There is nothing more perfect than the punch line of this Dilbert strip.
Who among us cannot relate? I actually considered making that my new theme on this site. There are times that it seems to perfectly capture my life.
That could be depressing, but the intent of this strip is to laugh at the depression, and that’s usually what I do in life as well. It’s amazing how well the stress drops off when you do that. When I’m in the proverbial “impossible situation” I just laugh at the absurdity of it all and realize that I can only do what I can do. Then I do what I can. If failure occurs, I just try to make sure it’s not because of me.
Is that denial? Maybe. I’m okay with that, though.
This list from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, is about 2 years old, but I just saw it for the first time, and I think it’s an excellent distillation of the basics of personal finance. It really focuses in on exactly what I’ve been reading about in the couple of years that I’ve been getting more serious about personal finance.
Everything you need to know about financial planning*
Make a will.
Pay off your credit cards.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
Fund your 401(k) to the maximum.
Fund your IRA to the maximum.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and you can afford it.
Put six months’ expenses in a money market fund.
Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker, and never touch it until retirement.
If any of this confuses you or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues) hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.
* Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel, Collins, New York, 2002, p. 172.
On the Vanguard page, a bunch of experts weigh in with their opinions on the advice, all of which is positive.
I’ve got #1 and #2 in progress right now. #3 would be next in line. Numbers 4-7 are in various states of completion/planning, though funding the IRA and 401(k) to the maximum is currently a bit of a stretch goal. Number 8? Yeah, well I suppose I’d have to have money left over for that to happen.
These are all long-term goals, but any progress toward them is good. I’m happy that I’m making some headway.
I don’t have a pet. Dog, cat, fish, bird, rock… nothing. That’s not likely to change in the next 5-7 years, if ever. There are lots of reasons, actually, but here are the three primary “excuses”:
I can’t afford it
According to Glblguy in his post, Don’t buy a dog, given an average lifespan of 12 years, the cost for a dog works out to $7,210.00 ($775 for the first year, then $585/year for 11 years), and that’s ignoring the purchase price! If I had $585 a year sitting around, I’d be out of debt way faster, never mind getting past the purchase and the first year. Personally, I even think those numbers are conservative, because eventually that dog is going to get sick, and then you’re paying out the snout for health care for a pet.
I have allergies
I’m allergic to fur. Yeah, I could take pills, but now we’re into another cost, plus the hassle of remembering to take pills. I’ve got enough problems remembering to take the pills I already have to take for my own problems! I could also get a non-shedding breed, or a fish, I suppose, but then there’s just the general smell that normally comes with the package, of which I’m not fond. That too can be handled through the application of proper grooming/cleaning, for the most part, but then that leads to my third reason…
I don’t want the hassle
I don’t want to spend the time cleaning or cleaning up after pets. I don’t want to deal with the ruined furniture or soiled floors while they’re learning how to behave in my house. I don’t want to have to take them for walks, or pick up their “gifts”. I don’t want to worry about them when they’re sick. I don’t want to have to carve out a space for them in the house. I have kids for all that.
It’d be easy to read all that and think that I hate animals. I don’t. Actually, I love them. (Well, mostly dogs, but still.) I love playing with them. I love their energy, and I love their love. I really enjoy visiting animals (and frequently their owners).
I just don’t need to have one in my house — even if all three of the other people in my house want one. Fortunately, I have veto power on this one. For now.
So what about you? Are you a fervent pet lover? Dog lover or cat lover? Do you think the cost estimate is right? I’d really like to know that, actually — if you’re a pet owner, what do you think you spend yearly on pet-related costs?
Well, it may sound glamorous, but they’re giving me a headache.
See, it just doesn’t add up. And things need to add up. I’m trying to fit three of them into a space designed for two, and I just can’t get it to work.
I need someone to explain the math.
In music, everything is very orderly. You have a certain number of beats in a measure. Most of the time that’s 4 beats per measure. Divide that evenly between 4 notes and you’ve got 4 quarter-notes per measure. Need twice as many notes? Split ‘em in half and make them eighth notes. It ain’t rocket science.
| 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & |
But wait! What if you need to fit three notes in the space of two of those eighth-notes? AH! That’s where a triplet comes in. A triplet magically converts two into three, without actually adding another beat.
| 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & | 1 & 2 & 3-3-3 4 & |
Fine. Just add an extra note in. Sounds easy, but I don’t get the math. I pretend I get the math, and I can actually sing and beat out a triplet without too much effort, but I don’t truly get it.
Usually, that’s not a problem. But not today. Today, I’m trying to write a new piece of music. It’s got a lot of what I assume must be triplets in it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to write it down. The problem seems to be that I really only want to use two out of the three triplet notes, but they’re different rhythmic values - a 1/16th and an 1/8th note, to be exact. You can’t just drop a value, though or it breaks - music is math, really, and it absolutely has to add up. But I can’t figure it out. How does that work, mathematically? How do you take two eighth-notes and turn them into an eighth plus a sixteenth inside of a triplet? What’s the “right” way to notate that kind of thing?
And seriously… how do you count it?
These triplets are giving me a headache. One of these days I’m going to work on this song during normal hours and call my father-in-law for help (former music teacher).
How do you get Desitin diaper rash cream out of carpets, sheets, clothes, blankets, or any other cloth item? If my experience so far is accurate, you can’t.
Somebody please, prove me wrong. Add a comment here with the solution.
I’ve tried using diaper wipes. That’s successful to a point, but not totally. On the carpet we tried shampooing after first using diaper wipes, and then blotting with soap and water. We still have spots on the carpet. That frustrated me for a good week, until I finally accepted that I couldn’t do anything about it.
See, a while back my wife and I were relaxing in the morning while our kids played elsewhere. Eventually I (or maybe it was my wife) went in to see what the 2-year old was doing and found her covered from the waist down with diaper rash cream, which was also all over the carpet, the closet doors, and the side of the changing table.
Hours of cleaning later, we are left with the aforementioned spots, and the knowledge that we can’t leave our 2-year old alone with the Desitin tube.
Fast forward to tonight, a month or two after the previous incident. We’re downstairs getting ready to watch a movie - something we’ve been looking forward to for a while. My wife says it sound like one of the kids is trying to come downstairs. I think she’s nuts. I didn’t hear anything, and it’s been almost an hour since the kids were put to bed, plus they were tired from trick-or-treating. But I’ve learned that she hears more things than I do, usually, so I went upstairs to check. I was right. No one was coming downstairs. But as I stood and listened, the 2-year old’s door opened and she started to come out. Okay, so my wife did hear something (good thing I didn’t tell her I thought she was nuts). So I picked my daughter up and put her back in bed.
In the dark, as I gave her a kiss and pulled the covers up, I felt the thick slime on my hands. “What the heck?” I thought. It took me a couple seconds before the realization and feeling of dread hit. When I threw the lights on my fear was confirmed. There on the bottom of the bed was the now almost empty tube of Desitin, wrapped in the bedsheet, the cream spread over the sheet and the two hand-knitted blankets we had received as gifts. Globs of the stuff, some sitting on, and some ground in to the blankets’ weaves. Obviously, we had forgotten to put the cream away tonight. Amazingly, I didn’t detect any of the goop on my daughter. She must have protected herself with the sheet as she squeezed the life out of the tube.
It may be relevant for you to know that I hate creams. Diaper creams, hand creams, face creams, first aid creams… about the only creams I like are ice cream and whipped cream. I just hate how they feel and smell. Slimy, slippery, and sticky, all at the same time - the filmy residue, impossible to completely remove. I honestly can’t understand why people choose to use them when they have other options. They are an “only when necessary” evil for me.
So I’m sure you can imagine the fun I’ve had over the last hour trying in vain to remove as much of the cream as possible from these blankets.
I hate creams.
I’m almost willing to toss the sheet. I’d really like to save these blankets, though. So what do you say? Any ideas?
Seriously. I’m begging. I know this will eventually come up again. I’ll take any idea. Leave a comment. Please.
Well, apparently you guys are really interested in my death. The last post, I want to end my life, but I’m too lazy, has been the top of the page views list for 3 days running.
Sadly, that has never happened with one of my new posts before. Usually the random searches outperform anything new (which is a sad statement about the popularity of this blog, but oh well).
So, to celebrate, I’m planning to “kill” myself every week or so. We’ll see how that goes.
I’ve got a swirl of thoughts going on in my head at the moment. This one’s gonna ramble. Hopefully it comes out making some kind of sense.
I want to end my life. Well, part of it anyway. I would prefer to continue breathing, let’s just get that straight right away.
I want to excise the part of myself that wants “stuff.” Wanting stuff is the pursuit of temporary pleasure. As soon as I get something I want, I feel better for a little while, then I want “stuff 2.0.” All that stuff costs money. That means I have to work, because I haven’t figured out how to get paid for doing nothing yet. That takes time from other tasks I have to do. Time is finite, so I have to figure out how to get those other tasks done faster, which means either paying someone else to do it for me, or buying some other “stuff” that helps me get it done faster. But that means I need more money, so I can pay for that, which means I have to work more.
Nothing new there. You see where I’m going. It’s the same cyclical problem everyone has on one level or another.
I want to drop out of that cycle. I could. I know I could. For example, I could sell my current house and move someplace smaller and cheaper. It’s an option. Other people have survived with much less than I have. I won’t though. I like it here. It’s too hard to give up what I have now.
That makes me think of how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven. When approached by a rich man wanting to know what he must do to gain eternal life, Jesus said he should sell all his possessions and give it away to the poor. In other words, he had to stop coveting “stuff.” (if you’re wondering, the passage is Matthew 19:16-30). There was a time when I thought I’d have no problem with that. That was before I had this much stuff. Intellectually, I knew what the story meant, but now I feel the guy’s pain. It’s hard. In fact, not only do I not want to give up stuff… I want more stuff.
That gets me to thinking about church. I used to be much more involved in church activities. Part of me feels like I’m not involved enough now, but I am in the choir and a small group, and I’m not sure I’m willing to commit more time right now.
And then there’s the heart of the matter: the choir connection that at some level probably kick-started this post much earlier today (well, yesterday, at this point as I write this after 3am). A friend of mine from choir has cancer. It’s apparently progressing very quickly, and hospice has recently been mentioned. I haven’t seen him since early this summer, before he was diagnosed. He and his wife are very active in our church. He’s a very nice, happy, intelligent, funny, godly, loving man. He’s one of the first people to offer help in any circumstance and has been a source of support when my family was going through some tough stuff over the last 5 years. I have an immense amount of respect for him, and it pains me greatly that he’s going through this, as does the knowledge that he may not be around for much longer.
Thinking about that and other reminders of mortality coincided with another friend of mine reflecting on “Hurt” as performed by Johnny Cash. He noted that the video for that song shows Cash “sitting there looking back on all that he had accomplished and realizing that, save a few precious things (his faith, his wife, his kids), it was all meaningless.” “Stuff” isn’t in that list. I imagine my choir friend is having some of those same thoughts.
I need to end this life as it currently exists, and refocus. The way I want to live and the way I’m living are not lining up as well as I’d hope. I’ve got a lot of inertia, though, and I’m lazy. It’s hard to get started.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I persisted in believing an unfounded assumption rather than taking a few minutes to find out the truth. Because of that stupidity, I missed out on some enjoyment. Luckily, I can make up for that in this case. As I’ll come back to, that’s not always true.
The name “Five for Fighting” applied to a music group immediately conjured up images of hard, driving rock music, with lots of screaming and anger. It’s just the name alone that brought that image to mind. The only music I had heard from the group at that time was “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” which is one of my favorite songs. But I persisted in my faulty image, thinking that maybe this was the song that broke their mold, and the rest of their songs were just as I imagined.
Then I heard a couple more of their songs, and they were all very nice, acoustic piano-driven songs with thoughtful lyrics and beautiful orchestration. And still I rationalized. “Maybe they do one nice song per album.”
Eventually I realized that was a stupid assumption to make and I should look into the group and see if I was missing out on something great. Still, it took a while to do anything about it. In fact, it wasn’t until I started exploring Pandora that I really found out how stupid I am.
I had a lot of my facts wrong. First off, “Five for Fighting” isn’t a group. It’s a guy. He just figured his name was harder to remember than a marketing title, and he was right. I haven’t had any trouble remembering the name (which refers to a hockey penalty) - I just associated it poorly. Which leads to my other large mistake. It’s still amazing to me that presented with nothing but music that I loved, I still had this notion that the majority of Five for Fighting’s catalog would be stuff I hated. I’ve listened to probably 15 of his songs now, and I have liked all of them. Most share the same acoustic, orchestrated, piano-led sound.
While I have a few contenders for my favorite so far, I have to give the nod to the radio hit “100 years”.
That song perfectly blends many of the elements I love. Strong rhythm piano, nice orchestration, a distinctive sound, strong solo work moving into full instrumentation, and lyrics about the passage of time and life. I’m a sucker for the “time passing” motif.
So why, presented with only music that I love, did I persist in my prejudiced viewpoint? Ignorance. Ignorance is at the heart of all prejudice.
There are people who hate others based only on their race. They don’t get to know the people or what they stand for at all - they simply believe their prejudiced views, despite evidence to the contrary. The same applies to religion and politics. There are Republicans who recoil at anything labeled “Democrat” without any knowledge of the message’s content. Likewise, there are Democrats who cringe at anything to come out of a Republican’s mouth, simply because a Republican said it, with no regard for the content of the statement (or its context).
This problem of prejudice is exacerbated by the sound-bite driven, attention-deficit guided media coverage that focuses on isolated incidents or statements with no regard to context, frequently presenting a misleading, or even wholly inaccurate, picture.
Don’t allow prejudice to guide you. Don’t be ignorant. Don’t assume that you know; know that you know. Find out the truth. You don’t have to agree with it, but discover the truth. Unlike choosing which music group to listen to, some choices can have lasting and dangerous consequences.
And on your way out, take a listen to this lesser known Five for Fighting song that I discovered after I started paying attention.
Last week I started doing something I hardly ever do - I started reading a non-fiction book. Even more amazingly, it’s an auto-biography. That’s a genre I almost never delve into. In fact, I can’t even remember the last non-fiction book I read cover to cover. It’s not even a recent book. I ran across it literally by providence, and decided to bring it home.
The book is Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, among others. It’s not a standard auto-biography, though. The short description on the cover summarizes it as Lewis’ “search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.”
While his writing is frequently either outside my experience or above my head (in the first few chapters he discusses his very early life, including English and Irish boarding schools and social circles, and manages to write in a few Latin phrases and references to other works that he apparently thinks are common knowledge), I do get the drift. He had a tough childhood, emotionally and intellectually. The cruelty of his first boarding school headmaster was random and violent, and the academic lessons for the most part without merit. I get more of a sense of the atmosphere of the orphanage from “Oliver Twist” (or in my case, Oliver! the movie), than I do of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, which is patterned after an English boarding school, as I understand it.
But at the end of the description of this time in his life he says this:
Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. Even, in a sense, by faith; for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far off that it is as hard to realize them as to realize heaven. They have the same pitiful unreality when confronted with immediate horrors. Tomorrow’s geometry blots out the distant end of term as tomorrow’s operation may blot out the hope of Paradise. And yet, term after term, the unbelievable happened. Fantastical and astronomical figures like “this time six weeks” shrank into practicable figures like “this time next week,” and then “this time tomorrow,” and the almost supernatural bliss of the Last Day punctually appeared.
He continued to describe the deep, nearly breathtaking delight that that day held. He also went on to acknowledge the other side of the same equation: that at the beginning of each time at home, the next school term was as unrecognized as a young man in good health would recognize his own mortality. It may be acknowledged, but never truly realized, until time moves forward and the inevitable occurs.
In all seriousness I think that the life of faith is easier to me because of these memories. To think, in sunny and confident times, that I shall die and rot, or to think that one day this universe will slip away and become memory . . . is easier to us if we have seen just that sort of thing happening before. We have learned not to take present things at their face value.
I haven’t had the same kind of circumstances in my life that he had, but I can come up with a few situations (though laughably smaller in intensity) that help me draw that same parallel. It’s helpful to have a new frame of reference for living in hope of a new world to come—to be able to work through the day to day grind of life while keeping one eye on the prize.
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