The Honest Courtesan

Not much scares me outright, but anxiety is a different matter; I’ve suffered from it since childhood, and though it never completely goes away, I’ve mostly learned to manage it pretty well except for circumstances I’ve mentioned before:  air travel, long summer days, dealing with bureaucracy, etc.  But there’s one cause I haven’t had to worry about since my early teens and had hoped I would never have to worry about again: inflation.  I’ve always thought that was a serious misnomer, because the problem isn’t really that prices are going up; it’s that the value of the currency is going down.  I’ve never been any good at saving, so at least I don’t need to worry about cash reserves shrinking in value.  But now that I’m semi-retired, my budget is much tighter than it used to be, and I don’t have a lot of wriggle room; also, I’m not yet finished my construction project, and the price of everything I need for it has increased dramatically.  And next month, my normal summer and travel anxieties will be compounded:  I’m going to a conference in Las Vegas, but summer standby flying is even more nerve-wracking than ordinary standby flying; not only are there more people traveling, more of them are airline employees (often with kids), therefore far fewer available seats.  And even when my outbound flights are OK, the return flights into Seattle are usually a negative-number-of-seats-available nightmare (I’m told it’s due to the fact that many cruises depart from Seattle).  So I’m planning to drive to the conference instead of flying; I want to make two other stops on the way there, so the flights would just be a logistical mess anyway even if I wanted to try it.  However, the skyrocketing cost of gasoline is causing me considerable anxiety about that strategy; I estimate it might cost me as much as $1000 (still cheaper than if I had to buy multiple airline tickets, but stressful nonetheless).  So if you aren’t hurting and appreciate my work, would you consider a gift of fuel funds so I can get to Vegas to A) meet with a couple of folks about possible consulting gigs that might stabilize my financial situation for the next few years; and B) rattle some cages about supporting sex worker rights?  If it helps, remember that I actually kinda like road trips, and one of the stops is to visit a friend I haven’t seen in almost three years, so you’d also be subsidizing a little vacation for me.