06.08.08
Shuffle
Way the heck back in 1975, a feminist musical group, The Deadly Nightshade (Helen Hooke, Anne Bowen, Pamela Brandt), released their eponymous album, with a wonderful song called “Shuffle.” I don’t remember much of it, except the last verse:
“Susie’s got some diamond rings, Susie’s got some furs.
Susie rides in half a dozen cars, but none of them is hers.
Well, I ain’t got no caviar, and I ain’t got much wine.
All I got’s my body and soul and, baby, all of that is mine.”
This verse has stuck with me since then, and was on my mind this week at work, because of a situation with one of the more skimpily dressed female students. It was on my mind again today, because of something that happened online.
A “friend” on a social website offered to help me monetize this blog. I was interested, until he told me that the firm my readers would be clicking through to would be a pay day loan organization. I thought about it for all of a half-second before refusing the offer, noting that I did not believe in those pay day loan providers, and that I felt that offering a pay day loan to folks who are interested in getting out of debt was totally unethical, and would lose me any of the precious credibility I am trying to build. (You will note, I am not saying that no one should monetize their blog this way, just that for me it was a big negative.)
I first heard of pay day loans in ads on late night tv, promising to send money directly to your checking account. These offers sounded way too good to be true, and when I examined the fine print, I found out they were. As in most loans, you pay the interest off first, but the rate of interest is so high that the payments the loan company deducts never actually manage to do that, so you keep paying exorbitant interest on top of interest on loans that were not all that much to begin with.
Unfortunately, my roommate didn’t do her homework. She took one out. Then, when she couldn’t pay that one off, took out another, and another, so eventually she had five of them deducting amounts from her checking account each pay period. Soon, she was behind in her share of the rent (again), and for what? All because of a lousy $250 pay day loan.
We are still trying to deal with the fallout from that, and her shortfalls have affected me, in that to keep a roof over my head, I have had to intercede between her and her mother, who writes out our rent checks.
That aside, the main thing I know is that if you don’t have your reputation, and your credibility, you have nothing. So, turning down this offer was easy.
Do you find that doing the right thing eventually turns out to be the real “easy way”, instead of the shortcuts most folks look for? Have you ever been offered something that you know is unethical? Did you do it, or turn it down? Either way, how did it turn out?
Spoons
In the fannish community I hang out in, there is a phrase that has become part of the currency: “not having enough spoons.” It refers to Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory, (available at her website, ButYouDon’tLookSick.com). This theory came about when she was trying to explain to a friend what is was like to have Lupus. After having given the friend a large bunch of spoons, they deconstructed the friend’s day, with one spoon being removed for each discrete decision or action. When the friend opined that she wanted more spoons, it was explained that often running out of spoons was what having Lupus was like. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, and I highly recommend that everyone reading this blog go read The Spoon Theory. In fact, this is the one time I will virtually insist that you click through to another site, because no one explains it quite as well as she does, and understanding it is important to understanding the rest of this post.)
Back? Great. Let’s go on.
Okay, so while you can see how this applies to the amount of energy a person has to get through the day being finite, you can’t see how it relates to personal finances. Neither could I until I was thinking about it this morning after way too much coffee yesterday and way too little sleep.
First, assume that your paycheck is the bunch of spoons. Each of us has a finite amount of money we can spend each pay period. We can sometimes borrow another spoon or three, by putting purchases on a credit card, or by borrowing a few dollars from a friend or relative, but then those spoons are not there for us the following week, because we have to pay them back. By and large, however, the sane thing to do is to learn how to manage so that we are not spending more spoons than we have. And the process most of us are going through (becoming debt-free, setting up appropriate financial cushions, learning to live frugally, etc.) is learning to conserve our spoons.
The wiser the choices we make as to how we spend our spoons, energy, money, or natural resources the more we will have in reserve for the emergencies that inevitably arise in life.
What spoons can you conserve today, so that you will have them when you need them?
Fielding Curve Balls
I got thrown a curve ball a little while ago, while commenting on a post at Bible Money Matters.
I noted that one step in recovering my equilibrium was turning a huge negative (being a battered kid) into a huge positive (having been gifted by my dad with the best thing a parent could give: toughening me up enough to survive whatever gets tossed at me).
Now, I grant you that there are many better ways to teach this to your kid than taking a knife or your fists to him or her. Heck, I surely wish I didn’t have to learn it that way. But what I am convinced of is that it is a major lesson that many of my more sheltered friends never learned.
I cannot note how many of my better-cared for friends crumble at the first real emergency that arises. Nor am I immune to that first sinking sense of panic that accompanies most emergencies. But at some point reality kicks back in and I move from hysteria to figuring out what the next step is.
Often, I have no idea how I will survive whatever the emergency is, but one thing Mom used to say is that God helps those who help themselves, and — after a lot of thinking about it — I have to agree with that. So, my way of regaining equilibrium is to just keep putting one foot ahead of the other, and to know that I am not alone, no matter how much it may look like I am.
What are some of the curve balls that you’ve been thrown? How has handling them changed your life? How have they either strengthened or changed your core beliefs?
