Eyes wide shut?

This weekend, we got to see a taiko drum performance. Despite some difficulty making it out the door in time, a required stop for gas, and driving in freezing rain turning to snow, we made it more or less on time. Unfortunately, we ended up with seats that left something to be desired. Entering when we did, we ended up sitting behind the sound board in the theater. Normally, this wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the person operating the sound board was also filming the performance, and spent most of it standing in front of us in order to operate the camera. Perhaps the reason she was able to spend all of her time filming was because it was a drum performance, and the sound equipment was completely unnecessary. It looked like it was turned on, but it wasn’t actually in use.

Even when they were playing quietly, the drummers were entirely audible even from the back of the theater. When they really put their weight into it, I could feel the sound rumbling through my chest and vibrating up through the floor into my feet. It was exactly the effect that people with very expensive sound systems in their cars try to duplicate at stoplights, without any of the distortion that usually makes a mockery of such attempts. As I sat, looking at the back of the camera operator and feeling the sound roll through me, I spent some time thinking about how I tend to experience these kinds of events.

Ingredients of Morality?

A recent New York Times magazine article, The Moral Instinct, touches on issues near and dear to my Unitarian Universalist heart; different ideas of morality. The article discusses how human beings are somewhat hardwired to have a moral code. However, just what that morality can entail can vary wildy from culture to culture, but most ideas of cultural wrongs can be boiled down to violations of a few different kinds of taboos:

Blogroll Addition Extravaganza!

Okay, it’s been a while since I pointed out additions to the blogroll, and it appears that the advent of allergy/asthma/holiday/exam/video game season is cutting into our collective writing, so, if you find youself without fresh geekings to read here, try these other fine blogs.

Blogs by Grinnellians

Bittersweet, the personal blog of our friend Molly, a (currently) former middle school teacher and aspiring YA novel author. She blogs about life, books, dogs, and often posts very realistic criticisms of our public education system.

Brood, the always amusing blog of Sarah Aswell, MFA, former writer for Grinnell’s campus paper, current minion for the publishing industry, and part-time (working toward full-time) journalistic writer for a variety of publications. She has several ongoing features on her blog, including “Sarah vs. Britney Spears,” “Ripley: Cat on a Diet,” “Lifetime Movie Reviews,” and, of course, book reviews. You can peruse a list of her published articles here.

Puffery is yet another blog featuring our own kidsilkhaze/Jennie. It’s amazing she has time to keep up with all this blogging! Puffery is actually a group blog, too, again with mostly Grinnellians, about beauty and bath products. If you’re a girl who wants to acknowledge your girly side and get some practical advice about what and what not to buy, go read! If you’re a boy who wonders what all the fuss is about all this girly stuff, go read! Moisturizer, makeup, bubble bath, shampoo, soap… they’ve got it all.

Sports Guy Talkin’ Crazy Again, a blog by a Grinnell English professor. It is, as he describes it, “Erik Simpson’s commentary on the way people talk about sports.” Only updated as often as Simpson notices people saying something interesting about sports, but when it’s updated, it’s always good. (His non-sports blog is Underlying Logic.)

Blogs by Other Worthy People

The following are blogs by recognizable famous journalist authors that you may already be reading, but if you aren’t, you should check out.

gladwell.com is Malcolm Gladwell’s blog. Gladwell is the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, and writes regularly for the New Yorker magazine. He blogs, as he writes, on a wide variety of interesting subjects.

The Loom is Carl Zimmer’s science blog. Zimmer is a science writer who focuses on evolutionary biology. He is the author of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex, Soul Made Flesh, At the Water’s Edge, and The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. He also writes for the New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, and numerous other magazines.

Relatedly, From A to Zimmer is written by Carl’s brother, Ben Zimmer, a linguist who also writes for Language Log. From A to Zimmer is his column on the Oxford University Press blog. Mmmmm, linguistics and etymology.

How Much Is Your Idealism Worth?

As a current job-seeker, I am especially sensitive to the market for recent graduates. Since I’m looking at a lot of do-gooder organizations, I somewhat expect that wages in such positions don’t keep pace with business or government positions. But how much of a cut am I supposed to accept in order to do “fulfilling” work?

What got me riled this time was this fellowship, a one-year position that offers $20,000 to recent graduates of undergrad or graduate programs (no differential for the latter’s further educational experience) or to activists with work experience who would benefit from a research-oriented environment. That sum is to live in Washington D.C., a city where rent can easily equal what the organization is paying as a monthly wage. Unlike many other organizations offering meager salaries, this one doesn’t make it up in free housing or elaborate benefits either. I don’t mean to single them out, because they are by no means the only ones exploiting young people. This is long common and accepted practice in the competitive world of internships; the question is how far it will extend into the world of employment, of qualified people who should be able to support themselves.

Enso Beta

A while ago, in this very space, I waxed rhapsodic about Humanized Enso, a program that aims to bring computers a little closer to Jef Raskin’s ideal. I agree with a lot of things in Raskin’s book The Humane Interface, so I was happy to see his work in a form that I could use in my everyday life.

For those disinclined to read my earlier article, Enso uses a semi-modal, textual interface to perform all sorts of useful actions anywhere in Windows (there are rumors of a Mac vesion on the way).  For example, if I want to open up Word 2007, I can hold down Caps Lock and type ‘open word’ no matter what I’m doing and it’ll open up a copy of Word for me.  I can also tell Enso to learn a particular file as a command, so that I can say ‘open geek’ and it’ll open up my folder of Geek Buffet articles.  My big problem with Enso is just that there’s no way to extend the commands.  Sure, you can open new and interesting files, but you can’t do new and interesting things.

The financial state of the union (part IV)

What’s changed in the nine months since I first started entering my expenses into a spreadsheet? Back then, you’ll remember, I was afraid of writing down a budget, I had no health insurance, I didn’t feel like I could track my money with an irregular income, and I always felt guilty about paying for things. Now, I have a budget that I’m working towards, I have health, dental, and an IRA, I set things up so that I can budget my income as if it were regular, and I know when I have enough money to buy things so I feel less guilty. Best of all, I no longer feel like my money is just disappearing. I still don’t make all that much money (less than $1000/month), but I have a much better handle on where it’s coming from, where it’s going, and how I can use that to prepare for adverse situations.

My current setup isn’t sustainable, of course, but it doesn’t have to be. This is just a stepping stone on the way towards the life I want. Eventually, I’ll be in a place where I can get rid of my car, I’ll own a house, and I’ll be making enough money that I can set aside more for retirement. Until then, I’ll keep sticking to my budget and suffering the pitying stares and rolled eyes of those who just don’t understand.

If I leave you with one thought, let it be this one: controlling your finances is a long process and a hard process, but it’s a great process.

When you’re ready to take the plunge, there are all kinds of resources that make it easier. One of the best is Get Rich Slowly, a daily financial blog for normal folks.

Other posts in this series:
How I learned to love my budget (part I)
Lattes are expensive, but cell phones are worse (part II)
Failure is still success (part III)

– Will

Failure is still success (part III)

By this point, I had several months’ worth of expenses recorded in my simple spreadsheet. I sat down one weekend and read through it all, sketching out general categories. Despite all of the reading I’d done online, I ended up with a budget that was entirely my own. A budget is a very personal thing and even the categories that you choose help you figure out where you’re spending more than you want and where you want to spend more (often savings and retirement, but it might also include hobbies).

In my case, I ended up with: fast food, groceries, entertainment, car insurance, gas, miscellaneous, restaurants, rent, snacks, vacation, cell phone, utilities, and gifts. As I focused on problem areas (like my car) and brought them under control, I merged them with other categories. I also added some categories for saving and modified some categories for joint spending with me and my fiancé. Right now, my budget has: joint expenses (rent, utilities, groceries, dates, etc), fast food, snacks, miscellaneous, entertainment, insurance, cell phone, and savings. My budget is a living document and I change it as my goals and living situations change.

At first, my budget was literally just set up to mirror my average costs. It was descriptive rather than prescriptive, which let me keep the illusion that it wasn’t really a budget at all. Of course, by trying to keep my costs at or below their average, I was still managing to reduce my expenses.

Lattes are expensive, but cell phones are worse (part II)

As I wrote my budget down, I started realizing that most of my big expenses were fixed expenses: rent, Internet connection, cable TV, car expenses, cell phone. Rent was my largest dollar cost, of course, but it was reasonably low since I lived away from town with roommates. My Internet and cable costs were tied up in that as well because of the roommates and car expenses didn’t seem under my short-term control.

So I started with my cell phone. I’ve never been a big talker, so it was a natural place to cut costs. I looked through six months of statements to figure out my average and peak monthly usage (150 and 300 minutes). With that information in hand, I searched around for the cheapest plans possible. In the end, I got a T-Mobile pre-paid phone and 1250 minutes for $140. I’ve since paid 30-50% of my previous bill each month without changing my calling habits at all.

How I learned to love my budget (part I)

When I tell people that I’m on a budget, I tend to get the sympathetic looks generally reserved for funerals and those counting calories. It’s a pitying look, often accompanied by a slow shake of the head as if in commiseration that life can be cruel sometimes. And then the topic of conversation changes as if by magic.

It’s an odd reaction, as if budgeting (or counting calories) is vaguely shameful. Of course, nobody would budget if they didn’t have to, right? Much better just to live in the moment and trust that everything will work out.

Maybe I’ve just been trained by years of RPGs to enjoy crunching numbers, but I actually like budgeting. It can be stressful when you take it too far and start looking only at the numbers (hey, just like in RPGs!), but I find it even more stressful to go the other way and ignore those numbers entirely.

Blogging, Graphomania and the Age of Universal Deafness and Incomprehension

On my recent travels, I reread The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, originally published in 1978. That, dear readers, is two years before I was born — which makes his prescience all the more astonishing to me.

Kundera is a Czech-born writer-in-exile, living in France since 1975. The book addresses Communism and sex and lots of other things you can read for yourself in the Amazon reviews. What I found most interesting were his insights on writing, which I believe reflect the blogosphere in a way I don’t think even he could have imagined.