoo.com, at https://www.giftly.com. And you can contact me via email if you want to send me a paper check. I’m also on Cash App under “georgeums.”
