I Am Not a Blogger

So I’d heard a few people mention Afford Anything as a blog they like. I’d looked at it briefly a few months ago, but decided to take another look over the weekend.

It seems like a well organized site, with focused, well-written articles. Though it seems to me that it is not really a personal finance blog, it’s more of a “lifestyle design” blog. And, like most lifestyle design blogs, it is all Rah! Rah! Quit Your Job! Travel the World! Move to Thailand! Buy Rental Property! PASSIVE INCOME PASSIVE INCOME PASSIVE INCOME!

Yeaahhhhh!!!!!!

Which makes me cower in a corner and cover my head.

Please do not make me travel around the world and own rental property. Please.

I can’t even manage to fix my own house, much less take care of a house I don’t even live in. Every time I take time off to do things around the house I am SO GLAD when I’m done and I get to go back to sitting at my desk figuring things out on my computer. All these people who see rental property as the way to a fabulous future kill me. Man. Total torture.

Also the whole “outsource everything and do your job for four hours a week while travelling the world” is completely not appealing to me. For one, I am a control freak, and therefore find the concept of outsourcing problematic. Also I do not like to travel. With the possible exception of places that I have a prior relationship with (i.e., places I used to live, places I’ve visited often, or places I visited once and enjoyed) or where I have someone I really like a lot who lives there that I can stay with.

I know, weird. But whatever. That is me.

Here are some things in life that I like

1. sleeping in my own bed
2. walking around town and running into people I know
3. going to a restaurant that I’ve eaten at before and had a really good meal, and getting the same thing again. Because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
4. riding my bike for ten, twenty, thirty mile rides and knowing exactly where I am
5. sleeping in my own bed

Did I mention sleeping in my own bed?

Can I just have my nice peaceful life here in North Carolina? Is that okay? I will even pay extra to get my wisdom teeth removed by my friendly local oral surgeon up the street, instead of going to Thailand or Costa Rica for it. (This is especially useful if a week later you get dry socket, you can just go up the street and get that taken care of, and again six weeks later when you get an infection, you can also get that taken care of right in your own neighborhood.)

A lot of these blogs, when I read them, I wonder if these are real people. People who move to Thailand and write ebooks about location-independent lives and make a living off their blogs. Do people really do this?

Do they like it?

I read blogs like that and it makes me think that I’m just not cut out to be a blogger. Because all I have to write about is things like hanging my laundry and mowing the lawn.

And sleeping in my own bed.

Because that is my life.

There you have it.

How It Begins, and How It Ends

[Ed. Note: Last year around this time, I wrote a post that referenced an essay by Umberto Eco, published in the collection How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. Below is something I wrote just afterwards, but then didn’t post because after writing it, decided that it wasn’t relevant to anything, and, in the end, I wasn’t sure what the point was. But I’m doing a little computer housekeeping and I just read it again. And I decided not to worry about whether it is relevant, or whether it has a point. It poses an interesting question. I like it. That is enough.]

The essay in Umberto Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon that follows “How to Eat Ice Cream” is also great. It’s called “How It Begins, and How It Ends,” and, like “How to Eat Ice Cream,” seemed to speak directly to some of the themes I’ve been thinking about and writing about lately — specifically the idea of what brings happiness.

The essay is about how when he was a scholarship student at university, he and his friends learned that they could bribe the usher for admission to films and plays, but the dorms were locked at midnight, so they had to leave before the end of the show in order to get home in time.

“And so it was,” Eco writes, “that, over a four-year period, I saw the theatrical masterpieces of every time and place, except for their last ten minutes.”

He talks about all of the things he doesn’t know — “if Othello punched up Iago before setting off on a second honeymoon, if the imaginary invalid’s health improved, if everyone threw rice after Romeo and Juliet, and who was Bunbury” — and thought he was the only one who suffered from this problem. But then he happened to have a conversation with an old friend who, as it turned out, “suffered from the same anguish in reverse.”

As a student, his friend had worked at a theater run by students and had taken tickets at the door, but because many people arrived late, it was always the start of the second act by the time he was able to slip into a seat and begin watching the production.

Well to make a long story short, Paolo and I exchanged confidences. And we discovered that a splendid old age lies before us. Seated on the front steps of a country house or on a bench in the park, for years we will tell each other stories: he, endings; I, beginnings, amid cries of amazement at every discovery of prelude or catharsis.

He runs through some of the things they will learn, about Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear.

Missing the beginning or end of a story would always seem like something to be avoided — of course you would want to know the whole story. But Eco ends the essay with an intriguing question:

Will we be happier afterwards? Or will we have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who’s going to win or lose the game?

What Are Your Hours?

Window Sign, Eden, North Carolina

That should cover it.