But seriously. I do. We have some money in a mutual fund that is supposed to be a house down payment. DH and I were just discussing that we should take the money out because of all the China craziness and so on, but I procrastinated and then last Friday happened. So now we are just sitting around, hoping that we won't lose too much more money and that there will be some kind of rebound. I know the *market* is rebounding, but it hasn't quite translated into an increase in value in our account. It makes me so angry that an amount of money that represents hard savings for us can evaporate in three days. It makes me angrier that we were clued into the fact (we pay attention to financial news) that there could be some craziness and didn't act. This may be a very expensive lesson on procrastination. All I can say is that I'm glad that we didn't make a big contribution to our IRAs last Thursday.
My mother calls investing in the stock market "gambling", and I think she's right. I graduated from grad school in 2006. Where are my 7% returns, Dave Ramsay? Did they happen during the great recession? Did they happen when I couldn't get a very good paying job when DH was in grad school? Did they happen last Friday? Um... no. It's supposed to be the case that if you invest in mutual funds (or ETFs or whatever) that you are protected because all your eggs aren't in "one basket". But they are! They are in the single basket that is the stock market. It can all lose value! So easily!
But then what? Put our money in CDs and savings accounts with no interest? We'd be losing money to inflation, but at least it wouldn't be $XXXX in one single day. Real estate? I'm actually intrigued by the idea of owning rental properties, but we haven't even bought a house for ourselves yet and we need what little is left of our money to pay for our own down payment. And I don't have the mental space to become a slumlord right now.
Sheesh.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
You know what's fun
- Riding on a train
- With big kids
- Who feed you pretzels
- Their pretzels
- Dumping Goldfish crackers on your baby sibling's head
- Laughing and laughing with the sibling
- Eating the crackers off the floor
- Allowing your mother to eat her lunch in peace while you have a Goldfish party
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Check
Made good use of some babysitting time this morning and got notes for one long and one short chapter completed. Just two more chapters of prep for class B and... um... 100% left for class A. However, one of the full time instructors is supposed to help me out by sending his schedule, and I'm hoping class A is going to be the kind of class where I can just teach from the book. It's more boring but (I suspect) will be way less work than class B. On the other hand, I'm hoping that after one more iteration teaching class B my notes will be set and I won't have to do a bunch of prep like I did over the summer and now. Then I need to find a student who will make my notes all formatted and pretty. Like clean floors, that's something I enjoy but have no interest in doing myself. I gladly pay for both.
Monday, August 17, 2015
A little more on tendencies
Yesterday I asked the world what they both liked and didn't like about their habit forming tendency, but I neglected to say anything positive about mine.
Maybe that's because it's easy to think that what comes naturally to us comes naturally to everyone else and what's hard for us is a personality defect.
Because of my obliger tendency I:
Maybe that's because it's easy to think that what comes naturally to us comes naturally to everyone else and what's hard for us is a personality defect.
Because of my obliger tendency I:
- Respect people's time
- Am not late
- Or call if I would be
- Take responsibility for my actions (like scraping a car in a parking lot last week... ugh)
- Pay bills on time
- Am prepared
- Think about how my actions fill affect my family
Not that other tendencies don't do these things. In fact, I'm blessed because by in large my family and friends all are responsible, respectful people, but I attribute those qualities in myself to my obliger nature.
The key for me is to continue to nurture my positive qualities. Obviously not everyone does all those things (exhibit A: late fees). However, it's easy for me to let my life be taken over by petty tasks (there's always laundry to do) rather than prioritizing meaningful activities that are for my own personal development.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Habits
Recently I read Gretchen Rubin's book Better Than Before about how people displaying what she calls the four tendencies (she capitalizes it in her book, but I hate capitalizing non-proper nouns, so I won't) develop habits and how, once one knows one's tendency, one can use that knowledge to develop the habits one wants to develop.
The four tendencies are: upholder, questioner, obliger and rebel. There's a quiz at the beginning of the book that is supposed to help you determine which one you are; however, I felt the quiz wasn't actually that helpful until after I'd read the book and done more reflecting on which type I was.
I started out thinking that I would be an upholder - mainly because I liked the idea. Upholders always keep commitments to both themselves and others. There's no question that I'm good at keeping commitments to others, and I decided that the daily habit of exercising I'd developed (mainly running) was evidence that I was an upholder. DH is an upholder. He is a self-taught musician and can focus laser like on what is important to him and tune out everything unimportant. He will fulfill obligations to others, but it won't ever come at the expense of obligations to himself.
After I read a bit, I'd decided that I might be more of a questioner. There were definitely things I wanted to do (more blogging, playing the piano, eating healthier) that I never made time for, and I decided that I was doing so because I didn't believe there was enough information that said activity would benefit me, and I couldn't convince myself that I should do an activity that I didn't really believe was important. Which is kind of true, but I could see that I didn't hold responsibilities to others to that same strict standard of having convinced me they were truly important.
So finally I landed on the fact that I'm an obliger (I'm definitely not a rebel). I have a very hard time putting my own wants (important but not urgent tasks) ahead of others' wants. It's not that I'm some saintly unselfish person (that's one of the reasons it was hard for me to determine that I'm an obliger), it's more that I get more of a kick from ticking off things that I need to do for other people than I do from working on my own projects. Part of it is probably my upbringing where we always did our "work" first and our "fun" later. Now that I look back at my own habits, I see that my running really developed out of a perceived obligation that I had to look a certain way and that running would get me there. I can also get sucked into the idea that there is some kind of "other" in the world that is judging my competency as an adult based on how organized my medicine cabinets are, but that tends to go hand in hand with insecurity about other areas of my life rather than a true belief that there's an external standard that I have to live up to (toys do not get picked up every night at our house).
I also had a hard time determining that I was an obliger because I see my MIL and my mom as consummate obligers. My MIL is more of a person who acts because she feels very pressured and judged by the outside world. She feels like everything has to be a certain way because of the expectations of others. My mom gets a lot of satisfaction from serving others, but sometimes to the point that it can be frustrating because she won't communicate her own wants and needs (and you can tell she as them) and gets upset because those wants and needs aren't met. It's funny because they both want the same thing but have such different ways of approaching it.
Lots of Rubin's suggestions for obligers revolve around accountability partners, the idea of which is not really appealing to me, but I recognize that I do fare better with my habits when I have some kind of external accountability. I really need to take lessons if I want to lean to play the piano. I like to have races and a training plan to stay motivated with running (now that I'm coming it it from a healthier place). I feel an obligation to family to post things about my kiddos so I blog at least once or so a week under my other identity.
Which comes back to making posting in this space a priority or habit or what have you. I have a lot of stuff on my plate, and I love the idea of ticking it all off, but, at least for today, I'm putting my obligations to myself and my own long term projects first.
Dear internet, what do you think is your tendency? How do you think it helps and/or hinders you in life?
The four tendencies are: upholder, questioner, obliger and rebel. There's a quiz at the beginning of the book that is supposed to help you determine which one you are; however, I felt the quiz wasn't actually that helpful until after I'd read the book and done more reflecting on which type I was.
I started out thinking that I would be an upholder - mainly because I liked the idea. Upholders always keep commitments to both themselves and others. There's no question that I'm good at keeping commitments to others, and I decided that the daily habit of exercising I'd developed (mainly running) was evidence that I was an upholder. DH is an upholder. He is a self-taught musician and can focus laser like on what is important to him and tune out everything unimportant. He will fulfill obligations to others, but it won't ever come at the expense of obligations to himself.
After I read a bit, I'd decided that I might be more of a questioner. There were definitely things I wanted to do (more blogging, playing the piano, eating healthier) that I never made time for, and I decided that I was doing so because I didn't believe there was enough information that said activity would benefit me, and I couldn't convince myself that I should do an activity that I didn't really believe was important. Which is kind of true, but I could see that I didn't hold responsibilities to others to that same strict standard of having convinced me they were truly important.
So finally I landed on the fact that I'm an obliger (I'm definitely not a rebel). I have a very hard time putting my own wants (important but not urgent tasks) ahead of others' wants. It's not that I'm some saintly unselfish person (that's one of the reasons it was hard for me to determine that I'm an obliger), it's more that I get more of a kick from ticking off things that I need to do for other people than I do from working on my own projects. Part of it is probably my upbringing where we always did our "work" first and our "fun" later. Now that I look back at my own habits, I see that my running really developed out of a perceived obligation that I had to look a certain way and that running would get me there. I can also get sucked into the idea that there is some kind of "other" in the world that is judging my competency as an adult based on how organized my medicine cabinets are, but that tends to go hand in hand with insecurity about other areas of my life rather than a true belief that there's an external standard that I have to live up to (toys do not get picked up every night at our house).
I also had a hard time determining that I was an obliger because I see my MIL and my mom as consummate obligers. My MIL is more of a person who acts because she feels very pressured and judged by the outside world. She feels like everything has to be a certain way because of the expectations of others. My mom gets a lot of satisfaction from serving others, but sometimes to the point that it can be frustrating because she won't communicate her own wants and needs (and you can tell she as them) and gets upset because those wants and needs aren't met. It's funny because they both want the same thing but have such different ways of approaching it.
Lots of Rubin's suggestions for obligers revolve around accountability partners, the idea of which is not really appealing to me, but I recognize that I do fare better with my habits when I have some kind of external accountability. I really need to take lessons if I want to lean to play the piano. I like to have races and a training plan to stay motivated with running (now that I'm coming it it from a healthier place). I feel an obligation to family to post things about my kiddos so I blog at least once or so a week under my other identity.
Which comes back to making posting in this space a priority or habit or what have you. I have a lot of stuff on my plate, and I love the idea of ticking it all off, but, at least for today, I'm putting my obligations to myself and my own long term projects first.
Dear internet, what do you think is your tendency? How do you think it helps and/or hinders you in life?
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Up from the briny deep
I've been wanting to create this space for some time now. A place to write more openly and honestly (and comment on other blogs more openly and honestly) than I feel I can under my real identity. I'd like to write about issues in research and education (my current professional fields) and learning to be a good parent. The fun and frustrations of working both at an R1 university and at a community college (which I will call Greendale). The fun and frustrations of being a mostly SAHP to two little children. You know... normal stuff.
Not sure how much I'll actually write here. I just deterred 9-month-old baby WB from sticking his finger in the empty hole of a power strip. Soon I have to get up 2.5-year-old SB from his nap. It's quiet, I'm rested, and I probably should take the time to work on a syllabus or review a paper.
There's the big one calling. Bye for now!
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