MaBug Family, Travel & Money

First off I want to say Good Morning to everyone, all one or two of you, haha. So, where to begin? Well I guess I can begin by going back to 2008.

It was the year after I graduated high school, I had found my freedom from being in that weird stage, you know the one I’m talking about. The one where you don’t really know what to do or who you are really friends with, you are barely passing your classes and just making it til you graduate. Yeah that stage. It was weird. I honestly find it hard to remember a lot of that year, actually those few years. It’s like glimpses every once in a while honestly of some of the things that happened, whether I enjoyed them or not. I have found myself not remembering a lot of my graduating class and I’m not real sure why. Maybe they didn’t make an impact on me, maybe its my brains way of closing that chapter in my life that made no sense what so ever or maybe its my brain itself. I have this feeling as I get older I will have memory issues, due to the fact that I have this constant headache which has gone on for more than 15 years and I find it hard to remember a lot of things, events, people, etc. even now in these recent years.

Anyway, so its 2008 and I tell you what, that year between 2007 and 2008 almost exactly, was rough. It is hard trying to find your way around when there is no one person to give you all the right answers. Luckily though I did not spend more than a year doing all the stupid stuff one usually does when they get out of high school. Unfortunately for me I was not a lucky one to be able to go off to a nice college, which that was never really my goal anyway. I had NO clue of what I wanted to do with my life and I had no way to learn. You see growing up in a lower end middle class family where parents live paycheck to paycheck really just provides an endless cycle to a lot of kids. Over the years I have of course learned a lot and spoke with a lot of people from different communities that all had that in common and my goal is to provide some sort of insight to how you can change that from the very beginning, starting in your teenage years.

My wife and I met in April of 2008, after I begged her to drive to come and see me, haha. My vehicle was not working at the time. So she did and that was the beginning of a lifetime relationship. We started off of course living with our parents, sometimes mine, sometimes hers, but it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. My mom was and always has been very supportive of who I chose to be with, and being with a female was no different. Her parents however, lets say it took a lot more convincing. I had to prove myself to her parents time and time again that I am not a bad person and that I have goals and want to be more than some paycheck to paycheck person that keeps their daughter in a run down house. Of course in the beginning it was very slow getting started, bouncing from parents house to parents house until finally landing a rental of our own, even then having to have help with rent and bills because we sometimes couldn’t make enough money. None the less we prevailed and finally got some decent hours from our jobs and were able to start standing on our own two feet and only needing help every once in a while.

We had no idea about finances at the time. No idea how to buy a car, save our money, invest, what banks to use, how to go about making any adult decisions that were going to help us in the future. We did however know how to sit down together and write a 5 year plan, and that’s what we did. I don’t remember much about what was on that list but I do know that buying a car and having decent jobs was on that list. It all started with her getting a job with a tanning salon. Someplace that had real good hours, didn’t mind if I came to hang out in between walking around to find a job in the area of that salon, and being able to tan for free at the time was a perk. We spent a lot of hours at that salon and I even managed to pick up some work there by doing some maintenance and painting. Then one day a lady walked in that was the manager of a fast food restaurant, one thing led to another and I landed a job that had all the hours I could want, so I took it. I worked my tail off at that job, picked up as many hours as I could and we finally started to have some light showing up at the end of that tunnel, that is until that lady quit or got fired, still not real sure and the new manager came in.

This new manager was against me from the start. I don’t know if it was because I could out run him on the drive through or the fact that I was gay but man he did NOT like me. Once I noticed this I had to start looking for something else, but it took me so long to get this job I did not want to let it go.

During my time working there we would always have police officers come in and I would ask questions to them all the time about how to become an officer. Now I would have never seen my life heading in that direction, EVER! But something made me addicted to the fact of becoming an officer, so much so that I began telling my co workers there that I will be a cop one day. Of course none of them believed me and thought I would never go through with it but I had made up my mind. This was what I wanted to do. The manager at the time continued to cut my hours, didn’t want to give me my breaks, and apparently even though I was wearing black pants which was the uniform, did not like the fact that my black pants were fitted to the way I wear my clothing and not hugging my bottom so tight that if I bent over my pants would rip. He began telling me that my uniform was not correct and that I would need to go buy new pants, I proceeded to tell him that he needed to give me a raise or buy my pants for me because I could not afford to go buy clothing. Of course he refused and cut my hours so low that I had to quit, but not before finding another job.

That is where I will end it for this blog today. Hope you enjoyed the read. ~MaBug