Money Manners: Time for Gen Xer to move

Dear Jeanne & Leonard:

I’m a Generation Xer currently living at home with my parents. There’s a man I’d really like to marry and have a child with, but the problem is this: I’m in school studying for my long-overdue associate degree, and the man I yearn for lives in Minneapolis. I’d really like him to move back to Chicago so we could build a life together. But he owns a successful bar there and doesn’t want to sell it. He says I should move to Minneapolis, but I don’t like the area. What should I do? What should we do?

— Lovesick, Park Ridge, Illinois

Dear Lovesick:

As Mick Jagger sagely observed, “You can’t always get what you want.”

Not to be unsympathetic, but while you can switch schools, your Mr. Right can’t just move his bar to Chicago. He’d have to sell it and buy another, and there are no guarantees that his new enterprise would be a success.

We know, you don’t care for Minneapolis. But if you’re an Xer, you must be approaching 40, at least, meaning you’ve reached the age where, like it or not, financial security trumps the weather, or whatever it is you dislike about the Twin Cities. If you truly want to build a life with this man, it’s time for you to leave your parents’ nest and go where a life with him awaits you.

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Dear Jeanne & Leonard:

When I was in elementary school, I was the victim of bullying. It was a terrible experience, one I’d like to forget. But my older brother, who aspires to be a singer, has written a song about it that he sings in local clubs. When he performs it, he explains that the song is about his kid brother, and he uses my name in the lyrics. I hate the humiliation, and I’ve asked him to stop, but he says I’m being too sensitive. He also says that the song is on a hot topic and that it’s helping his career. Now he wants to put it on a CD to sell in the clubs where he plays. Am I really being too sensitive in objecting?

— Bullied Enough, Tennessee

Dear B.E.:

If it’s any consolation to you, everyone who’s close to a writer lives in fear of having his or her life appropriated in the name of art. Not that this gets your brother off the hook; if they awarded gold records for the most callous exploitation of a relative’s misery, he’d already have one.

So to answer your question, no, you’re not being too sensitive. Your brother has no business trying to make a buck or build his career off of your scars.

P.S. Where are your mother and father in all this? If you and your brother are as young as you sound, they deserve a plaque in the Bad Parenting Hall of Fame for allowing your brother to sing that song a second time.