intellectual properties

big dreams

i do have another new year’s resolution besides “get off the continent” that i am reluctant to talk about here, but i’ve mentioned it elsewhere. plus, it’s a little scary putting your big dreams out there, mostly because it feels lame to keep talking about something for so long without making any actual decisions or plans, so i didn’t even really mention it in my new year post. but especially after a nice long dinner with my friend stephen last night (vegan sushi = yum!!!!), i’m a little bit more resolved. not 100%, but closer.

i know: vague. but that’s how it is right now.

revolutions: saying yes

this post was meant to be the first post of 2009, but it has been started many times and has taken a number of twists and turns. i’ve written some of it while angry, some of it while frustrated, some of it while hopeful, some of it while happy, some of it in one of my many other moods. i’m going to attempt to make all the pieces flow but it might seem a bit disjointed and it’s definitely as polished or coherent as i’d like it to be. i’m tired of working on it though, so here it is.

ariel wrote recently about coming into contentment around her age. i admit i have also been struggling with the aging process, but larger than anything superficial, although there’s that too, for me, it’s not so much about my age and what that means physically or culturally, but about how much time i have left. it’s also very hard for me to accept “i am where i am” when i’m not really where i want to be, and i feel like every day is a missed opportunity in a limited number of opportunities to get there. the problem is, i don’t know what “there” is, and every January 1 that rolls around gets a bit harder in that respect.

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keetsa debt

like a good consumer, i was only debt-free for about 36 hours.

jay’s been complaining for months about his back hurting in the morning, presumably from our soft coil mattress, and so on saturday we went to the berkeley Keetsa mattress store to check out their environmentally-friendlier memory foam mattresses - they’re like tempur-pedic, only a bit cheaper, and the company is committed to reducing their carbon footprint and all that. it was a choice between getting another coil mattress with a foam layer on top, or going all out and getting the 100% foam mattress, which is the best. lying on the beds, it seemed obvious that the 100% foam mattress was waaaay more comfortable, didn’t transfer movement between us, and didn’t seem like it was eventually going to do the cave-in-the-middle thing that our current mattress was doing. after some debate and a lot of lying around, we decided to go for the 100% foam, and since it was embarrassingly expensive, we financed it. well, i financed it. 0%, but still - i’m back in debt.

after we had just talked about how awesome it was that my august 15th paycheck would be the first paycheck i’ve had since i was 17 that i didn’t owe anyone anything.

i made jay promise we’d pay it off before the end of the year, ASAP.

as for the mattress, 2 nights sleeping on it and i’m not in love, which sucks. i like that the foam stays warm underneath me, but without the pillow top and coils it seems really….not hard, but SOLID. it’s just weird to have NO movement. she said give it 30 days to get used to it, but if you pay more than a grand for a mattress i kinda want to love it right away. sigh.

debt-free

i just clicked the button which submitted my final student loan payment, which means i am now 100% debt free.

!!!!!!!!

now, i need to focus on SAVING money so i can get out from behind this desk and conquer the world.

filling the gap between theory and practice

ha!

i’ve definitely been more capitalist than i profess or want to be lately. the arrival of summer (and the fact that i no longer have any credit card debt to send all my extra money to) has send me into a little bit of a spending spree…and it’s a helluva guilty pleasure.

i think i finally hit my guilt limit though (definitely not my spending or shopping limit), and have now officially opened a savings account which i vow not to pull money out of except for two things: 1) emergencies (let’s hope there aren’t any), and 2) trips out of the U.S. - hopefully in the not so distant future. i’m much better about managing my money if i have definitive and separate places to put it. having all my extra money just sitting in my checking account since i paid off my debt has not been a good thing. it just gets spent. it’s a small thing and probably not newsworthy (whoohoo! i got a savings account! like…duh.), but it’s a big step in the direction i want to go.

turn and face the strange

as a follow up to my last post of 2007 about letting go, for my first post of 2008 i want to talk about hope. and letting go of fear.

i thought i’d mentioned this here before but i can’t find it, but my valedictory speech at high school graduation was on fear, written on that topic mostly because i was terrified of giving the speech, and while in my younger years i made a lot of rash decisions (thankfully, most of them turned out pretty well), one of the things i’ve become more and more aware of in the last few years is that the older i get the more sort of obsessive/compulsive i am when it comes to Big Changes, in that i either make them quickly and dramatically with little or no forethought or i spend weeks (if not months or years) obsessing over the details, envisioning as many scenarios as possible before i let myself make any kind of decision, and often that leads to not being able to make a decision at all. it’s another symptom of my anxiety, this total inability to make decisions in any kind of logical way. sometimes even the smallest decisions seem impossible, like what kind of bread to buy at the store. if they don’t have the kind i usually buy i will stand there and read all of the labels first. this drives jay insane when grocery shopping. my mom said i was similar as a child in trying to figure out how to spend my allowance, agonizing over the smallest expenditures, and when i look back on that speech i made in 1994 the more i realize i have always been very afraid, of a lot of things, and that it has kept me from making a lot of decisions and changes i probably would have benefited from, possibly including the stressful one i alluded to in my last post.

here in my grown up life, while it may seem to some readers that i’m happy-go-lucky and spontaneous, sort of like ariel i’m a bit of a slave to stability and anything that seems spontaneous probably wasn’t; there was probably a lot of mental calculation that went into it. i’m incredibly risk-averse, whether it’s a new job or a road trip or a consumer purchase. i sweat the details on almost everything.

it’s sort of confusing to me, this clinginess i seem to have programmed inside me that is slowly becoming more prominent as the years go by. in my daydreams, i am SO MUCH more easygoing and spontaneous, footloose and fancy free. i fantasize about making all kinds of huge decisions - leaving the country, changing jobs, moving from SF, joining the circus - and i hint about making vague plans for all kinds of things here, but in reality i’ve been at the same job going on 8 years and in less than a month jay and i will have been together for 10, and whenever something comes up that looks like it might rock the boat, even if it’s something i want, i freak out and generally pull out in order to maintain status quo. the physical manifestations of this don’t make it any easier, as recently whenever i’m faced with a really difficult choice i start having anxiety and panic attacks, which are really awful, and so i go into avoidance mode and sort of shut down. not healthy, i know.

i’m not sure how much of this conflict of interests is me and my fears about change and instability (and possibly failure as a result of change), or, as blogged about a few months ago, the paralysis that occurs from too many choices in current affluent american culture. this is something i really need to figure out, but it’s so complicated.

this interesting piece in the NYT discusses some of the same ideas, focusing on the role hope plays in human decision-making and emotion, and how often clinging to hope causes people to avoid making changes they need to make, such as waiting for someone to come home who is probably never going to come back (an endless character theme in books and movies), or believing there’s a cure for whatever ails you when really you should be making plans for what happens if there isn’t, or in the case of the current mortgage crisis in the US, hoping to get bailed out and so not taking any action to get yourself out of the hole.

this is interesting to me, as recently in a project involving public health here in the bay area, “the politics of hope” were discussed, and how in many urban areas, what some people think is the cause for the seeming disregard for human life and public cleanliness (high homocide rates, trash in the streets, etc.) is that the people in those communities have lost all hope of anything better, so they no longer care about who they are or what they have. “hopeless” is a state of being that no one ever wants to feel, yet many in poor communities, urban or rural, live without ever believing that they’ll have a better way of life, and this dramatically affects the life decisions they make. more importantly, depression can affect entire communities, not just individuals, and in this book i’m reading the discussion about the affect of economic depression on social values and thus what choices communities make about their ecological environment is really very key to solving global environmental issues.

back OT: these ways of thinking about the affects of hope - uplifting because it gives people something to work toward or paralyzing either because of believing that something is coming that probably isn’t or because there are too many choices to make in order for change to happen - represent the ends of a spectrum, and depending on your current situation i think most people fall somewhere in the middle. i am certainly on the end of that spectrum in which i have so many choices i’m overwhelmed, which, ironically, also ends up in the same result as having no choices: depression. i have so much hope for my future, but i have so much anxiety about making the wrong choices that i end up not making any. another article on the subject notes that people in cultures with little or no opportunity are often happier with what they have, because they don’t have to think about choices.

this year, i think i have some tough choices to make about my life, because despite all my fears, i think change is good and change is important for growth, and aside from all the standard resolutions, by the end of 2008 i hope to have made some good progress on doing some of the things i’ve been too afraid to do, and take some chances i’ve been too afraid to take for no other reason than fear. i need to follow the advice of the tag line i’ve had on my email in the upper left hand corner of this blog for many months: “If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”

there was a saying for january 1, 2007 on my little zen calendar that really spoke to me, but because i thought i wasn’t ready yet to make any big changes in 2007 but planned to do so in 2008, i instead saved it and put the little note on my planner page for today, january 1, 2008. it says:

mission accomplished

as of a mouse-click just a moment ago, i have officially paid off all of my credit card debt, thx to a generous year-end bonus and a monetary gift from my mom. this was my one goal for 2007, and with just a few short days left of the year, i achieved it! i do still have a small amount of lingering student-loan debt, but since that’s considered “good debt” i’ll let that take care of itself with its incremental payments and by the end of 08 that’ll be gone too. woo hoo!

and that’s why it really hurts

i do a lot of things to myself. subject myself to things that no one else would ever inflict, think things no one else would ever think, keep myself from doing/being that no one else would ever keep me from. as the year nears ending i’m thinking of resolutions again, and thinking of how i want 2008 to be different than 2007 in this respect. i had a conversation recently with someone about how impossibly difficult self-love can be, and i think 2008 is going to be a year where i really try harder.

i will also try to love everyone else more too. it seems like a natural way to start.

resolution update

2 saturdays ago i was feeling….angsted…about politics and capitalism and the lack of equity in even the Land of the Free and all that non-happy stuff, and i acknowledged that part of my own unhappiness was that i give into things that i don’t theoretically or logically support, either due to the inability to have some self-control in the wantwantwant area, or because i’m too lazy to find/do the alternative options when the easy ones are put right in front of me, just like most other americans. we’re all presented with innumerable choices every day and sometimes we don’t make the best ones, fully consciously.

in an armchair attempt to do *something* about it all, particularly the current consumer-debt crisis coupled with the ever-increasing problem of the u.s. trade deficit (when did i start worrying about these things? how old am i?), i vowed to not buy anything but food for at least a week. this is also partly because it’s almost september and closer to the end of 2007, and i only had one resolution this year: get out of debt. so far i’ve been doing pretty well. i started out $10k in debt at the beginning of this year, and i’ve cut that in half without much change in lifestyle in the past 8 months. however, this is not as quickly as i had hoped, probably due to the not really changing my lifestyle, and so now i have $5k in debt to pay off in 4 months if i want to reach my goal. um. huh. i mean, i *could*. if i never went out and ate cereal for the next 4 months. and didn’t go to burning man. it’s possible. but i don’ t think THAT dramatic of a lifestyle change is going to happen.

so anyway, the week went by and there were a couple of non-food items i really wanted to buy but didn’t, including a hand-built antique wooden rocking chair from urban ore. i absolutely love rocking chairs. and it reminded me of my grandmother. i think more than a week went by before i bought anything non-food, but i stopped keeping track. it wasn’t that big of a deal; more or less all i really did was put off buying things for burning man by a week, which hopefully means the total overall spent will end up being less, and i won’t be putting my out-of-debt date too much further off. once out of debt….? i’m not quite sure how being debt free will change my day-to-day life, particularly if i’m committed to less consumer spending. what do you do with more disposable income if you don’t believe in spending it? invest, i guess. but in what? i can’t really wrap my head around that right how; those are questions for 2008.

optimism & resolutions

i am optimistic that there is an election next year, and that there is a turn of tide coming in politics, as was shown in november. i am optimistic that science is able to increasingly settle arguments about previously subjective experiences, like climate change, and therefore more things will be done to clean up our world and/or prevent further damage; for example, i am very optimistic about alternative energies. i am optimistic about the one good side effect of globalization, and that is that the average american is quite aware of what’s going on in other places in the world, at least moreso than 50 years ago, thanks to television, which does have its merits; i think people are starting to think much more in terms of global impact than they used to, which can only be a good thing. for myself, i am optimistic that i’ll finally be getting out of debt this year, which means that i will soon be able to travel like i’ve always dreamed of.

in general, i think he is quite right: i am a pessimist in words and say i have little faith in human nature, but in practice, i think most people try to do good things within their context, and as people are learning more and more about the world every day, that does make me optimistic.

of course i am also optimitic about my social life and my incredible friend network, and can only see the blooming relationships i have now becoming stronger and more valuable. because of this i am also optimistic that i’ll be accomplishing some things this year that i’ve been wanting to for quite some time - some of them yet undefined - but that overall my life is only going to get better; all signs point to good.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
i am not officially declaring any resolutions this year, especially since they are pretty much exactly the same as last year, and the same as everyone else’s: eat better, exercise more, spend less. as these are ongoing, they’re not really resolutions. the only REAL resolution i have for this year, as referenced above, is to pay off the rest of my debt. i’m now below $10k…so OMG. by the end of 2007 i’ll be debt free!

mark morford also writes on optimism and resolutions:

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