Job update: according to my supervisor, the university has finally gotten around to signing the research work order for the lab tech position. Now they have to figure out whom to notify about it in Reston. That’s right, Reston, Virginia, the site of the Ebola Reston outbreak that Robin Cook parlayed magnificently into a lousy book and a blockbuster movie. Richard Preston’s “
The Hot Zone” is nearly as bad and five times more sensationalistic.
One of the things that being on financial short rations does to one is to create a mental priority-sorted list of things one intends to do with money when one eventually is paid. Bookshelves have been high on mine since I moved here six weeks ago, after “repayment of roommate’s loan for last month’s rent” and “bike light so I don’t kill myself cruising downhill in the dark”. Bookshelves are important for the idea of stability. Keeping one’s books in cardboard boxes is only mildly inconvenient, but signals a transitory state; being able to replace them on shelves means residency. Plus, our living room remains a great expanse of empty carpet. (There’s also no ceiling light fixture, which is another parallel with the first chapter of the book of Genesis.)
Yesterday I went to a budgeting seminar at an EV Free Church which was using material produced by Willow Creek’s Good $ense ministry. (Willow Creek, which is in Illinois, I don’t like because it’s too incredibly huge. It’s more like a small city unto itself than a church, and I think it’s far too easy for megachurches to become insular, exclusive communities, and too intimidating for people who would prefer to investigate Christianity in a less concert-like setting. The Bible tells us to “shine like stars” – too massive a star ( a black hole. However, I won’t say that megachurches are the Antichrist either.)
One of the areas they discussed was credit cards. A video collage of short interviews with passersby in Chicago demonstrated that most Americans think “debt is expected and unavoidable.” I’m only buying groceries with my father’s card until I get paid, and am strongly annoyed that I have to depend on it in order to maintain an emergency reserve of real money in my bank account. Another Malaysian at my
alma mater (let’s call her the Vampire Violinist in future posts, or VV) probably wouldn’t borrow money unless she was
literally starving. Being in debt has classically been considered shameful in the East Asian Confucian ethic – being dependent on Ah Longs was for the poorest of the poor like tenant farmers and people with no self-discipline like gamblers. But it’s getting to be more acceptable – yeah, yeah, I’m blaming it on Western culture. Heck, even the US government is in hock to India and China (see
Allan Sloan and
Fareed Zakaria’s columns in a recent Newsweek). I read an essay a while ago wrote about what healthy shame is. Debtors are increasingly shameless and letting themselves be screwed big-time.
Supposedly credit cards encourage spending because there’s no tangible evidence that one has paid out money when one buys something with a credit card. I wonder if a cultural shift will come as younger people grow up in a world where information has increasing importance compared to that of physical matter, and they learn to think of money in terms of sheer numbers instead of physical bills and coins. I usually keep a mental running tally of what I’ve spent with my debit card and Papa’s credit.
On the other hand, given how damn materialistic modern urban culture is, the impulse to spend might well overpower the ability to count.
The advice offered in the book we bought for the seminar ($10) was good, but the font was childishly large and there was generally a lot of white space and repetition. Maybe this is to avoid intimidating participants already frightened by the complications of personal finance, but for information-hungry people like me, it’s irritating. In an appendix titled “Unplugging from the Consumptive Society”, tip #3 says “
When you do decide it is right to purchase an item, see if God will provide it without you having to buy it. Pray about it for a week, then consider if you still need it. If God hasn’t provided it and you do still need the item, go ahead and purchase it.” The Willow Creek speaker shown on the DVD reiterated the point that immediately buying large things you need removes the opportunity for God to use the need as a “learning experience”.
My first reaction was, WTF? This sounds very much like the prosperity gospel idea of “if you pray hard enough God will give you a Mercedes,” which is a movement even less palatable than that of the megachurch, and the general vaguely religious superstition that you can beg stuff from the powers that be (be what? I’ve always wondered about that phrase).
Anyway...it really was a good seminar overall. Aside from the book being rather content-light and short of advice for young adults fresh out of college/school, I didn’t have any complaints. And the lunch was great for five bucks. Some parts were boring, as my income and net worth were zero and negative several hundred respectively, but once I get paid I’ll probably be somewhat better organized about knowing what to do with it (more on that in a later post, probably).
After it ended I went to the house of a friend who’d persuaded me to join her in the seminar. As she was driving me back, we spotted an enormous melange of junk that someone had left by the side of the road – within walking distance of my apartment – including three bookshelves.
Twenty minutes of walking back and forth with a dolly netted me two light but sturdy metal shelves of the angle-iron style (I left the white chipboard one), an acrylic globe chandelier, and a tatty broom for the porch.
Okay, okay, it’s not that I don’t believe in divine providence, it’s just that I’m a little suspicious of my own assumptions about it when it happens too easily...
AOL absolutely sucks in terms of consumer choice. When you use one of their free CDs, the installer doesn’t give you any options and puts a load of crap on your desktop and in your hard drive:\Program Files folder. I deleted and/or uninstalled most of it except the main program and the AOL Dialer program. Am planning to post a sign by the mailboxes asking my neighbours (none of whom I’ve met yet) if any of them would be willing to share a wireless network in return for contributing to payment of their DSL bills. Hopefully the owner of “bin’s home” never figured out we were piggybacking on their network.
After I got rid of most of the AOL junk, I wound up spending a good several hours surfing aimlessly (see Lifehouse’s “Sick Cycle Carousel” for a nice angry song about addiction: “If shame had a face I think it would kinda look like mine / if it had a home would it be my eyes”). Wired had an article about a bunch of
SuicideGirls going on strike, so I checked out their website out of curiosity. (Yes, I’m writing about porn in the same entry as about churches.) I’ve never gone to a pornography site deliberately, but that one’s all soft-porn anyway. Looked at some of the sample pictures and saved a couple of models who had really lovely tattoos. One had a triangular area across her upper chest that looked like a sunset with wings.
Looking at beautiful bodies makes me think of the quotation CS Lewis included in “That Hideous Strength” about the beauty of the female being the garden of delight for both males and females or something like that – everybody knows women generally don’t enjoy looking at naked men as much as the converse. Some other models are skinny to the point of ugliness, though – ribsy chests sticking out like an advanced emphysema case.
I’ve been flirting with the idea of getting tattoos, since my friend Amanda who’s one of the least ‘wild’ people I know got one with the logo of her drum corps, but the three reasons not to get one are a) they’re expensive to the point of being a luxury, b) I don’t know how my aesthetic tastes will change in the future, and c) my parents would freak – in DEscending priority order.
