When I got my first non-temporary job in the US, I had health insurance, but I soon started to experience the pains of for-profit healthcare. I was recently returned from study abroad in India, with lingering exotic health problems requiring expensive testing, which I had to pay up front and then wait to be reimbursed. This was a recipe for disaster when I was living paycheck to paycheck.
The insurer was slow to pay, and I was short $300 to pay my rent. After a fruitless phone call to hurry them up, I started crying in the office – I had no other resources. My manager personally loaned me the money to tide me over. Which was very kind of him (thank you, Larry!) but it was absurd that I’d needed it.
Update Aug 16, 2021: If I were still unvaccinated today (or even weeks ago), I would of course have a completely different view of the risk: the risk of me getting COVID is now much higher, and hugely outweighs the risk of blood clots. Risk is always relative.
First, let’s get a few possible misconceptions out of the way:
I’m not an anti-vaxxer
I already got my flu shot, as I do every year. I have been vaccinated frequently throughout my life, having lived in many “exotic” countries when you had to travel with a vaccination record to show you weren’t carrying yellow fever, typhoid, etc. I raised my daughter in Italy, where kids cannot go to school without being fully vaccinated. I had no problem with this, in fact I considered it a favor when we were reminded to get her childhood vaccines on time and it was easy to do so with the family GP. Her entire school was once given Hepatitis B vaccines without parents even being informed. I had no problem with that, either. I am grateful that vaccines exist and have even gotten better over time.
When I was growing up in Bangkok 1967-71, one of my favorite places to go was the Saturday-Sunday Market. It was big even then, with sections devoted to food (the smell of dried fish raises warm memories for me), housewares, clothing, and live animals. I don’t know now whether any of those animals were intended for eating, but many of them were there to find homes as pets. Over the years, we tried out parrots, white mice, hamsters, fish, and of course cats and dogs.
We stayed mostly on the mundane end of the pets spectrum, but others literally went wild. It was something of a fashion among expats in Thailand in those days to keep gibbons as pets. We never tried this, probably because my parents’ observed others’ experiences: it is hard to raise a wild gibbon as a pet. I have seen one instance where it went well: the gibbon was treated as part of the family, eating at the low, traditional Thai-style dining table with them, with table manners at least as good as anyone else present. More often, pet gibbons became uncontrollable and bitey and had to be got rid of.
In some ways, I wish I had spent more of my working years in a “normal” office routine. Working intensely side by side every day, with people you like and respect, is a fantastic feeling, and at times I’ve had that and enjoyed it. But other times workplaces went toxic, so that going into the office every day became a torment to be dreaded. I’ve also had working from home situations go bad, and at those times I dreaded getting up to face my computer every day, even if I didn’t have to directly face the people who were making my life hell.
Often, remote work was the best option available to me. When my Italian employer moved most of the company to the US and then sold out to a US company, continuing in that job was the best paid and most interesting work I could have while still living with my family in Milan.
When I was a small child living as an expat in Thailand, a lot of my cultural inputs were American, especially around July 4th (the annual party at the American club featured fireworks, which terrified me) and Christmas. We had a few vinyl records of Christmas carols. I loved the music, but the context confused me: In tropical Thailand, we never had snow or even cold weather. I didn’t know what a chestnut or a holly was, had never seen a reindeer, and Santa’s furry red suit would have been stifling in Bangkok temperatures. Though I longed to experience a “white Christmas” and was excited about decorations and presents, I felt disconnected from the “holiday spirit” that seemed so important to others. This continued to be true even when I later lived in places that did have cold and snow (both overrated, in my opinion).
The weather in Thailand was always different from what I read about in English-language books or saw in movies: we had a hot season and a wet season (also hot). The idea of four seasons was strange. I was never cold in my life (not that I remembered, anyway) until we went through Europe in the winter of 1969 on our way back to the US for home leave.
