money – Page 5 – hannah ananas

Unpacking

My life is absurd.

In case you read this regularly and don’t already know that, this is a reminder of it. 😛

Continuing my unpacking the other day, I wanted to get my desk space set up, so I can actually use it for my school work and writing and photo work, right?

Okay, so, I’m unpacking the box labeled “Komputertisch” – for some reason, I almost always label my moving boxes in German, without even thinking about it -, and I find a small pile of a ten dollar bill and about an equal value in one dollar bills.

No biggie – I set cash down all the time, and then end up adding it to a savings account of some sort when I re-find it, after having forgotten about it for a while.

I continue unpacking the box, putting things in their new homes, and then I pull out a pile of 500 dollars.

Okay, this is the money to go deposit, now that the dentist paperwork is completed, I think.

(Because I’ll pay with my card, but didn’t want the money to get lost in my bank account before everything was handled.)

I set the money aside, to insert in an envelope later, to take to the bank this week.

I pull out something else from the box, and find underneath this next object…. another small pile of money.

Actually, this one is much, much larger… it is mostly twenties, but it also has some fifties in it… and it ends up being 890 dollars.

What??!…. What is this money now???

I add the ten from earlier to it, because that is too weird an amount for me, but I keep the ones and the dentist money separate from the stack, because they’re ‘different money’. 😛

After several minutes of contemplation, I recall that it was from all the nannying I did, where the mom would leave cash for everything we would go do, and I would use my card actually to pay for those activities… so I’d end up with a lot of twenties – many more than my wallet would hold -, but I don’t want to have to go to the bank ever to get cash, so I usually keep some cash available to me… this was just more than usual, because of the specific situation and its having continued for quite some time.

Okay, that makes total sense… glad I worked that out.

I remove two more or so things from the box, getting almost to the end of it, now, and what do I find?

It looks like a folded twenty and ten.

It actually is a twenty folded around four hundred dollar bills…

Seriously?…. you’re absurd, child, I think, talking inwardly to myself (though I repeated the Seriously? of disbelief aloud, in a similar fashion to SNL’s “Weekend Update” Really?! segments).

At that point, nothing came to mind for this one, so I just let it go – it could have very well been birthday money, or something like that, but I knew it wasn’t destined to anything specific, because of the bills involved (I don’t do hundreds for paying things), so I let it go.

I put the dentist money into an envelope and with my bag, as planned, to take to the bank, and I piled up the rest together, making it all ‘the same money’, still unsure as to what precisely to do about it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, somewhere down the road, I come across this pile of money that I have since today forgotten, because I didn’t want to put it into my bank account, and let myself suddenly think that it was okay to spend more money than I have been lately, because I would have seen a higher amount in the account… 😛

Totally absurd, right?

Post-a-day 2019

Money, money

I figured out what to do with that money.

I talked with my brother today, after thinking about different things, and we both agreed that it was a beautiful and practically perfect in every way use of the money… and I’m terrified in a good way about it all, which shows how good of an idea it is.

So, yay! for that.

Also, did I mention that I’ve been wondering what I might do in my life, if I had someone to fund me in whatever I chose?

I’ve been thinking on that these past couple or few days, because I had this sudden realization that I actually quite likely could find someone to fund something I really wanted to do, and quite likely could make it into a monetary gain for myself with whatever it is, anyway, so it is well worth considering what I would do, if I had the someone to fund me…

It’s been tough to start out, because I’ve grown quite accustomed to cutting myself off on those absurd dreams that require money I really don’t have right now…, but I’m growing into the thinking style, and am liking it more and more – I’m excited to see what I come up with. 🙂

And, of course, terrified, because I know myself, and I know that even a simple idea in this case has a high chance of turning into actual actions. 😛

Kind of like the whole “Be careful what you wish for,” thing in a positive way, because I so totally might make it happen, and new adventures can be really scary – in a good way, but scary nonetheless.

Post-a-day 2018

Christmas presents

I kind of gave up on Christmas presents over the past handful or so of years.

You see, Christmas is about the story of Jesus the Christ, not about giving a present to everyone we’re ‘supposed’ to like and be related to… and I feel wrong pulling a holiday so far away from its foundation.

Plus, this whole consumerism thing has really gone a bit out of whack in recent years, and it might just make me sick, if I were to think about how much waste is caused, first) in terms of physical items, and then, second) in terms of mental effort.

We work so hard to give gifts to people, and we usually fail at bringing them the joy we were hoping to share with them – we want them to feel our love, but why must our love be so shallow and know them so poorly that we gift them ‘crap’ they never really liked and now feel obligated to use?

So, my goal has been to find ways to share my love with the world instead… I’m not so sure I’ve done a great job of achieving that goal, but I’ve been working on it.

Plus, for gift-giving, I do that normally in life – when there is a gift I want to give to someone, I do my best to make that happen, whenever it arises… I don’t wait ten more months for the excuse of Christmas.

Someone once told me that I must be an awesome friend, because I gave him a book and out of nowhere, shortly after we’d really met – just because our conversation had led me to believe he would really love reading the book.

I kind of shrugged it off at the time, I think, but I’ve come to see how valuable that is nowadays, where people do often give because they feel obligated to give, and not because there is something they truly want to share with the individual.

Anyway, the whole reason I brought all of this up, is because I was given a check this evening, as a Christmas present.

I had already said that I didn’t need it – separately to both parties involved – and that I didn’t expect anything to be given to me – and I’ve said the latter for years, more or less – … and yet the check was given me in double the amount from years past.

It made me want to cry with frustration as I examined the check (and I did actually tear up from that a bit)… I didn’t know what to do about it.

After a quick but genuine text chat with my brother, I mentally accepted the money, finally able to see that this was their way of showing that they cared about me.

Plus, it gives me an opportunity to do something great with the money that they likely never would have done with it – it doesn’t have to become just plain groceries for me alone… it is, instead, an opportunity for good.

I was hesitant to reject the money, because I didn’t want to leave them feeling rejected by me, nor did it make any sense whatsoever to pass up money being given rather freely to me at the present point in my life (remember the grad school and total uncertainty situation).

And yet, I felt utterly pathetic for having been given money in the first place – like sad charity, is how it felt for me.

But it worked out, thanks to my brother’s wonderful alternative approach:

Hannah, you should accept the gifts people give you. They want you to have them

Be grateful you have people in your life that have those resources

Use the money for something good, be empowered by it. Don’t pity yourself, instead, make its value exponential

Also, consider how much more good you can do with that money vs what they’d do with it. A transfer of wealth is much more than a gift

And I can see that now the way he saw it.

The funny part about it is that I had said that I felt similarly about a gift he, my brother, had just given me, too.

I had known that my view was not so good nor healthy, and I was glad to have a new way to see it all, as well as something beautiful to go do with these gifts given to me.

Post-a-day 2018

Work

I’m not at a place to turn down a work-for-money opportunity, really, and so I’m going in tomorrow to work, though it wasn’t on the schedule until late this afternoon….

I usually love getting to go in to work, though – I genuinely enjoy it…

And the funny thing is that I’ve felt more and more down and out since I agreed to go in tomorrow…

… and I’m really not sure why…

Post-a-day 2018

Crazy lady travels free

I was just thinking about when my coworker and I took a group of kids to England and France a few summers ago, and things associated with that. At the end of the trip, I stayed in France to go visit my old stomping grounds down south, and so I left the group to go home on a flight with my coworker (per our own full agreement and arrangement ahead of time). I waited too long to decide to do that, so I had to pay $350 for the flight change (Ugh). We also each had to pay $937.50 for the trip in the first place (Meh). Therefore, I had to pay a total of $1287.50 for a 10-day trip that included all accommodations, food, tours, and transport, and another ten days on location at my own expense, which is really not bad at all. At all.

However – and this is a BIG however – as part of our arranging and hosting this trip in the first place, the tour company gave us each a training trip.

Mine, as I selected it, was a long weekend trip, with food, housing, tours, and transportation included, to downtown Rome, Italy. Therefore, my just-under 1300 dollars actually got me two separate trips to Europe, with almost all expenses paid for most of the time on the trips.

I really do come up with the craziest stuff to have happen in my life. And – what is possibly the best part of this all – I don’t even seem to notice how absurd it all is, until I find myself ruminating on this and thats one afternoon, years later, and it suddenly hits me that, say, taking a free trip to Europe is not a normal thing in life. I take this moment to nod my head to my cousin for the question she exasperatedly declared one evening at my apartment a few years ago: “Hannah, do you even know what real life is like?”

Indeed, fair cousin, it seems I do not know that most of the time – reality bites, so I live somewhere else, and I love it. 🙂

Post-a-day 2018

Words worth more than gold

After a discussion over the phone with a college student calling to ask for my monetary donation to the study abroad scholarships at her school, – which I exchanged for encouragement to the girl and for sharing with her various specialties related to where she would be studying abroad this coming spring semester (for which she continuously thanked me delightedly, and which she declared was a million times better for her life than a monetary donation to the fund would have been, anyway) – I wrote a sort of poem.

You see, she recommended I write it, because what I was sharing with her, she said, sounded like poetry.

So, find in the following photo the first draft of the poem we discussed today, which I said I would write for my weblog tonight, and which I tapped out on a typewriter(!!!) this afternoon.

Post-a-day 2018

It’s all relative

It only takes a trip to somewhere worse to appreciate coming home to a place one was initially glad to leave.

I’ve been doing that a lot recently, but switching between going to somewhere worse and to somewhere better, constantly flipping my perspective back and forth (and, ultimately, leaving me moving in no real direction at all most of the time).

Post-a-day 2018

Is it heart or nonsense?

Ever feel like you’re secretly an amazing artist, and you just have to set up your life so that you start creating the art, and the world will follow suit by tossing gobs of money your way to encourage more art to be shared with the world? I totally do. And I felt a lot of the pull today towards doing that with my life. It has been a spectacular end of and beginning of these two different years of my life today. My brain is sleepy from so much back-and-forth thought patterns and emotions, but thrilled at prospects that feel ever nearer. 🙂 I have happy hopes and intentions for this year.

Post-a-day 2018

::Sigh…

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to get a high-paying job in an office, and start saving up. Then, after a couple or few years, start the process for adoption. The only work so far that I have loved doing, without almost any question ever, is doing things with other people’s kids (nannying). Maybe having a somewhat terrible corporate job in suits is worth it for having a kid…

I just don’t see myself happy each morning and each bedtime in a job like that, and that means bad sleep each night and a tough start to the day each morning.

I don’t know… sometimes I get depressive, and then desperate, and start calculating what ‘makes sense’ for life, as opposed to ‘listening to my heart’. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve even asked my heart what I/it want/wants to do with my life and time…

Now is as good a time as ever, I suppose. 🙂

P.S. I’ve noticed that, whenever I get upset in the depressed, my life is going nowhere experience, I have an almost panicked desire to move to Europe, and it is most often France. It’s not like I have any idea whatsoever what I would do there, or how that would solve any of my current issues. Plus, it would create the issue of being away from almost everyone I know and love and who loves me, since most of them are in the US. However, there’s just this feeling that arises that living in Europe somehow would just make everything okay, and in a good way (not just tolerable okay, but good okay). Anyway, just something I noticed tonight.

Post-a-day 2018

that 1%…

Have you ever had strongly disagreeing viewpoints with someone close to you, on a topic of great importance? I have, and I currently still do…

You see, someone rather close to me – let’s call her Carol – has a completely different view on money than I have, and in a way that we disagree on how to go about certain things. To her, people with money almost have a responsibility to give money to people who don’t have money. Now, I don’t mean in the sense of homeless people, or people who do nothing with their lives. She believes that people who work hard and who are smart just kind of deserve money, no matter what careers or jobs they have. For me, for example, I’m kind of a high school teacher. That maxes out my salary at around, say, $60,000 per year for a lifetime in the career. Most of my acquaintances began their first jobs post-college making at least $50,000, and have gone up from there – they will surpass my lifetime maximum within ten years at most in their jobs.

These are the situations in which Carol believes that the money-making acquaintances have an almost-obligation to give money to people like me, – or at least to do things that cost money for people like me – since we have no chance of ever affording it ourselves, through no direct fault of our own, per se.

And this is a point on which we disagree entirely. While I certainly appreciate when people do things like that for me, – and I know that I would do things like that for people, if I had the money (for I already do with the little money I do have) – I do not believe that they have any obligation to me. I regularly feel as though I am being encouraged to take inappropriate advantage of friends, family members, and acquaintances, because we so much disagree on this. For me, it is not seizing the opportunity, but strangling out every penny someone could possibly give to me.

I did, to a certain degree, select this work. (I avoided it for a while, because I hated the idea of the salary, I really did. And yet, here I am, anyway, teaching. Nothing else has ever piqued my interest. Though, I’ve had lost no experience in anything else real, really.) But Carol believes that people need to give me their money, give me their airline miles and hotel points and all the other benefits – not so much that they themselves suffer the loss, of course, but just so that I get to benefit alongside them – that their high-salary jobs afford them.

And, while I would love to find a partner in life who’ll provide loads and loads of money for our lives, – let’s be real: I’ll probably give most of my share away – that is the only person I would expect to provide me with money or benefits of any kind. And not because I’m lazy, but because there is something valuable for me to do, that we both see as valuable, but that is not up there on the high-salary scale. No one else even comes close to being expected to share anything but a little time with me. That’s why I have the friends, anyway, is to spend time together. Not to take their money.

I feel like I’m not saying any of this very well, and that I definitely am not making a worthwhile point… I’m just exhausted tonight. Today has been unique and somewhat terrible, as some days do turn out in life… I look forward to the balancing of the scale for today soon.

Post-a-day 2018