What Goes Down…Sometimes Bounces

This past week has really taught me that you can’t plan for anything. Of course, living in the moment is for teenagers and meditation.

There needs to be a balance. Not just a work/life balance I hear people prattle on about, because really you’re either working or not working and we are all just doing best we can. In most cases, the priority is to just not die with a buttload of regret hanging over us.

The balance is the living in the moment vs. living in the future vs. learning from the past. It’s more of a triangle than some easy-peasy back and forth see-saw that you can somehow straddle and feel like you’ve figured it all out.

This holds true for any aspect of life. Relationships, finances, fitness, and even parenting. We look to our past to find the good and the bad in our lives and the lives of others, then we look to the future and what we hope to see happen, and then we take those and try to make the right decision in the moment to bring us to the desired future out of the information we gleaned from our past.

Our finances this week swung twice. Once when my husband had an orientation date for a new job. Then, he mixed up the date and unintentionally ditched it. Then they rescheduled it, but in such a way there wouldn’t me money coming in from that job this month, then they called back and moved the date up so there would be some income from that job to add to this month’s bottom line.

Lucky for me, I’ve been a lot more chill about things in our life lately – yes, even including finances – and that has brought great relief to the whole household. Instead of being unhappy when the bad thing happened and then happy because it was remedied but then unhappy because it wouldn’t help us when I wanted it to and then happy because it all worked out in the end I can just kind of relax into it and see that the time to react and invest my emotion is the last time, the time where the ending is clear. Not before, when things are still in flux.

Of course, that’s the trick that life plays on all of us. Life is always in flux, so choosing those restore points in our lives where we make a stand and have a strong emotion sometimes become automatic. We have to learn to control them a little better – well, I do anyway – and set better restore points for the memory system of my mind.

This month was rocky financially because both my husband and I started new jobs. They aren’t glamorous and they aren’t amazing, but they are steady, they pay, and they don’t require either one of us to be spin doctors. I don’t have to ever worry about being that poor KitchenaidUSA Twitter person who said something completely inappropriate on the company Twitter feed. I don’t judge her. I say some pretty smarmy stuff and her smarmy stuff should not have been publicly consumed. The only reason anyone even cares is because someone made a human mistake and their dirty laundry and bad sense of humor got aired for 26,000 people.

Social media does not have room for empathy anymore. Between all the inspirational quotes and pretty pictures is a really sad bitterness. Brittle people who say things that they would never say in a group of people they didn’t know. One shitty dead grandmother joke and someone loses their job, but to stand up for your beliefs, no matter how stupid they seem to everyone else, is totally okay.

I’m tired of it. Really. Why people think they are an expert because they read the same things on the Internet I did blows my mind. The sense of entitlement and the bully mentality (not actual bullying, it’s far more passive aggressive than that) and so many people being so sure they’re right just makes me feel so very, very sorry for them. I hope these people are able to remain in their bubbles with their people who stroke their egos, because if they lose that it’s a very cold world and the Internet is like Heathers where something will inevitably get blown up in the end.

This was supposed to be a budget update post. I’m not sure where all that came from.

It looks like this month we will just meet our expenses and won’t have any extra money to pay down debt. Considering we were both unemployed for over a month I’m feeling pretty damn good about that. Our savings carried us beautifully because we sacrificed when we didn’t have to. It wasn’t much savings, but it didn’t need to be, because we live a pretty simple life.

I’m still waiting to hear back about the refinance, I just have to cash out my Facebook stock in order to get the rest of the closing money together. I’m not sure if you can pay for a closing in cash. Since I use ING Direct I’m not sure how to pay the closing costs at all. I wonder if they take a personal check? I’ll have to ask our mortgage guy on Monday.

Oh, hey, there’s a fitness win that happened yesterday, too! I went to a party and there was Chex mix and pizza and Crazy Bread (my downfall, for real) and punch, and cider, and a shitton of booze.

I had a banana. I am not even kidding you right now. I almost ate her avocado but thought that might be rude since there was only one. As I watched other people eat I didn’t even have a moment of any feeling. I was fine with them making their choices and I was fine making my choices. It was all good.

I think that is a really, really good sign for long term success.

Next month, I’m hoping that the extra finances balance out and we can throw some extra money at debt. Snowflakes. Also next month we should know when my husband’s testing dates are for one of two jobs he really, really wants that would make our debt snowball go a lot faster! But for now I’m not really feeling anything about that. I am hopeful, but won’t let that take over and make me anxious.

In the meantime, I’ll continue focusing on empathy and compassion. Those are not traits you can have too much of.