Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City

Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City Read Free

Book: Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City Read Free
Author: Choire Sicha
Tags: General, Social Science, Sociology, Popular Culture
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delivered. Frequently
     a wedding would be celebrated with a party of great expense. Hundreds of guests would
     be fed; spaces much larger than the traditional house were paid for; musicians were
     hired; people now came from far away, where once it was customary for only local people
     to celebrate a union. The arrangements often cost tens of thousands of dollars, if
     not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was frequent that the parents of those
     to be wed shared in this expense, as if the expense of this undertaking could not
     reasonably be assumed by the parties embarking on what was often referred to as a
     “new life.”
    This was a messy stew of old and new ideas. Marrying for love was a brand-new practice.
    The customs of love in general had dictates, although there were many disagreements,
     many minority opinions. Early on, the rules concerned who should, or could, pay for
     things like the purchase of food in restaurants, and what that meant, this little
     gift-giving of things to be digested.
    As the relationship developed, the pertinent matters became who would pay for the
     residence, who would make more money and how it would be shared. Love suffered most
     when issues of capital intruded. It bred distrust and bad feeling. In this way, the
     City and love were at odds.
    Sometimes people would simply declare themselves married—even with no one there to
     observe this declaration. But declarations of marriage became more onerous and bureaucratic
     over time. To be truly married, an official had to preside over the declaration, and
     the couple involved had to pay a fee in order to be licensed by the government. So
     only the official could say who was wed and who was not.
    The state became extremely busy deciding which domestic arrangements were legal and
     which were not. In this time with which we are concerned, there were some arrangements
     that society utterly forbid: it was illegal for people of a certain age to have sex
     with people under a certain age—these ages were picked to define “adult” and “child,”
     but didn’t always quite hit the mark—and it was illegal to force people to have sex.
     And there were some laws that were less sensible and were quickly falling out of favor.
     For instance, it was illegal to exchange money for sex, and it was illegal for men
     to marry men and women to marry women. It had also, until quite recently, been illegal
     for people of some different ancestries to marry. As well, it had been illegal for
     two people to have kinds of sex that couldn’t result in the conception of another
     human being.
    Sometimes the people prosecuted the crimes—or at least the criminals—themselves. Shame
     or violence was almost as good a punishment as imprisonment. But almost always, people
     were more forward-thinking than the laws. And the laws that fell out of favor, they
     didn’t stay laws forever.
    JOHN HAD GRADUATED from his professional school just four months prior to starting this job, which he
     had now held for a couple of years. He was very young and very thin, in the fashionable
     way of that time. He had freckles that would come and go in the summer sun, and reddish-brown
     hair: a handsome chipmunk. He was quick with words and he had no sense of smell and
     he couldn’t drive a car and his eyes were pretty bad, so sometimes he wore these old
     glasses that made him look funny; they were blocky and dumpy and incongruously old.
     Often in the bullpen he’d put his face right up to his computer. He liked working,
     but he still remembered the freedom of that summer after graduation—everything had
     been so easy.
    He had worked briefly as a nonemployee, a “freelancer,” and that meant he made more
     money because so-called “freelance” pay was generally higher. It was expected that
     the freelancer would pay all his or her own benefits—like health insurance—and, at
     the conclusion of each year, taxes. Taxes were a percentage of

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