I have spent the afternoon being very grown-up. Said another way: I have spent the afternoon on the phone and spending money for things that are supposed to be good for me, like support for a presidential hopeful and health insurance. The verdict: IT SUCKS. I want to be 21, fearless, and ignorant again.

1. I registered to vote in CT (finally) and marked a party affiliation. This was a first - the party, not the voting. I registered to vote in CT the day I turned 18 and proudly wrote NO AFFILIATION, kept this status when I moved to New York. I moved back to CT last year and neglected to change my voting status or party affiliation because when the fuck does it matter whether or not you vote in a primary? Whoops. So now I’m a registered Democrat.

2. I donated money to Obama’s campaign. This is an absolute first for me, and even though it’s almost totally symbolic (my $50 isn’t going to break the bank, though it might for Hillary), it feels good to care enough about something political to actually want to be a part of it. I’ve given money before, but only to friends doing various feats of strength in the name of cancer or AIDS or whatever, and every year since college I’ve donated a little bit to Planned Parenthood and other women’s reproductive rights advocacy groups, but this political stuff is new for me. I like it.

3. Ugh, it only gets worse from here. Spent about an hour researching the best health care options for me. I’ve been without insurance since I quit my job and moved home to go back to school, and it’s looking increasingly like I will not have blanket insurance again until I start medical school in the fall of 2009. I’ve been skating by on my excellent health and crossed fingers, and my NYC gynecologist has had the good grace to only charge me for the cost of care (a $35 pap smear) rather than bill my non-existent health insurance; plus he gives me pharmaceutical samples of the pill for free, so I’ve not paid for birth control in over three years. Very lucky, I know, and I feel like this luck is about to run out. So I’ve been researching my best options to minimize costs, and I think I’ve found something pretty reasonable: $2K deductible, which doesn’t include 4 doctor visits (primary and specialists) per year ($25 copay on those); 50% coinsurance on prescriptions, which basically will amount to about a $30 charge for generics, which is kind of expensive, but still way better than paying $60/month for a pill that I only technically NEED on average two times a month (this is an entire new blog that will NEVER get written); $140 monthly premium. Wow, reading back that last “sentence” I can honestly say that a year ago I didn’t know what half those words meant. The fucking irony of all of this is that I WORK IN A HOSPITAL, a hospital that pays me minimum wage for a maximum of 16 hours a week, and refuses to give me health coverage.

4. I rolled my old 401(k) over to an IRA. I’m pretty sure this officially makes me a grown-up. This is maybe the worst, though. This 401(k) is from my first job out of college, at HarperCollins Publishers. The fund is through News America, their parent corporation, and I was able to roll about $600 of pre-tax stuff. I had a separate, HarperCollins specific account that had about $200 in it, of which I will see exactly $0 because I was with the company for less than 5 years. FIVE YEARS?! I don’t know if anyone reading this besides Tara is in publishing, but so few people stay at the same company in this industry for five years, especially fresh out of college knuckleheads like I was in 2004. So basically, that precious $200 is going back into Rupert Murdoch’s giant Scrooge McDuck safe so he can go swimming in his piles of money, while I sit over here and desperately try to grow a left nut for HarperCollins to suck on.

5. My mother, in a fruitless attempt to get me to change my organization style from “random piles” to “anything else,” bought me a mini-filing cabinet with hanging file folders and manila separating tabs last summer. I stuck it under my desk and ignored it out of spite…until today. Shhh, don’t tell her, but it’s actually REALLY AWESOME to look down and see little folders that have titles like “Fidelity IRA” and “Medical Records” and “Taxes 2007″.