Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Ah, finally an influx of cash! My financial aid check for this semester came in and I'm now the proud owner of $5400! Well, okay, not really. I owed $400 to the bank, $350 to AT&T, and then my desire to splurge on new toys kicked in.

I ordered a new duel-worthy lightsaber from Ultrasabers for $90 including shipping, and bought a new 320GB Western Digital SATA drive for my computer, which I somehow failed miserably to install, for $80. I think the drive was dead, but I have no way to be sure unless I take my machine to the shop and pay them $60 to diagnose the problem. Of course, that thought led me back to Best Buy for a 500GB Seagate USB external drive so that I could port all my porn off the old drive before taking the machine in for work. There's nothing illegal on my drive, but I just don't need the guys at the shop knowing of my predilections for hot moms and lusty college girls! And, just for the record, my old drive is only 80GB, and no, it wasn't completely filled with porn... only about 40GB!

After my assorted expenditures, I had a bit over $4000 left, so I decided to begin my earlier financial experiment anew. This time I'm starting with $2000 instead of $1000 like before. This provides me with a couple of benefits over last time. For one thing, with $2000 I should be able to double my initial investment faster than before, and I can also divide my investment over more stocks at once which should provide some added security from the inevitable downturns which come from each stock individually. Also, my investment account was recently changed to allow trading with unsettled funds. Formerly, when this wasn't allowed, it slowed me down considerably because it forced me to wait three days between each buy/sell cycle. Now, I should be able to sell and buy all within the same day.

The thing is, right now I'm feeling antsy for things that cost money. I want to build a new computer so that I'll be ready to upgrade to Windows 7. My current rig was built exactly five years ago and just won't keep up with all the bells and whistles of newer software. Beyond that, little things are going wrong with my car (the AC doesn't work, the interior lights are shorting out, my rear defroster doesn't work, and there is an oil leak from faulty oil sensor switch), and I want to either get them fixed or get a newer, more fuel efficient, car than my 2000 Dodge Neon. And, to top it all off, I'd really like to buy a new bicycle. I haven't ridden a bike for at least 15 years, but I'd like to have a bike for short (under 5 miles) trips to the grocery store, and just general leisure and exercise. Plus, I'd like to be able to save a little gas by not hopping in my car and going for a drive whenever I'm bored. Good quality "city" bikes cost around $800-1000, and I would need a helmet and a bike rack for my car. I haven't even mentioned the fact that I would LOVE to go shopping for new clothes since many of my pants and shirts are wearing out.

Truth be told, I suppose my priority list should be in this order: Car, Clothes, Computer, Bike. Realistically, though, when it comes to money I've never been one for practicality. Knowing me, as soon as I can afford to do so, I'll get the bike, then clothes, then the computer, and I'll just drive my car until it explodes, whether or not I'm actually in it at the time!

Have fun and keep living life... But spend your money wisely!

Another One Bites the Dust

I had to make a hard decision today. I chose to drop my British Literature class. I'm not sure why, but rather than feel like I made a good decision I feel like I failed somehow. This is the first time I've ever dropped a class even though there were several in the past that I probably should have in order to protect my GPA. By dropping the class I insure that a low grade will not lower my already injured (2.54) GPA.

Part of the problem comes with the fact that, in order to drop the class, I had to get the professor to sign off on the form for me to drop. I've mentioned that I wasn't really in love with her as a professor (Okay, so, without ANY evidence whatsoever to support this, I called her a Dick Cheney-loving dominatrix... but not to her face!), but when she asked me my reason for dropping the class I actually felt bad for her! I didn't want to hurt her feelings for some reason. Now, understand that I had already planned out that I was going to just go ahead and tell her that I felt she was condescending and that if we were in the corporate world her teaching style would be equivalent to that of a micro-manager who picks at every little detail of his underlings tasks, and how I don't appreciate that level of specificity because it insults my intelligence and gives me the sense that my work and talent isn't being respected, and if she doesn't like how students write papers at this level she should just feel free to give them Ds or Fs rather than laying out every single point that she wants presented in a paper. Instead, I meekly commented that I wasn't enjoying British Literature as much as I had hoped I would, and that I just didn't think her teaching style meshed with how I like to work as a student. For her part, she politely recommended I take a literature course taught by a professor who by coincidence I've had before and is, according to her, "less structured" in his teaching style and looks at everything from a "communist" point of view! I have to admit, the professor in question DOES sort of look at things with a communist point of view, but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing!

I've been trying to figure out why I backed down from telling the professor how I really felt about her. Some might say that I'm "maturing" or "becoming more sensitive to the feelings of others" in my old age, but I think that's a load of bullshit! I think it has something to do with the power differential between us. You see, in normal classroom situations (ones where I feel glad to be there) I am incredibly outspoken with a mix of insightful comments and wry sarcasm. In those environments, I feel as though I'm an equal (perhaps even occasionally superior) to the professor. It would be completely natural to let those professors know EXACTLY how I feel about them because I didn't hold anything back during standard class time. Unfortunately, I never felt at home in my Brit Lit professor's classroom. Rather, I would sit there quietly staring at her PowerPoint presentations, rarely making eye contact, trying to avoid being called on, absolutely never interjecting my own thoughts, and just trying to pretend that I wasn't there while still showing up enough not to go over my allotment of permissible absences. The assignments I did turn in all made As, but I just didn't want to be there. I didn't want to work for her. I didn't want to impress her. And I didn't want to connect with her as a human being.

I guess that's why I feel so bad about dropping her class. In that one brief minute that it took to get her to sign the form I was forced, for once, to consider that she was a person with feelings and a life outside of the classroom. Granted, by tomorrow (certainly by next week) she will likely have forgotten all about me as a student. And perhaps that's the way it should be. Because for her to remember me beyond next week would have meant that I had to make an impact. And to make an impact, at least in that moment, would have meant that I had to be rude and insensitive and try to take away, for a time however brief, another person's sense of self-esteem. In doing so, ultimately, I would have gained nothing but a fleeting sense of ego-inflation. I can get that somewhere else.

By the way, I got my first test grades back from all my other classes and I made an A (90) in Philosophy, a B (88) in Environmental Geology, and a C (76) in Human Development, though Dr. Mike will drop our lowest test grade and I expect to make an A on my paper in the class so I'm still in okay shape there, for now.

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof.

A Request for Help...

Just a little request.

You may have noticed that, at least in Internet Explorer, if you scroll down the page my blog posts will frequently vanish from view temporarily until you scroll back up to a certain point. I have NO idea why this is happening and the help from the Blogger forums is less than helpful. I've noticed that refreshing the page can help sometimes, but then the problem will just move to other posts for some reason! It is annoying me as much or more than it may have annoyed you.

If you have any ideas about HTML/XML coding (by the way I'm a severe novice at this and have been using online tutorials to learn some basic website editing, so I have no qualms admitting that I may have made an error in coding something even though the problem seems a bit too random to be caused by errant code) feel free to leave me a comment and I'll get back to you so that hopefully we can sort it all out.

Thanks so much for your support.

Picking Up a Spare

I went bowling last night with Chris, the guy who helped me with my spark plugs a few months ago, and two of his friends. I hadn't been bowling since Ex and I were still dating. In fact, the one time we went bowling was actually the last date we went on before breaking up a week later. I'm not an especially great bowler (I can bowl around 100 on a good day), although I do have my own ball from when I took a bowling class in college back in 1993. I have a thing about touching other people's sporting equipment, so any sport I plan on playing more than a few times is one in which I own my own equipment. I have my own pool cue, by the way.

I had a really good time bowling with Chris and his friends, a heavy set guy with a peach-fuzz moustache named Joe, and a tall average sized guy with a shaggy haircut named Beckett. All three of the guys are under twenty years old. None of them were particularly good at bowling, either, although they kept playing as though they knew what they were doing. All were fond of throwing heavy balls and curving them as hard as humanly possible. Consequently, alot of their hooks ended up in the gutter! For my part, I like a lighter ball (mine is only 12 pounds) that I can bowl straight as a laser and better focus on my accuracy. My biggest problem with bowling is that I can never seem to capitalize on a strike or a spare. My next balls after each always seem to gutter or only hit one or two pins. It would be nice to pick up a spare every now and then.

We bowled for over three hours, and during that time Chris and Joe got into an argument about god-only-knows-what that really brought the mood of the evening down. The argument lasted for at least 20 minutes, perhaps as much as 45 minutes before subsiding. We all continued to bowl, regardless, and my score actually improved with me ending the night with a 127 (I beat all the other guys with that). Of course, during the argument, I made attempts at trying to calm the situation down. Trying to pull as much as I could from my psychological studies, and personal experiences in therapy, I attempted to get Chris and Joe to see things from each other's perspectives and try to understand what was motivating the other's behavior. I encouraged each of them to rise above their pettiness and put the argument behind them so that they could enjoy what was left of the evening. Nothing seemed to help, as these two just wanted to keep digging into each other's skin, figuratively speaking. Even though Chris and Joe eventually ended their outward shows of hostility it was clear that, by the end of the night, they were still holding grudges.

This is where it gets interesting, at least to me. As a final bow to the evening, Joe left before the rest of us were ready to go. While doing so, he picked up the bowling tab for ALL OF US. Joe had already sprung $20 for pizza, which mostly he and I ate, and THEN picked up the $30 tab for all of our bowling. Even Chris was flabbergasted by that move. I'm not sure if Joe was trying to show that he was better than Chris by having done that, or if it was one of those angry, spiteful tab pickups that I've been known to do in the distant past. Perhaps you've done something similar. You know those nights where nothing is really going your way, and you just want to get it over with as fast as possible. So, rather than taking the time to behave rationally you just fork over all the cash in your wallet to the service person and leave without even stopping for your change. It's the sort of rash thing that young men are somewhat typical of doing.

At any rate, it was nice to get out of the house and spend time with other people for a change. I'm fairly certain that Joe and Chris will smooth things over in a day or two, since they've known each other for several years. And, even though the guys are all young enough to technically be my sons, I had a good time feeling as though I was, after a long time without this feeling, surrounded by friends. And it's always good to have spare friends around.

Have fun, and keep living life... or some approximation thereof.

You're So Money

Why can't we see ourselves through the eyes of others? I wonder what life would be like if we could. So often, it seems, the "me" that we see isn't the same as the "you" that is the view of the outside world.

Take, for instance, my Brit Lit Professor. I can almost guarantee that her self-image and the image she projects are not even close to parallel. Why am I so sure? Because the image she projects is that of a vaguely sinister, highly condescending research librarian who splits her time between stacks of antiquated literary tomes, her basement dungeon where she dons skin-tight leather, fishnet stockings, and thigh-high stiletto boots while wielding a cat-o-nine-tails as she forces unassuming men to submit to her will and call her "Mistress Kitty", and her blog where she coordinates the Dick Cheney Fan Club because, after the things she's made men BEG her to do to them, waterboarding could HARDLY be considered torture!

All too often, our self-image has a tendency of holding us back from the things in life that we want, and the things which we are capable of achieving. I've mentioned before how I used to see myself as basically helpless to the things which inevitably would happen to me in life. It was a sort of learned helplessness which came from years of being told, as a child by a mother who never won any awards for parenting, that men were only good for sex, and even then weren't that great half the time. I saw relationships as an economic transaction -- I had to spend something in order to get something that I wanted in return. Most of the time, I never thought I had anything of any value to spend. For some situations, I'd spend what money I had, for others I'd spend what sexual ability I had to trade, and for still others I'd trade my natural skills as a counselor. In situations where I didn't have enough money, sex wasn't a tradeable commodity, and counseling wasn't required, I had absolutely nothing to offer. Or, at least that's what I would tell myself, repeating things I'd been taught as a boy.

Of course, the world is filled with examples of people who see themselves in ways different from the objective reality. There are people who stay in abusive relationships because they don't see themselves as capable of existing independent of the other person. There are people who think that their attempts at humor are well-received when, instead, they make everyone around them uncomfortable. There are the young men and women who, after looking at fashion magazines and television and movie stars, feel as though they don't measure up to some imaginary "ideal" of appearance and must starve themselves in order to be accepted even though they were perfectly attractive to begin with, and their attempt to satisfy their self-imposed body image is what actually becomes the horror show. I wish I could tell everyone the truth of how they are REALLY seen by the people around them in a way that would actually make a difference.

I've referenced the movie Swingers before. In the movie, Trent, played by Vince Vaughn, is fond of telling Mike, played by Jon Favreau, "You're so money and you don't even know it!" By this, Trent means that Mike, a down-on-his-luck wannabe actor in LA who just broke up with his fiancee in order to pursue a career which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, has so much to offer the world if only he would wake up and see it for himself. In many ways, despite the cool veneer that Trent projects, Mike is the real deal, a guy with all the qualities that Trent can only pretend to have.

We all have something to offer the world. We all have an inherent value. I know that sometimes it is hard to believe it for ourselves, but it is true. And we don't need to go looking hard to find it, either. We just need to look at the people who really care about us: our family, our friends, our acquaintances. Would we miss any of them if they were gone? What do they offer us that we would lose if they disappeared? Isn't it feasible to believe that WE give those same things BACK to the people we care about? And if, for some reason, we don't, is there some way we can start? Because the value of our lives doesn't have to be measured in dollars, or favors, or sacrifices of ourselves that we make to hold people tight against us like glue. The value of our lives can be measured in how happy the people we care about make us, and how readily we exchange that joy.

Have fun, and keep living life... and remember that you're money, baby!