Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: school

  • If I Want To Live Forever, I Need Only Attend Corporate Presentations From Hell

    What bores you?

    There is the saying that only boring people are bored. But is that true?

    I’ve found in life that I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. There is sooooooo much to do in life!!!! So many books to read, magazines to peruse, films to watch, exercises to do, hikes to take, places to explore. If I lived a thousand years, I couldn’t begin to cross everything off my list that I’d like to do. So for me, the problem isn’t boredom but sometimes of feeling overwhelmed.

    For me, the only time I feel bored is when I’m trapped. When I was a kid, that meant sitting in class with teachers who dictated what we had to do, or sitting in a class (e.g. shop class) where I had no interest. As an adult, it’s corporate mandated trainings and meetings. Life is an ETERNITY when I sit in these meetings. I feel so bored. So trapped. I feel like if I want to live forever, I should just spend every day in a Corporate Presentation. But who wants to live forever in that way? That’s like an eternity in hell.

    Have I ever left a corporate presentation Zoom call or a training or a meeting where I thought, that was worth my time? Not that I can think of. But I do feel like time has slowed down and that the day was 10 years long.

    So I’m rarely bored when left to my own devices. It’s when I’m forced to waste my time in meetings where I feel trapped and bored. If I want to live forever, I’ll just spend the rest of my life going to corporate meetings.

  • Budgeting: A Tale Of Two Lives (Then and Now)

    Write about your approach to budgeting.

    Over the decades and over the years, my approach to budgeting has changed.

    Partly because of the times, but mostly because of the circumstances.

    Time was I had to budget to the penny every single month.

    Part of this was because my mom was a CPA and budgeted to the penny every month so that was normal for me. But mostly it was because I was broke.

    I was in graduate school with rent to pay, then I was a lowly-paid teacher with a mortgage to pay, and every single month money was tight. Exceptionally tight.

    At the time, I used a chart on graph paper to keep track of every necessary bill (mortgage, electricity) and reconciled the checkbook to the penny, and if a bill didn’t arrive on time I called to ask how much it was so I could pay it and not worry about it showing up unexpectedly. Every month was down to the dollar, and more often than not the last week of the month was a reliance on broccoli soup since broccoli was cheap. I remember joining a mail-order coffee club because they gave a free coffee machine, and that was the only way I could afford a coffee machine. Adding to that was the city of Seattle, of course, which had exceptionally high license renewal fees/taxes each year for car renewals despite the fact I was driving a very basic and aging car, so every August when that was due I’d moonlight a second or third job to cover that expense so I didn’t have to fret about it.

    But overall it was hell.

    Today budgeting is easier.

    I have some money in savings, I am steadily building my retirement savings for 10 or 15 years down the road, and we’re good about not living beyond our means, and all my financial obligations except credit card* are on autopay, and my daily expenses go on credit card, so I don’t have to hyper manage my budget anymore. In fact, although I religiously check every expenditure that goes out, I don’t budget per se, and I don’t fret per se, although if we have a big expense coming up (trip to see family, house repair) I’ll put the money for it aside in a separate account.

    It’s hard to be poor. It’s exhausting to be poor. It’s stressful to be poor. There is absolutely no margin for error to be poor. So for me when I was part of the working poor (much of my adult life, actually, given that I gave my 20s and part of my 30s to teaching) I relied heavily on a budget, had no room for extras, and kept track of every single penny.

    I’m grateful that in recent years I can be more re-active and less stringently uptight. It makes life more enjoyable. And it also gives me compassion for the people who are part of the working poor like I was.

    NOTES

    (*) Not having credit card on autopay forces me to go through the bill each month in a timely manner to comb for errors and/or fraudulent charges while also keeping an eye out on my spending habits for the month so I can adjust if necessary.

  • A Walk In The Rain

    This morning during my early morning walk it rained.

    Typically a Seattle rain is a drizzle, but today it was actual rain, a rain that I wasn’t actually expecting (for some reason I forgot it was supposed to rain this morning) and by the end of my 35 minute tour of the neighborhood I was drenched. My jacket was wet, my sweats were wet and my shoes were drenched enough that my socks were also wet.

    In a perfect world, I would have changed clothes and had a warm cup of coffee. But I arrived home just in time to drive my daughter to class, so rather than changing into dry clothes I hopped into the car with my drenching wet clothes to battle traffic for an hour.

    It was fine. I was fine. I eventually dried and am at no risk of dying from pneumonia or anything, but it was unpleasant driving in my wet shoes and socks, especially since I kept thinking how nasty my feet were going to be by the time I got home in an hour especially since I’m a week overdue for my pedicure 🙂 (note: I get a pedicure Thursday, thank goodness).

    I grew up in Seattle. Which means I went to school in Seattle. Which means I walked many many days to school in the rain, especially in grade school, since in the 1970s and 1980s kids still walked to school and NO kid back then wore rainproof clothes unless they wanted to be teased (no Seattleite wore rain gear back then. Why? I don’t know. A misguided badge of honor, maybe).

    Most rainy days in Seattle are mostly damp days, wherein it’s not dry but it’s not really rainy either. But I do remember some of the soaking rainstorms that accompanied me to school as a kid, and I do remember quite a few days arriving at grade school pretty drenched. We didn’t think too much about it I think, but now I’m realizing how unpleasant it must have been to sit in school all morning with soaking wet clothes. How does someone learn their multiplication tables and how to diagram a sentence when their clothes are wet?

    Then, after school, we often played in the rain. I remember the countless days of playing basketball where there was a puddle just underneath the hoop, and we knew to watch our dribble around that puddle since the puddle more-or-less served as an extra defender. Then, after we were done playing and soaked to the bone, we went home. And no one I knew changed their clothes when we got home — we just let them air dry as we continued on with our evening

    I think of all the distractions we had in school back then. There wasn’t really snacking back then so I remember my stomach growling in that final hour before lunch. I think of the 60 minute oneway bus rides that commenced at 6:45am because I was part of the district’s busing program during high school. How sleepy I was so often throughout the day at school after my 5am wake-up time. And I think of all the days I sat in class with soaking wet clothes and feet. How in the heck was I able to concentrate through all that?

    I’m grateful we live in a different world now. A world where I don’t think kids have to walk to school in the rain, and sit in the classroom with soaking wet clothes. A world where when we get wet, or when our kids get wet, we change into dry clothes. And I’m grateful I have a life in which a big deal is wet clothes or a long bus ride — there are people in this world who’d give anything to have a life where these are considered problems at all. I’m grateful to live in a world where my problems are first world problems.