I know I left things sounding pretty dire the last time I spoke about my home refinance situation.  I’ve been meaning to make note of the resolution here for a while but then I also didn’t want to jinx anything.

I made a deal with the devil parents.  I know it’s not an option everyone has and to be honest I really tried to exhaust every other option first.  Let me tell you a story or two…

When I went to college, my middle class parents made too much money for me to qualify for any financial scholarships and even though I was an Honors Student in high school with an excellent GPA and a semester of college Freshmen English completed during my final semester, it wasn’t enough to overcome the advantage of having parents who were well-salaried even if I wasn’t and didn’t want to be associated with their dimes.

I had no choice but to accept the charity of my parents.  For four years, my parents paid for my college education as well as my room and board and any other expenses outside of the pitiful money I made at the handful of underpaid part-time jobs I attempted to work while acquiring a 5-year degree in 4 years, which required attending 4 semesters a year (2 in the summer) plus 1 extra 5 week semester one May where I had to read almost a novel a day.  For 4 years, my parents wanted to know how I was spending not just my money but my time as well.  You know, they wanted to make sure that their investment was paying off.  And don’t think they didn’t have a say in what classes I took or what major I had.

During those same 4 years, my parents were also  financing a scholarship for another student at another college.  This young man whose name I’ve never known — let’s call him Joe for the sake of this story – was actually from a family who could not afford to send him to college and knowing my parents he probably also had an excellent GPA in high school.  I’m told that they never met him but that he was from a minority ethnic background.  I suppose he had a choice to accept the charity of my parents, but probably the idea of 4 years of tuition at the local university was a good deal, so why pass that up?

So, here’s the facts: Joe and I both technically had scholarship agreements with my parents, but they were vastly different agreements.  Joe’s agreement was limited to spending four years keeping up his grades and getting his tuition paid while getting a degree in a Business major.  My parents never once called Joe  at his home to check on him; they never wanted to know what his study schedule was like; they took no role in making decisions about his class schedule or his extracurricular activities.  They did not discuss whether or not he had a t.v. in his bedroom or whether or not he should have to eat breakfast in the cafeteria.   In fact, as far as I know, Joe went to college with the goal of becoming what he wanted to be growing up, experienced college the way he wanted,  got the degree he wanted, and possibly got the job he wanted afterwards.

I wanted to be a journalist or a writer in my heart of hearts but those jobs didn’t really “make money” according to my parents so I was steered toward the sciences or engineering.  My senior year of high school, I was leaning toward physics, aerospace engineering, or mechanical engineering.  (I kind of liked finding out how things worked and I was really into science fiction.)  My parents were thrilled.  I started college as a mechanical engineering major but after fourteen months it was clear to me that neither physics nor engineering were interesting enough to me to keep me awake or keep up my grades for 4 years of college.  I had an interest in Accounting, which if some of you recall is what my father is — he’s a CPA — and I still wanted to be a journalist or a writer.  However, Business majors apparently were not as successful, money-wise, as science majors or engineers and journalism and writing was still a big no-no.  The only degree in Engineering that I had any talent at and promised not bore me to death was Computer Science and thus the agreement was made with my parents –

Don’t get me wrong, I have never said that I didn’t like being a programmer.  I enjoy programming; I’m quite egocentric regarding my programming skills, I admit.  In fact, I am a self-proclaimed programming diva.  I love the challenge of troubleshooting, the art of design and development, the triumph of doing the impressive impossible.  There’s simplicity, logic, puzzles, beauty, and drama in the world of programming.

However, at the time, I probably would not have chosen this as my career had I been given the opportunity to pick any career I wanted.

My scholarship agreement involved so much more than Joe’s.   And I’d rather not hear from the crowd who just wants to tell me how I should have just walked away from my parent’s money and rules, learned to take care of myself, put myself through college, and be my own person; until you’ve been there, felt the enormous pressure weighing on you, you can’t say anything, know anything.  At the time, I sold my soul to the devil my parents to get a college degree because that’s the only way I knew how to get one.  The scholarship system really is set up to screw the middle class student who doesn’t want to or can’t depend on his or her parent’s income.

I’ve always said that the price of taking money from my parents always comes with mental anguish  interest payments.

The second story I want to tell involves a time after college as a 20-something when I was living paycheck to paycheck as an underpaid programmer with no benefits and no vacation time with a roommate who made even less money than me.  Honestly, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t making a fortune like all of the books, guidance people, and PR promised programmers and geeks would be making in the 90′s.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had to live on the Pantry Diet in the past; well, that’s when I discovered that wonderfully undelightful diet and when I learned to dig through my sofa for loose change every Saturday morning after having my friends over on Friday night.  I recall that you could get a McDonald’s All-American Meal for $1.59 back then. (For 10¢ more you could get cheese…of course, that was after the first time I was a vegetarian and before I found out I shouldn’t eat meat because of my kidneys. )  I got into about $5K – $7K debt and I just didn’t know how to get out.  It was like quicksand; every move I made, I sank further into debt.  Eventually in desperation, I went to my parents for help.

You have no idea what it’s like to have to admit to my father that you are in financial trouble, that you have run up credit cards and not paid them off every month, that you have not lived within your means.  There are hours long lectures; there are repeated questions about why you made the purchases you made, why you spent the money you did, why you didn’t pay the bills you didn’t.  There are doomsday tales of people your parents knew who went into debt and horrible things that happened as a result.  Heaps of guilt is shoveled onto your miserable self as if you weren’t already feeling wretched.

Talk about feeling like a failure when you get into stupid debt and you are the child of a financial control freak CPA.  I suppose it’s like being the criminal child of a Supreme Court Justice…or at least that’s how it feels, the crime of stupid debt while being the child of a CPA.  Should have known better.

It took me about 10 years to both pay off the money I borrowed from my parents and the rest of the money I owed, but I did it, and I felt good when I did it.  Becoming debt free is liberating.  It’s kind of like that feeling you used to get on that last day of school every year when the Summer was just starting and you had 3 whole months of freedom ahead of you with nothing to tether you down.  It’s like that, but better.

And I had planned to stay that way.  Honestly.  My father heaps a good deal of guilt on me about living within my means, but my parents also dish out a lot of conflicting messages each with their own built-in pressure, even at almost 40.

As soon as I was out of debt, even though my plan was to spend the next 2 to 3 years building up a savings to be certain I had an emergency fund and a reserve and a down payment before  considering anything like buying a home, my parents immediately started pressuring me to buy a home because I was just “throwing my money away” on an apartment and it was time for me to “invest in real estate”.  It was all they talked about when they talked to me and I admit, I have issues about needing parental approval;  I’m still discussing this in therapy.  My mother even insisted on driving me around to go look at houses while I was recovering from an outpatient surgery procedure that she flew in to take care of me for.  So, I bought my beautiful house much sooner than I probably should have — right before the housing bubble burst.

And so, having to have my gall bladder removed, needing an emergency appendectomy, discovering an autoimmune kidney disease and gastroparesis on top of my other health issues, having the furnace fail and thus need to be replaced, suffering ice dam damage to the roof requiring a new roof and repairs to the bathroom, the kitchen and the living room, having the unexpected need to replace my car, and dealing with the unexpected increase in utilities and other bills…well, my limited savings in 3 years has been over-exhausted.  Every time I got some money saved, it immediately got spent again by the next unexpected thing, until all I had was my credit card, which I very reluctantly used because I knew from experience what that was like.

And having my mother give me advise such as “You really should have $10,000 in savings” or “You should be making extra payments on the house” when I tell her how I’m struggling financially really doesn”t help my mental state.  And I can’t blame anyone but myself for being in this position because technically I’m the one who got me here.  I’m always saying that once you become an adult you become responsible for your own actions and you can’t blame your parents or what your parents may have said or did to you in the past for anything you do as an adult.  I want to blame them for pressuring me, for subconsciously enabling me into positions that are hazardous to my financial and mental health, positions where I will need rescuing, positions that will leave me dependent on them, forcing me back into the submissive child co-dependent role.  I want to blame them, but I have allowed it to happen…again.

I spent about 4-6 months last year trying to get a loan for debt consolidation through the usual routes and even though I still have a good credit rating, no banks or lending institutions were interested.  Even Lending Tree didn’t respond and they have that 24 – 48 hour guarantee.

I know from experience that if I have fewer payments per month, it is easier for me to pay everything off, but if I have to stretch my dollars to cover too many debtors then nothing will get payed off.  However, no one was lending.  Then when I tried to alleviate my pain through home refinance, well, we know that had problems due to the fact that my home lost value; the bank wanted me to give them about $15K to pay down the house to 95% — if I had $15K, I wouldn’t need to refinance, right?

So, after a lot of soul searching, sleepless tossing and turning, stomach acid churning, I talked to my father about what happened with the home refinance and with the bills last year and how things got behind.  Despite the fact that I outlined how my income increased minimally in 3 years and my basic expenses including property taxes and escrow plus the addition of a loan for the new furnace and a loan for the new car had grown exponentially and not in proportion to my income, my father gave me a lecture about learning to live within my means.

However, with the lecture also comes a loan for the money to pay down the house to refinance and also money to pay off a credit card and my Time Share loan.  This parental loan is a long-term low interest loan, but as I know from experience it comes with extra terms that usual loans don’t have.  For example, I recently admired something and wistfully said that it was something I’d like to have one day and my father replied, “Does that fit into your new budget?”  Now, I didn’t even plan on buying whatever it was; heck, I didn’t even add it to my Things I Want wishlist, which I use to keep track of things I really want.  Already the mental anguish part of the payments has begun.

So, the good news is that my house payments will be $400 lower starting April 1rst.  Plus, I’ve consolidated about $10K with that $15K my parents loaned me; so I’ll be making fewer payments that are less money, which will allow me to rely less on credit each month.  I actually opened a second checking account and I will keep paying all of my bills out of my current one and will use the new one to buy groceries, pay for the monthly household things, and spend on whatever the variable monthly expenses are; thus, the original account should always have the amount needed to pay the bills for the month at the beginning of the month and the new account gets what’s left over.  I think this will actually make budgeting easier since I have such a hard time dividing things up into categories.

Over the weekend, I spent some time going through my rather long list of Read It Later bookmarks and I happened upon 100 Ways to A Better Life by Dragos Roua of Brilliantly Better.  Quite a few were either good reminders or wake up calls for me.

I’ve been allowing one of my co-workers to push my buttons lately and I don’t know what frustrates me more, that there are buttons to be pushed or that I allow it to happen.  I absolutely hate wasting my energy on him and his drama; I’m so tired of drama.  Last year I decided that I was just going to “be in the moment” and take a lesson from the Beatles to “let it be”.  I decided right around this time last year that I wasn’t going to let anyone make me miserable; other people are welcome to their judgements and opinions but in the end, only my opinion matters to me.  I can decide to be happy and I can decide what or who affects me.

Here are some of Roua’s ways to a better life that I find inspiring:

1. Accept Your Mistakes

You’re human. We, humans, are making mistakes. Accept what you did wrong and try to do better next time. No need to punish yourself forever. In fact, accepting your mistakes is the only way to make them disappear.

2. Accept Your Friends Mistakes

Maybe you got hurt by somebody. Happens. Just accept it and deal with it. People are making mistakes and if you can accept that for yourself, accept it for your friends too. In the end, all you need from them is their love.

4. Build Self Discipline

Don’t wait for other people to impose discipline on you. Start early. Create your own discipline. Although it sounds a little bit harsh, self discipline is a facilitator for many things in your life. It’s hard to get but great to have.

5. Make New Friends

Reach out. Don’t be afraid. Establish new contacts. The worst thing that may happen to you is to be rejected. Well, if that’s the case, move on. The reward of having true, long-lasting friendship is worth all the potential rejection.

15. Find Reasons To Agree

Rather than disagree. We have this mindset of competition which makes constantly arguing over things. Well, stop that. You don’t have to force yourself intoagreement, if it’s not the case, just trying to find some reasons will be enough.

17. Wake Up Early

This is not a habit, this is a lifestyle. Don’t just wake up early without a purpose. Be early. Be there before others. Look for opportunities and embrace them. Waking up early means keeping your eye open to every available opportunity.

18. Train Your Focus

Your focus is in fact your reality. Use it wisely. Train it constantly for it will enhance your reality in ways you never imagined. Keep your focus sharp as a razor blade and be prepared to experience life in fantastic shapes and colors.

21. Be Better, Not Perfect

Striving too much for perfection will ruin your life. It will wipe out all those little imperfections which are making you… human. Being better, on the other side, is rewarding. Look back at the yesterday you and just say: I’m better!

22. Stop Self Sabotage

You’ll be surprised by how much of a burden you can be to yourself. You are literallyself sabotaging. Most of the time, unconsciously. If you have a long history of failure behind, that could mean you’ve become your worst enemy. Stop it.

23. Find Reasons To Love Your Life

Maybe life wasn’t fair with you. Yes, I know, I’ve been there: life is never fair. But it’s fantastic. It’s unique, unrepeatable, one of a kind, beautiful, simple, challenging, sweet, hard… Just take a step back and find reasons to love your life.

24. Try Something New

Maybe you’re sad because you’re bored. Have you ever thought about that? Just reach out and try something completely new. Go for a challenge, learn a new sport, pick a different restaurant or go for a comedy movie (if you’re the drama type). Justtry it.

25. Avoid Fighting

Fighting is the biggest energy leak of your being. Trying to prove another guy wrong is so against your true nature. You’re here to acknowledge life’s wonders, not to prove anybody’s wrong. They’re not wrong, just have different opinions. And that’s part of life.

26. Stop Wasting Your Power

Are you doing something that you think you shouldn’t be doing right now? Well, that’s wasted power. That’s meaningless stuff promoted to the honor of being a part of your life. How long are you going to approve this? Why wasting power?

27. Learn To Ignore

I think they should be teaching this one in schools. We’re so focused on so many topics and think we have to do so many stuff, that our life is literally clogged with stuff. It’s good to do stuff, but learning to ignore stuff is much better.

28. Experiment Gratitude

When was the last time you said “thank you”? With all your heart? Everybody knows that an attitude of gratitude is the key to success, but almost nobody practices it. Well, start by experience gratitude first, and take it from there.

29. Recycle Your Aggression

Don’t throw it away, recycle it! Use it for something you really want! Call out those wild forces inside of you and put them to work. Aggression is part of your being, so don’t try to reject it, because it will only grow stronger. Recycle your aggression.

30. Release Your Guardians

Don’t touch that! Don’t eat that! Don’t go for that opportunity! Those are the sentences you hear when going for something you really want. Those are yourguardians, your mental constructs made to protect you. Release them, you’ll be much better off.

31. Clean Up Your House

It’s fun. And it’s good for you. Make a habit out of cleaning up your house with joy and happiness. What’s outside is a mirror of what’s inside. If your house is a mess, probably your internal life is a disaster. Neat that stuff, it’s easy.

33. Dissolve Negative Opinions About Yourself

Whatever you think you may do, it’s half of what you can really do. And that’s because you have so many negative opinions about yourself. You can solve them. Just accept the fact that you have them and then start working on them.

34. Build Different Skills

Don’t stop learning. Don’t remain stuck in a single career, it’s boring and limiting. Learn different skills, possibly from completely unrelated fields. You never know when life will ask you to use them. Besides, it’s a lot of fun.

42. Follow A Coincidence

Well, there aren’t any coincidences, I lied. Everything has a purpose. If you witness something which may seem like a coincidence, then you’re very lucky, you just got a sign. Follow it with trust, it will lead you well.

43. Play A Game

Any game. Just play. Like a child. Allow yourself to do something just for fun, without any goals, pressures or deadlines. Will make you understand that everything is a game. Sometimes a little bit harder, but still a game..

44. Forgive Somebody Out Of The Blue

Don’t hold that grudge for that past insult. Grudges are heavy and tend to make the take off for a new life a little bit difficult. The longer you hold that grudge, the more difficult the take off will be. Forgiveness will lift you off.

45. Stop Solving The Wrong Problems

You are not here to witness the bad things in your life. Nor the performance in itself. You are here to enjoy a journey. To become aware, To grow. So, stop solving the wrong problem and focus on what really matters.

46. Make Peace With An Old Enemy

That’s more than forgiveness, that’s the actual process of reversing a situation. Make peace with somebody. Turn it into your friend. I’m not saying this is easy, I know it first hand. But I also know it works. Enemies count down, friends count up.

48. Break Up With A Person You Don’t Really Like

Maybe you’re friend with somebody just by habit, chemistry being dead for a long time now. Just break it up. Tell him. Ok, let’s unfriend us, this will not work. It will bring up something you thought you lost it long ago: courage.

50. Stop Being Judgmental

With others AND with you. Excessive criticism will kill your enthusiasm. And if you think this post is something you shouldn’t read in the first place, then, my friend, you really are judgmental. Lighten up. Accept life as it is.

52. Smile At Least 10 Times A Day

And I mean it, start to count that. Smiling is a sign of honesty and power. Everybody can cry over a disaster but only the most powerful can take bitterness with a smile. Exercise that power. And then try to go for 20 times a day.

66. Say Something Nice To You

Ok, but if nobody is telling you nice things, why not start this yourself? Do it in whatever form you think it’s appropriate: send yourself emails, write in your calendar or leave yourself nice postits on the desk. With something nice just for you.

68. Don’t Argue, Win Or Lose

This goes hand in hand with avoiding the fight, but it’s a little bit different. If you get caught in an argument, just accept that you can have only two outcomes from it: win or lose. Settle with one and just move on.

72. Go Social

Mingle, interact, go out. Get used to meet new people. Make this a habit and you’ll soon get used to do new things too. The goal is not to be the best networker in the world, but to be connected to as many energy sources as you can get.

80. Stop Complaining

Complaining is like an open invitation for troubles. The more you complain about something, the more of that something you invite into your life. Cut it out. You don’t get any comfort out of complaining, only troubles.

81. Reject What You Don’t Want

It’s so simple, yet so underrated. Society wants us to complain even when we don’t really like stuff. Like forcing us to smile when we don’t find it funny. Allow yourself to walk away from something you don’t like. Just do it!

83. Listen To Your Critics

This one might be difficult in the beginning but once you get used to it it’s fantastic. You may find out a lot of stuff about yourself that you didn’t know about. You think you are one kind of person, but others may disagree.

84. Don’t Take It Personally

Never. Your world is shaped by your reaction to things, not by the things themselves. Don’t get upset, don’t think that somebody knows you enough to make right assumptions about you. Acknowledge and move on.

85. Laugh

This time is not about smiling. It’s about laughing. Don’t you ever miss another opportunity to laugh. Especially at yourself. The longer your laughing sessions, the shorter your misery ones. Looks like a nice deal, isn’t it?

86. Go With Passion

Don’t let your rational mind stand in the way of your passion. If you found – or at least felt, even occasionally – something that thrills you, you’re there. You don’t need a confirmation on this from anybody. Go with your passion.

87. Trust Your Emotions

Don’t underestimate your emotions. Or overestimate them. Your emotions are your feed-back system and for that they are very important. Trying to ignore your emotions is like depriving yourself from lights in a car running in the middle of the night.

88. Live It Like A Holiday

Ever observed how nice you feel during your holiday? How light, joyful and authentic? Everything is just wonderful. Well, you are on a continuous holiday here. It starts with your birth and end with your death. Live it like a holiday.

93. Stop Reacting To Stuff

And start acting on stuff. Initiate things. Start projects. Predict situations and be there before the hurricane hits. Reacting to stuff is a victim paradigm. Stop being a victim and start acting. Create your life instead of being the creation of others.

94. Live Today

Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Go for what you can do today and leave yesterday behind for good. It’s not here anymore. And tomorrow doesn’t even exist yet, so why bother. All you have is today. Don’t waste it.

95. Expect The Unexpected

If there’s something unusual that happens to you, go for it. The unexpected is a signal of an opportunity. It will not always be nice, this unexpected, but whenever it’s around, magical things are happening. Wait for it. Praise for it.

96. Enjoy

Like being in joy. Like giving permission to yourself to extract joy from any situation you’re in. Even if it’s bad. Or especially if it’s bad. Joy is everywhere, you just have to let it manifest through you. Don’t resist joy. Don’t reject it.

97. Make Your Own Rules

And stick with them. Go for what works for you, not the others. Go for what you want, not the others. Including me. Make your own system and be proud of it. You may upset some people in the process, but hey, that’s life.

98. Love

Unconditionally. Totally. Constantly. Restlessly. Love is the only glue that keeps your life running. You were born out of love and you carry it deep down in your being. Love is never about the others, it’s about you.

100. No Regrets

Regretting something is another form of not accepting reality. What you can do about it now? It’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. Focus on what you can change: your present moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. Live now.

Some of these things seem so obvious, so simple, but how many of us remember to really implement them all in our lives every day?  I feel as if I’m constantly striving to achieve these things in my life, to be a better version of myself, and I almost always feel as if I have to remind myself to be happy, to let things be, to just be in every moment without judgement or a need to prove myself, my thoughts or my actions to anyone.

I have a dry erase sheet in my bathroom that I leave little love notes to myself, reminding myself of these things — “All things shall pass.”; “Today is a happy day!”; “Be in the moment!”; “Smile!”  What do you do to help yourself become the better you?

I’ve been working on this whole budget plan thing for a couple of weeks now and I still don’t feel any further along than I was when I started.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m an intelligent person.  I can grasp the very basics:

Income – Expenses >= 0

I mean, I did study accounting in college and I do have a programmer’s logical mind.  Plus, I was a math minor.  I get the most basic part of the concept.  Really, I do.

However, I just don’t think my brain is wired right for easily latching on to the complexities.  For instances, most books and examples out there all offer up examples of income that is the same amount and dished out on the same two days every month and most of the expenses are fairly simple and fixed every month; a few of the examples might show the occasional expense that might be paid quarterly and they all usually show groceries and dining out as unpredictable.  Clearly none of us eats exactly the same thing day after day and no one is stupid enough to pretend to make the assumption in a sample budget even.

It seems like everyone these days are jumping on this zero-based budget bandwagon.  ”Zero-based” sounded a lot like what was in my checking account so I looked into it.   It turns out that it’s not what I thought it was.  Zero-based budgeting is basically a method where at the beginning of each month you spend all of your expected incoming income “on paper” — every dollar has to be spoken for, every dollar has to have a job, so to speak.  You make a list of all your expected expenses and you dedicate every last expected incoming dollar to every last expected expense until the balance is zero.  Now, one of those “expenses” can be a savings account so its not like you actually have to really spend all of the money — I mean, spending it all is what got you in this problem to begin with, right?  The idea is that you don’t just have money sitting around doing nothing, idling about, burning a hole in your pocket, raring to go do some evil by bringing some infomercial trash into your home…or whatever unnecessary thing you might spend money you might psychologically think is “free” on.

Well, that method seems like it’s solid and it appears to work for a lot of people.  Radio/TV talk show host Dave Ramsey has built himself a cult based on it, but I have to agree with my Daddy — there is just no way that you can budget for little thing.  The whole zero-based budget method stresses me out just thinking about all the ways I’ll feel like a failure throughout the month as surprises come up.

A number of years ago, I did really well using the envelope (or my Daddy calls it “the shoebox”) method – a method of budgeting where monthly or biweekly or whatever period, you set aside a certain amount of money for expenses in categories, in envelopes marked for that purpose (ie. mortgage/rent, groceries, gas, auto repairs, etc.) . Then anytime you want to  make a purchase or pay a bill, you check in the associated envelope for the type of expense to see if there are sufficient funds;  if the money is there, yeah!  Go for it! Otherwise, you have three options: 1) you do not make the purchase/pay the bill; 2) you wait until you can allocate more money to that envelope; 3) you sacrifice another category by moving money from its associated envelope. The flip side is true as well, if you do not spend everything in the envelope this month then the next allocation adds to what is already there resulting in more money for the next month.

The envelope method is just a tad more flexible for me.  There’s the psychological feeling that if I don’t get it right on the very first try, I can rearrange things while no one is looking and no one will care — in fact, the rules say I can so there’s no cheating.  Plus, I feel like I can have an envelope marked “Miscellaneous” that covers anything I forgot about when I made up the budget and drop any left over money into it every month; then at the end of the month, I can re-allocate that money over to savings, where my emergency fund is going to be building.

What kind of budgeting method works best for you?  What sort of mental tricks do you play on yourself every month to make it work?

Last night I saw an advertisement for something I could use.  It doesn’t really matter what It is.  Let’s just say that if It functions as advertised, it would make me look nice and probably boost my self esteem as a result — basically, the next best thing to magically making me a Supermodel overnight.

Anyway, It was one of those special deals with “order now” and “get this extra thing free” plus “get this other thing half price”.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  You’ve wanted one of those before.  You may even have ordered a few.  The whole thing was very seductive.  If you called right then, you could get the whole special deal.  (How do the sales people know when those advertisements are running really?)

Now, I’ve been reading The Budget Kit and a number of budgeting and personal-finance-related blogs lately, there’s a big focus on differentiating needs from wants, and a bigger focus on restricting the purchasing of wants or prioritizing them, especially when you are in financial trouble. So…I took some agonizing time to consider whether It was a need or a want. Clearly, It isn’t required to sustain my life — It isn’t food, water, medicine, air, shelter, wood for heat…Therefore, It is not a need.

Thus, It is a want.

Having divined this truth, since I am attempting to spend as little unnecessary money as possible, to straighten out my finances, to get back on track, I did not make the purchase. I agonizingly did the right thing. Non-spendoholics must not even have to think about such choices. They just know and do the right thing and there’s no residual disappointment.

Unfortunately for me, my new little frugal angel and my old spendoholic devil manifested themselves last night as I slept. I spent the night dreaming that I was arguing all night with my mother about whether or not she would allow me to buy It; she kept insisting that no one needs an It, but I argued that she used to encourage me to get one when I was a teenager and I had a perfectly good one in my 20′s that wore out. This It is better.

The whole thing has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I hope it will get easier.

I used to be a prolific letter writer.

When I was young, I had pen pals.  Real ones.  You know, people who did not live anywhere near me with whom I exchanged regular pen and paper based correspondence through the U.S. postal system.  I wrote pages and pages to each and every one of them and they wrote pages and pages back to me.

Those were the days before you started to see the random computer in schools or even in homes.  You know, the 80′s.  Oh, they were selling computers, but there wasn’t much that those dinosaurs could do back then.  I remember learning to write Basic programs on our Texas Instruments computer which hooked up to the television to use for a monitor and saved your data to cassette tape at really irritating high-pitched squeals and that was only if your parents didn’t want to do something important like watch the news or Quincy or Remington Steele.

I wrote my first novel in high school by hand on loose leaf paper.  I just wrote that to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.  AOL was the first real social not-just-for-nerds-and-geeks e-mail system that started to conquer the non-college community and that was the early to mid-90′s.

I think that’s when the art of letter writing began to die.

When people began to be able to send each other short messages every day and get a quick response and it was so much cheaper than making that long distance phone call, there was no need to write pages and pages of anything any more.  Heck, I find that some people’s sigs are longer than the actual message body, which is a big no-no for me — call it a pet peeve.

Now, there’s no excitement when I go to the mailbox.  Why should there be?  The only envelops in there are junk mail and bills.  There’s no anticipation, no hoping that maybe today will be the day that I get that extra special letter from that extra special friend.  I used to look forward to getting those envelops with my name on them.  I would race off to find a good quiet place to sit and read the contents, to catch up with my long distance friend, to vicariously experience through those pages my friend’s life, my friend’s dramas, triumphs, trials, and defeats.  Afterward, I would immediately begin thinking of what I would write in my reply; sometimes, I would tuck in little things I found for the receiver like a bookmark or stickers or a special pen and sometimes I would get things too.  The important thing was that it was a wonderful experience, a physical kind of contact that you don’t get with these modern day so-called pen pals that take place through e-mail.

I miss those kind of good old days, those kind of friendships where you wanted to spill your soul into pages and pages and someone in another zip code wanted to share theirs.  I miss the anticipation of hoping every day that the mailbox will hold a letter from your friend and not just bills and junk mail.

What’s strange about this whole moods is what got me started on this train of thought.  Yesterday morning, I was listening to The Writer’s Almanac on NPR; they’ve been doing a series on love letters since Valentine’s Day is approaching, and yesterday’s love letter was Napoleon to Josephine:

“I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk one cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain apart from the moving spirit of my life. In the midst of my duties, whether I am at the head of my army or inspecting the camps, my beloved Josephine stands alone in my heart, occupies my mind, fills my thoughts. If I am moving away from you with the speed of the Rhone torrent, it is only that I may see you again more quickly. If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love. … I ask of you neither eternal love, nor fidelity, but simply … truth, unlimited honesty. The day you say ‘I love you less,’ will mark the end of my love and the last day of my life. If my heart were base enough to love without being loved in return I would tear it to pieces. Josephine! Josephine! Remember what I have sometimes said to you: Nature has endowed me with a virile and decisive character. It has built ours out of lace and gossamer. Have you ceased to love me? Forgive me, love of my life, my soul is racked by conflicting forces.

My heart, obsessed by you, is full of fears which prostrate me with misery … I am distressed not to be calling you by name. I shall wait for you to write it. Farewell! Ah! If you love me less you can never have loved me. In that case I shall truly be pitiable.

Bonaparte

P.S. — The war this year has changed beyond recognition. I have had meat, bread, and fodder distributed; my armed cavalry will soon be on the march. My soldiers are showing inexpressible confidence in me; you alone are a source of chagrin to me; you alone are the joy and torment of my life.”

First of all, I have to say that for a supposed mad, out-of-control emperor, he certainly knew how to wear his heart on his sleeve.  If you didn’t know this was that stumpy little weasel-looking guy with a…well, a Napoleon Complex, if you close your eyes and picture Brad Pitt or David Boreanaz or whoever-it-is-that-people-think-is-ridiculously-dreamy these days, if you close your eyes and picture your dream guy writing this letter to you, you’d have to admit that’s one hell of a be-still-my-heart-catch-my-breath-aching-to-touch-his-naked-skin romantic letter, isn’t it?

Come on, isn’t it?

Second, he wrote it himself, not some git in Hollywood or some sap who works for Hallmark.  Napoleon actually wrote this letter himself.  With ink and paper.  He agonized over it, spilled his aching heart out to the woman he loved on pages and pages.  He didn’t make it short and sweet; he expanded on every thought and feeling, drew her a picture with his words.  He wanted to make sure she knew everything he felt and likely she was at home, waiting to receive a letter from him, to have that physical connection to reassure herself that he he was alive and well.

No one writes letters like that anymore.  Not even emails.  So many people are trying to reduce their communication to less than 140 characters that they have forgotten the art of letter writing and even the art of communicating.  Sometimes, less is not better.

I still remember the day River Phoenix died. I was in love with him, of course. O.K. I didn’t know him enough to love love him, but I loved the thought of who I thought he was.

And I remember the day he died quite clearly in my mind.  I came home from dinner with friends and heard on the late night news about his untimely and at the time mysterious death.  I remember the devastated, crushed ache of my young early twenties heart.  As time went on, all I could think about when I heard his name or saw one of his movies was what a terrible waste his death was — all that fantastic talent gone in the blink of an eye, snuffed out because of stupidity.

For the longest time, I couldn’t watch his movies.  They just made me too sad.

When Heath Ledger died in 2008, I didn’t have the same puppy love crush and thus didn’t feel the same crushing ache, but I did feel devastated for  the loss of amazing talent that was just gone in a heartbeat.  The story is all too familiar and yet no less tragic.  Like River he had graduated from child parts to brilliant adult roles and unlike so many actors in Hollywood today, he was able to play characters other than himself.  He had a lot of promise.

It’s been only recently that I’ve been able to begin watching movies which star him again.  Still, I feel melancholy.

Britney Murphy’s recent bewildering passing brought up all the same internal sadness for me.  Britney was another promising star in my mind.  Perhaps she wasn’t Julia Roberts nor would she have ever been some Angelina Jolie, but I believe she had the promise to be a great comedienne actress — one of the greats even.  At 32, she was so young, too young.  Her life and her career were just beginning and it was all over in the blink of an eye before there was a real hint of the shine her star could have been.

One of her movies recently aired on cable, one I really like because it made me laugh, but 5 minutes in I had to turn it off, because watching her made me cry.

The thing is that it’s not just actors who die young that break my heart.  Every week I hear about tragic deaths on the news, young people killed in accidents, crime, war — their lives were just beginning but  now they are gone and who knows who they might have been, what wonderful, amazing things they might have accomplished, but for a moment of stupidity whether it was their stupidity or someone else’s?

And it makes me sad.  I am devastated, crushed, and my heart aches.

Grumpy Old Man

My black tabby has a very limited number of ways in which he communicates with the world.   Most of the time, he is off somewhere in the house doing his own thing, ignoring the other cat, the Pug, and me, napping and, I assume, plotting some nefarious takeover of the world.  (Seriously, he hasn’t figured out how to open my laptop yet, but if I leave it open, I’ll come back to find all the settings have been changed.)

Sometimes, if I am outside when he thinks it’s dinner time and the front door is open, he will stand up on his hind legs and peek through the screen door to be sure that his piercing meows are heard down the street to let me know he wants his bowl filled.

In the Winter, when he’s cold, sometimes he will actually curl up next to or on top of me  – that is if he can claim a spot that the high anxiety Siamese and the extra loyal, pampered Pug haven’t already fought over.

But really and truly, for the most part, for the last few years, he has become obsessed with food.  I brought him home from a pet store as a eight week old kitten thirteen years ago and he’s always been a healthy weight and never gone a day without food; for some reason, however, he is desperately concerned about when the next meal is going to happen and this obsession doesn’t manifest in that delightfully cute yet annoying stereotype you see in cartoons and movies with the cat purring and wrapping his tail around my legs as he tries to trip me up while I walk through the house.

No, the Grumpy Old Man has become a master of torture.  Perhaps he’s been reading old Fu Manchu stories about Chinese Water Torture, because his methods have a similar irresistible to ignore mind-pulsating effect. It started innocently enough — in the wee hours of the morning, when he was worried breakfast wasn’t coming soon enough, he would find something plastic, like a bag or a trash canister, and start licking it, which in the peace of a rural night is something akin to the sound of water dripping ceaselessly, which to a sufferer of insomnia and migraines is the same as the sensation of someone drilling a hole into one’s head.

If you can ignore the plastic licking, well, he will toss anything he finds on a table or dresser or counter or flat surface that’s light enough onto the floor.  Oh, yes, my mother discovered that he will even wait for you to look at him, catch his eye, and then his little black paw will push your valuable ceramic keepsake right off the edge.

I was actually able to ignore such temper tantrums and just pick things up later until the dog came along, but now it’s a race between me and the dog to grab whatever it is so it doesn’t get chewed or swallowed and Hades knows this; he revels in this.  (Once when I wasn’t home, he pushed a whole loaf of very expensive 12-grain wheat bread onto the kitchen floor, which of coarse the dog ate half of before he got sick; there was also the Ghirardelli chocolate chips incident where I came home to find my poor Pug hyped up like Speedy Gonzales on speed, but I don’t like to remember that as it suggests Hades is trying to off the dog.)

For a while he had the dog involved in the middle of the night/early morning conspiracy.  He somehow managed to convince the dog that it was time to get up for breakfast and would get him riled up so that he would wake me up.  First, it was at 5am, but the time started shifting slowly backward until once morning I realized they had woken me up at nearly 3am.  So, I temporarily locked Hades into the dining room for a few weeks at night until I had the dog retrained to sleep until 6am for breakfast.

But now it’s not just about when Hades is going to eat, now it’s about what he’s going to eat.  Hades has decided he doesn’t like any food that is “good for him”.  Basically, the cheapest, nutrient-free store-brand cat food is all he wants, and if I buy anything else, anything that has vitamins and is good for senior indoor cats, well, it’s like declaring to the house, “Let the temper tantrums begin!”

And there’s no use trying to retrain Hades.  (Not that he was ever trainable.  O.K. I think I trained him not to chew on my hair as a kitten and that’s it.)  He’s set in his ways.  I’ve tried using all of the tips and tricks I’ve read in books and on the web on how to train or retrain cats.  I’ve tried to discourage the naughty behavior.  I’ve tried to do as much work-a-rounds as possible.

The fact is that Hades is simply not an open-minded cat.  He has his agenda and he isn’t interested in what anyone else might want or need or think that strays from his wants and needs.  As far as he’s concerned, he is the only one that matters and nothing I do now, after all of these years, is going to change that.  All I can do is accept him as he is, do what I can to head off his bad behavior, train the dog not to run every time he hears something get knocked off the kitchen counter (yeah, right!), learn to cope, and love the cat despite himself.

I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of people in my life who are in many ways similar to my cat; I mean, they have their own agenda and they aren’t particularly interested in much beyond that.

There’s a teammate at work who really doesn’t want to participate on a team and has said so; he has said that he will never “cover” for anyone else voluntarily while they are on vacation and he realizes that means that we likely won’t cover for him when he wants to go, which means he will have to complain to HR that the system of requiring a backup during vacation is keeping him from his right to vacation; however, he can’t just accept that the professional thing to do is to just play nice with his peers to get nice back.

Someone else I know refuses to believe that any kind of ailment can slow a person down, let alone stop a person in their tracks for more than a day or so.  He couldn’t grasp why I hadn’t recovered from my gall bladder removal after two days.  I have to explain to him why I need to sleep a whole day after I spend a whole day travelling every time I travel as if he’s never heard me mention it before.  After 30-something years he quit smoking one day cold turkey.  He just made up his mind to do it and it happened and he doesn’t understand why other people can’t just make up their minds to quit their bad habits or get over their invisible illnesses.   It’s beyond his comprehension.

There are people I talk to every day who can never compromise, never reach an agreement because they can’t see any other point of view or they won’t accept any other point of view.

Yesterday, I was complaining to my used car dealer that there were a number of items that they should have fixed the last time I brought it in that were required for it to pass the state inspection sticker they stuck on the window, but they didn’t and one of the things that is an issue is that the check engine light is broken;  I told her that my regular mechanic found 7 engine codes when he looked at it this week, which is 1 more than when I brought it to them last month — and 6 of the engine codes are still there from then.  She actually said to me, “Well, how were we to know that there were codes if the check engine light was broken?”  Duh!  My paperwork says that they sold me a used car that was up to state inspection standards.  Twice now, my mechanic has told me that there is no way it would have passed the inspection, though the used car dealership put a sticker on it.  The dealership’s agenda is to get my money and then get the car and me out of there while trying to do the least amount of fix-ups; I believe the intimidating dealership guy told me, “You bought a used car, you can’t have an expectation for it to be like brand new.”  So, there agenda and point of view are a bit different than mine.  Definitely their point of view is very narrow on the subject, enough for her to have such dizzying logic that they can’t be held responsible for not checking for engine codes when the engine light wasn’t working, even though they should have noticed that the check engine light wasn’t working because it’s an inspection requirement; so they couldn’t have passed the car for inspection with the broken check engine light…except they did.

The difference between people and cats is that you can at least converse with people and maybe find out what is going on in their heads.  However, many people are just as bad as cats; at some point they reach a stage in their life where they simply can’t be retrained.  The best you can do is head off their bad behavior, lock them in their kennel, avoid them, learn to cope, or accept them as they are.

For all intents and purposes for the life of this blog, my pen name is J. Lynne.  I shall be your hostess at Alternative Me.

What exactly is Alternative Me?

I’m glad you asked.  O.K. You didn’t but I’m going to tell you anyway because I have space to fill and I like to ramble.  You’ve been warned.

This former Southern city girl has discovered that Spring does funny things to these Mainers as the snow starts to melt away and the flowers start sprouting up here and there.  No matter what age they seem to be — from playschool child to ancient cubicle worker –everyone takes curious delight in the strange, slow, mysterious metamorphosis  of a catapillar to a butterfly.

Alternative Me is going to be the window to my metamorphosis.  I’m ready for a make-over — body, mind and soul.

• Body – As an overweight, out-of-shape, sufferer of multiple chronic illnesses, including migraines and IgA Nephropathy, an autoimmune kidney disease, I have a theory that I can improve my health and lose weight by improving the quality of my diet;  I’ve already given up red meat and poultry due to my kidneys, now I’m ready to commit to 365 days of eating vegan — no dairy, no eggs, nothing made with animal by-products.  The fun for you will be in reading about my adventures in adjusting — shopping for ingredients I’ve never heard of, eating out in restraunts and trying to order something other than salad,  finding soymilk chocolate, vegan cooking without butter spray, etc.
• Mind – Recently, one of my co-workers mentioned the 10,000 Hour Rule — the idea that if you spend 10,000 hours  (or 10 years) doing one thing (like a skill), you will become an expert.  A week or so later, as I was flipping through the t.v. channels, I realized I was barely spending more than 2 or 3 seconds on any one channel.  In fact, I realized, I could name any movie or t.v. show not on the pay channels within 15 – 30 seconds even if I had never watched it before.  All of that time I put in as a latch-key kid, as a movie theater concessions worker, as a video store clerk, and as a loner, gamer geek girl, home-body  had paid off.  I am an expert…at cable t.v.That’s when I realized that I really need to spend more time reading, going to museums or cultural festivals, expanding my mind, enlightening myself.  My mother believes I am really knowledgable on a broad range of subjects, but, honestly, I think I know enough to B.S. my way through an evening in society or on the Glenn Beck show.  I want to spend more time reading classics and books about other cultures and religions.  I’m sure some station will still be airing Legally Blonde or The Breakfast Club when I finish reading a few hundred pages or I get back from the Middle Eastern Art Festival.
• Soul – I suffer from clinical anxiety and depression.  It’s inherited.  I just recently realized, however, that I can’t use that as an excuse to wallow in it and do nothing about it.  In fact, I realized I can change the whole atmosphere around me by simply deciding to be happy that one day.  Just for that day.  I’m still working on it some days.I also have some other areas I’d like to improve on.  I want to veer away from negativity.  I’ve been told I tend to be very negative.  It’s hard to be sarcastic and not negative, I guess.  It’s just part of my sense of humor.  However, I don’t want to be smothered in the negativity.  I don’t want to draw it to me and thus draw other negative people to me, because negative people just feed off of each other’s negative energy and that’s just a trap that drains you, but it’s so easy to fall into.  I’m ready to learn to find productive ways to deal with conflict and difficult people — those people who just need to make drama.  I want to spend this next year learning to be a calmer, happier, more easy-going person.

I’m sure there will be plenty of other things I’ll be writing about here.  I have lots of discombobulated thoughts that need a home from time to time.