Stretching, Opportunity, and the Cost of Living

There are so many things I want to do.

There’s this quote I like from the Feminine Mystique (which I have yet to get all the way through) that really struck me, and I think about it a lot. It quotes a 17 year old girl saying this, “…only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to told yourself back.”

Last week I spent all day Monday and Tuesday helping one of my friends move into and clean her new house, and yesterday I helped a different friend paint some of the rooms of a house she just bought. I really enjoyed doing both things, not only because I was helping out my friends, but because I am excited about this thing for them. Because it is a thing that I am going to want someday, and someday it will be something I’ll do. I’ll save up enough money to put down 20% on a simple one story house in a good location, and my friends will be helping me move in, and coming over to help me paint my rooms in the colors I pick. This is something I want, but not yet. This is something I want now for my future self. One day I will stand in an empty house that I own wearing overalls and a bandanna and listen to loud music while I paint my walls in my colors. This is a want, and it might change, but it’s a future want.

Last week, due primarily to hormones, I was very sad. I also really wanted to quit my 2nd job, and thought seriously about it for a while. Luckily, the hormones resolved themselves, and I had a very positive 3 nights at work in a row. I am burning with excitement about this road trip. Tonight I took the wrong way on the highway while I was returning home from a friends house, and it was a portion of highway where the next exit wasn’t for another 10 miles, so I had to drive 10 miles to turn around and drive another 10 miles to the exit I needed. I imagined that I was on the highway in the middle of America with no particular attachment to anything but the thing I was doing right then: driving on a highway to wherever I cared to go. I thought about the freedom that I am working towards, and how I’ll pretty much be free to do whatever I want to. I am saving up enough money to be attached to nothing but my whims.

Tonight Morbo was explaining bits of the housing market to me, and related opportunity cost to real life stuff, which I thought was a brilliant thing. The opportunity cost = the cost of what you are missing out on by choosing this particular opportunity. This is great. I should be thinking about everything like this.

Let’s do some now:

Thing: Blogging
Opportunity: getting all these thoughts out of my head, documentation, processing.
Cost: loss of sleep.
Thing: working at Goodberry’s
Opportunity: making money so I can be attached only to my whims
Cost: missed family/friend time, attachment to job responsibilities, mild job discomfort.
Thing: Watching mindless T.V.
Opportunity: zoning, relaxation, family time
Cost: going to bed later, feeling/being unproductive, cuts into book reading, songwriting, journaling
Thing: Road trip
Opportunity: Adventure, music exposure, sightseeing, stretching
Cost: $20,000

Various assessments: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, suck it up pansy, watch less T.V. because you don’t have time for that shit, your 2nd job is fine and soooooooo worth it and you know it, stop writing midnight blog posts because you need your sleep, and find out exactly how it feels to stretch and stretch and stretch and never hold yourself back.