I love money!

Dear friends,

I am glad you invited me to join you in this venture. All of the writing I do lately is about nanotubes or imaging algorithms, neither of which interest me particularly, so I am glad to have another mode of expression. Plus I lack the motivation (and probably commitment) to have a blog right now, but have always sort of wanted to. Also my new project should be studying for the LSATs and god knows I don't want to do that.

To begin, I am a thrifty person, probably even a cheap one. I agree with you both in that my thriftiness seems to have come directly from my parents. However, while Rita's parents would drive across town to save 2 cents on notebooks and Julia's parents would buy her school clothes in New Jersey to save on sales taxes, my parents just avoided buying stuff. That is not to say that my childhood was all that Rita wishes hers had been (dresses out of flour sacks, killing our dinner, etc. - although my parents' current project is raising their own chickens for eggs), but my parents do hold a general belief that consumerism is bad. They do not like to buy stuff because they don't like stuff. I absorbed this general dislike of stuff, although Michelle has to an extent mitigated my parents longstanding influence.

The issue, of course, is how one makes decisions about need versus want, and how much one wants things. As an inherently thrifty person, I feel that I need very little and want only slightly more than I need. My first instinct is always to not spend money. Honestly though, I don't believe this is necessarily the best way to be. Michelle has repeatedly reminded me that it is okay to buy things one doesn't need, assuming one will get enough enjoyment out of them to offset the expense. She did this most effectively by buying me an iphone. Convincing!

That is certainly not to say Michelle is not thrifty, only that she is thrifty in a completely different way than I am. She clips coupons, loves sales, and can recall exactly how much she has saved on every item at the grocery store. For all my claims of thrift, I can't actually make myself care about sales or coupons or getting good deals.

As for the points about work ethic, I agree almost completely with Rita about society's view of people who work, don't work, and can't work. Except that I think it is not so much that "the person who does not work is lazy [and] incompetent" but that the person who cannot support themselves is lazy and incompetent. Julia, for example, who will not be working and instead will be traveling, will a) be able to do so because she has worked and presumably saved some money to support her desire to travel, and b) has proven herself more than capable of supporting herself. After all, taking advantage of available resources is a valid way of supporting ones self. Parents who will take us in are an available resource. Plus, if part of our ethic, as Rita points out, is to find jobs that satisfy and help to define us, then presumably unemployment is preferable to a soul-sucking career-path type job leading nowhere.

And while it does not seem to be true for a lot of young people, I have definitely had the importance of saving ingrained in me. Savings for me equals safety and more options in the future. If I lost my job, if I was in an accident and incurred huge medical bills, if our building burned down and we lost all of our stuff; all of these are scenarios that can potentially be fought off with responsible saving. Not that my paltry savings account could actually stand up against any of those things, but that's the idea. And a house and more school and kids are all things that I want to be able to have when I want them. What can saving be rewarded with other than whatever you spend that money on? You are rewarded for saving by being able to buy a house or travel through India for three months. You are rewarded for saving by not going under when you have unexpected medical bills or other costly emergencies. Few of us will ever make as much money in a year as we wish to spend in that year. Sometimes (now) we will make more money than we need to spend, and later on we may make less money than we want to be able to spend. It only makes sense to put away the extra now in order to have it later. But maybe it's easy for me to say that because I have an innate desire to not spend money, and am positively gleeful watching my savings account grow. Scrooge-like, I am.

And I'm out. Except that, Rita - I am all for hearing about your theory of the lost pseudo-lesbianism of Victorian/Edwardian female friendship, and why we should want that back.