Because Reasons

I am the father of two Gen Zers. I, myself, am a Gen Xer.

Our son recently graduated (cum laude, I might add) from college while attending the last several months of classes, lessons, and the like from home. Our daughter is a rising high school senior and currently looking at out-of-state colleges to attend next year if college happens at all.

Both are considerably hipper to modern lingo (see how I dated myself already?) than my wife and I are.

As a popular Instagram user, “Insta” as she refers to it, as well as Snapchat, our seventeen-year-old daughter oozes trendiness including the words she uses.

Over the past few years, I have been called Cringey, have heard many things referred to as Lit, Sus, and Iconic. I have been told that she is Vibing or that someone is Basic. I have heard her say Yeet many a time and have been called Bruh by her despite being her father. She refers to people as both “Queens” and “Kings,” which seems like a compliment.

These words, plus numerous others that make me scratch my head, are uttered by our daughter on a regular basis.

Our son is somewhat less caught up in trends and gathering Likes and shares on social media, although he garners plenty, himself.

But it is one of the phrases that he has used repeatedly over the past several years that I have adopted as one of my own and refer to here to be used for future reference for my stories. I welcome all to link to it or add your own reasons to mine.

As our son explains something technical to us or something that he is working on, he often skips over a lengthy explanation or list of reasons why something is applicable by saying “because reasons.”

“I am working with Luke instead of Jamie because reasons…”

“She will not be taking lessons with me anymore because reasons…”

“I do not want to go to that party because reasons…”

You get it.

What an awesome turn of phrase. No need to explain things in excruciating detail as I am wont to do. Just say “because reasons.”

Well, I, too, have reasons. You have your reasons. We have reasons.

In the spirit of listing some of my own so I can forever link to this “story” and save some typed words, please consider the following to be some of my reasons:

• My wife and I have two children although our son would be considered an adult by many. More than anything, it is my top goal to be a great father.
• Our son was born in July 1998 and our daughter was born in June 2003.
• My wife and I were married in June of 1996.
• We met right after spring break of our sophomore year of college, in April 1990, after I moved out of a shitty dorm that I was living in at the time and into an apartment across the hall from hers.
• We are decidedly middle-class per any and all metrics that one could find including another one that Pew Research Center recently released.

• Along the lines of our middle-class status, socioeconomic status has been a keen interest of mine for a number of years.
• We have a sweet, hairy little baby who I love almost more dearly than life, itself. She is a Morkie. Please do not let her know that she is adopted. She turned eleven in April 2020.

• We reside in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the very highly-taxed Cook County. I was born and raised in Evanston, where my mother still lives. I have lived in Illinois for my entire life with the exception of four-and-a-half school years living in Madison, Wisconsin, where I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications.
• I worked my way through graduate school, obtaining a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) on a part-time basis over the course of four years of night classes while serving as a Cook County Adult Probation Officer.
• I detailed my experiences as a Probation Officer in a self-published 800-page tome titled The P.O.: A Probation Officer in Chicago under the pseudonym George Kawalik. I still make a few bucks per month on it based on the number of pages read by Amazon Prime members.
• We purchased our very dated postwar split-level home that was built around 1960 ten days before 9/11, on September 1st of 2001.
• Our home has a never-ending list of needed repairs and deferred maintenance. We could plow fifty grand into it just to make it look modern and livable and as nice as many of the homes in our middle-class suburban neighborhood.
• I am the oldest of three. My younger brother is a highly successful self-employed attorney and my sister works for the educational system in New Orleans. My brother has three children and my sister has two. Both of their families are part of the Twenty Percent that I still aspire to although my prospects appear to be dimming.
• Our father passed away from cancer in August of 2012. We were extremely close. He was a “real author” and had many books published. He taught me much of what I know and once told me that Writers Write.
• My mother was an English teacher for many years and also collaborated on many of our father’s books. She authored a few, as well. She is a real character and still lives in the house in Evanston where she and my father raised me, my sister, and my brother.
• My wife is also the oldest and had two younger brothers. The older of her two brothers died of cancer when he was only twenty-five in 2004. Her living brother is a blue-collar Trump supporter who lives in Wisconsin.
• My wife’s mother passed away from cancer in 2008. Her father remarried about two years later and they have since moved from Wisconsin to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where we have visited three times over the past four years including this past December. He and his wife are also big Trump supporters, but we love him anyway.
• My wife and I hate, loathe, and despise every single thing there is about Trump.
• I have been a government employee since 1993 and have contributed to a defined-benefit pension plan for which I would first be eligible at the age of fifty-five, which I will reach in November of 2025, God willing.
• I have worked for the municipality that employs me since spring 2005. It is an extremely conservative community.
• I am an economic development professional and work closely with business owners, entrepreneurs, developers, investors, brokers, attorneys, lenders, surveyors, other government staff and agencies, and much more on a daily basis. I have been certified through IEDC since spring 2009.
• Because reasons including the preceding two, I write under a nom de plume that I spent months contemplating. M. Bernard Bloom is an amalgam of three of my dearly departed predecessors’ names. The M stands for an old-fashioned Jewish name that very few living people have anymore.
• I am of Jewish descent and my wife is decidedly not. She is Episcopalian and our children do not associate strongly with either one and we do not regularly attend church or synagogue.
• I saved and saved for our kids’ college funds for over fifteen years, eventually saving over $100,000 for each of them. As the markets climb back in the fall of 2020, I have nearly $120,000 in our daughter’s accounts. I have already paid somewhere north of $110,000 for our son’s undergraduate tuition, room, board, books, food, and the many fees that the college tacked on when they wanted more money.
• Like many, our family has suffered financial losses since March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. I am grateful to remain gainfully employed and able to hang in there financially. We are not wealthy, but I earn enough to support my family.
• Our family has had trips canceled including a round-trip flight that was neither refunded nor credited back (Spirit Airlines). The community where I work did not grant raises this year due to the pandemic and I missed a small ($1,000 before taxes) performance bonus.
• My wife has been laid off from her lunch supervisor position at the magnet school from which both of our children graduated. She had a very hard time logging onto the Illinois site to file for unemployment.
• Because reasons, I realized in 2019 that it would be prudent for me to continue working and contributing to my pension plan until the age of fifty-six rather than the minimum age of fifty-five, the earliest time that I would become eligible should I succeed in maintaining gainful full-time employment with an IMRF employer through that time.
• I read like mad, typically a few hours per day. I admit to being a bit of a book hoarder and engaged in a book-buying spree for over two years (2017, 2018, and a bit into 2019) when I purchased at least two hundred books. I have since been selling some and donating many of them to Salvation Army, local libraries, and placing them in Little Free Libraries.
• I also had subscriptions to at least a dozen magazines going into earlier this year. In an effort to cull the growing pile of magazines, I am letting them expire one by one. I only envision subscribing to two by early next year, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and The New Yorker.

• I walk quite a bit as my primary form of exercise. I have participated in walking challenges the past two months (September and October 2020) and have logged over half a million steps each month.

• I have been trying to embrace the philosophy of minimizing my possessions while earning some extra money via the KonMari method, selling quite a few of my no-longer-loved books on eBay in addition to donating many of them.

• I have some chronic physical ailments, as many middle-aged folks do. Most notably, my right ankle is messed up and causes me some degree of pain at all times. I typically treat it with Biofreeze every night, extra-strength Tylenol (I previously racked my stomach with Advil and even stronger meds), and occasional massages. I sustained the injury while playing tennis with my son in late May of 2013.
• I have had several surgeries over the years and have had stitches in seven places, all of which I do not care to recount because reasons.
• I am the breadwinner for our family, or the Household CFO if you will. I am responsible for the payment of all bills, all investments made, and everyone’s health insurance.
• Although my mother seemingly has enough money to see her through via a combination of collecting royalties from my late father’s books, inherited funds, and social security (which is her smallest income stream), I need to help her from time to time on basic things. My younger siblings, both of whom live out of state, cannot as easily assist her.
• Although I consider starting my own business, side hustles, taking over my father-in-law’s declining business, updating my late father’s outdated books, and possibly just working a retail or service job as a “semi-retiree” in my mid-fifties, I would like to be done working altogether by the age of sixty.
• I plan on collecting Social Security, should it still exist, at either the age of sixty-two or possibly sixty-three or even sixty-four depending on my ability to generate additional income besides my pension.
• After reading countless books, articles, posts, and stories in the self-help genre, I have reached the conclusion that one of the most powerful things that you can do is to improve yourself is to improve your habits.
• Some of the habits that I have embraced just this year, 2020, include walking and biking much more than usual, weighing myself on a regular basis, refraining from consuming as many sweets, and drinking apple cider vinegar occasionally.
• Also along the lines of helping oneself, I am also striving to Create More and Consume Less, to Increase My Grit and Perseverance, and Be Happier With What We Do Have.
• Although in my experience, good guys often do finish last, the smartest people do not always make it ahead, and the American Dream of moving up the economic ladder is largely a myth, I continue to strive for betterment, safety, and comfort for me and my family and I perpetuate the theory that hard work pays off for our two children.
• I could, should, and will improve upon my level of Emotional Intelligence.
• I overate for many years, only becoming more aware of calorie counts over the past few years.
• My primary philosophy when it comes to personal finance is to Pay Yourself First. I do so on every single paycheck that I receive. My problem is that I did not embrace that philosophy until only a few years ago. I had invested for quite a few years, but it was completely sporadic and random. I now systematically invest similar amounts on every payday no matter what other bills are coming due.
• In my own family’s case, I refer to the above as “Paying Ourselves First,” since my wife works extremely part-time and only makes around eight thousand per year. As the aforementioned Household CFO, I set up a Roth IRA for my wife quite a few years ago and have sent every dollar to it that has been invested. I currently send $500 to her account every month.
• Because economics, workforce trends, and technology are all highly pertinent to both my profession and life, in general, I follow them closely. I have also changed quite a bit over the years, from being more artsy-fartsy in my younger years to more jaded, pragmatic, and financially oriented throughout my middle age. I find the three topics extremely fascinating as well as sometimes frightening.
• I truly believe that it is harder to be a younger person growing up now than ever before. Despite the tremendous advances made in technology and healthcare, I think that the widening gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots, the growing divisiveness among races and political ideology, the sharing of everything instantaneously via social media and “for other reasons,” coming of age today is no easy thing.

There are many more reasons for me, and I would imagine that some of mine resonate with you. Perhaps you are my complete opposite, a Trump-supporting tech-savvy up-and-coming successful single lady of ethnic descent.

Perhaps you have already attained things that I can only dream of.

You may have reasons why you want certain things or would like to divest yourself of certain items or perhaps people. Perhaps you are already working towards building your own successful business or are closing in on attaining financial independence.

I do not really know.

What I do know is that all of us have reasons for things that we say, think, and do. It may be due to how we were raised or it may be due to strict schooling or coaching received. It may be due to a traumatic experience or a bad living situation.

Whatever your reasons may be, I have just listed but a few of mine. The beauty of this story is that I will revisit it periodically as more of my reasons come to mind.

I welcome any and all feedback including any reminders of important things that I may have overlooked.

Whatever the case is, I do not wish to elaborate any further because reasons.