Thoughts From Missoula

Photo credit: Malcolm Manners, CC BY 2.0.

So the thing about Missoula is that my phone doesn’t work here. I’m on Credo (tagline: “phone-powered progressive change”) and although I could get texts—sometimes a full hour after they were sent—and make calls if I was willing to repeat myself multiple times, I spent most of the weekend unable to check the news or social media.

Which, on the one hand, I didn’t mind at all. I like being able to spend time with people I care about without also feeling that pull and/or obligation to check in with everyone/everything else.

But some weekends you feel like you should be checking in with the rest of the world, even if you can’t do anything about it.

I got back to the hotel room and logged on to the Wi-Fi and read the news, and spent some time on Twitter despite last week’s decision to spend less time on Twitter, because this time people were tweeting about a real thing that had really happened. A series of unbelievable things—including the response from our president—that had, in fact, happened.

When I made my donation to the ACLU Foundation of Virginia I literally thought “Should I give to the full amount of what I can afford, or should I give less because I might need to make other donations soon?” Which feels both stingy and pragmatic. The kind of forward thinking we might encourage here at The Billfold, if it weren’t connected to human lives.

Anyway. I never know exactly how political this personal finance site should be, and how to balance the fact that we had an actual Nazi and/or white nationalist rally this weekend with the kinda jokey post about the stock market and the nuclear crisis that’s scheduled for later today, and the “how characters in Decemberists songs do money” post that y’all requested and that I’ll write up for tomorrow.

But last night I danced in the rain, with my friends, as The Decemberists sang about the end times.

And then I came back and I checked the news again—and, after learning the whole “it’s complicated” role the ACLU played in this weekend’s rally, made another $50 donation to the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP.

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