Errand

Today, I went to the bank, which is a block away, and deposited two checks.

This might not sound momentous, but I have been rewriting this errand in my to-do list for fully two months now. One time I almost did it, but I realized I had somehow left home with only my insurance card and my credit card (no drivers license, oops, and more significantly, no bank card). But otherwise, I just never got to it.

You might say, well, you’re a single mom with a huge career and you’re fabulously productive in so many ways besides, it’s understandable that these little things slip through the cracks. To which I would duck my head modestly and say thank you, but actually, this has always been a problem even back when I had fuck all to do.

I don’t know what it is about simple errands; I just CANNOT manage to do them. If I have something to mail or a form to print out or a check to deposit, that’s going to occupy a corner of my mind for weeks on end before it finally gets done.

And so it really seems that anything that cannot be done purely over the computer but requires me to move physically through the world in some way is a small violence against me. And it’s astonishing how many things still require this! Nothing needs to require this, and I feel like if I lived in a more advanced society, like say, Japan, nothing would, but in the States there are any number of industries that are still operating by moving little physical bits of paper around the globe and it really makes me furious.

For one thing, my parents and I now have to regularly exchange sums of money back-and-forth now that we live together, and I am realizing this is…impossible? My mom wants to write me a check every month, which is not possible, because see above. I’m realizing not all banks have, like, Zelle, and there’s usually a fee for transferring money very often or over a certain low amount. I had an online bank for a long time and the best thing about it is it allowed me to deposit checks via mobile app – you just scanned them. Why the fuck don’t all the banks do this?

Except I just now googled it and my bank does do this; I just had never looked at the mobile app before. If I had, I wouldn’t have had to run this errand today at all.

Ok, so fine, problem solved, I GUESS, but I’m still mad.