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Mundane

I hate getting bogged down in the mundane details of capitalism: balancing my checkbook, filing old bank statements, making COBRA payments until my new insurance kicks in, looking at 1099s, keeping track of 401(k) and IRA statements.

The thing is, I'm anal retentive. You'd think I'd like these things (and truthfully, sometimes I do). But for the most part it's just a pain in the ass and being forced to do them makes me understand why monks are all smiles. They got a robe, a little hutch to meditate in, and soup once in a while. What more do we really need in life?

I guess this meanders into the fact that a couple weekends ago I went to see Suze Orman at The Fitzgerald. She was recording a special for PBS (which they will repeat 100 times during pledge week, no doubt) called "The Laws of Money." She had some really great points, but after the lecture I started thinking. I realized that what money really means to me is freedom.

And not freedom in the sense that I can do whatever I want and spend like a drunken sailor, but freedom from worry. When I was 19 and I got my first apartment, I used to cry about my finances at least once a month, usually around rent time. It was a constant struggle to make ends meet. I hated it.

But now, I'm fairly comfortable, with a wee apartment all my own (a studio by choice, as I'm trying to avoid accumulating too much crap in life. So Zen of me, don't you think?), hardly any debt left to pay off, and enough extra money to play with friends, buy organic, and get someone a gift once in a while. Even so, there's so damn much crap to clutter your brain with: taxes, bills, online payments, Quicken, FICO scores, blah blah blah. I wish some of these things would just magically take care of themselves so that I could think about other things. I wish it was easier, and simpler - that we didn't have to worry about credit ratings and retirement and everything else.

I guess there are some people that don't worry about it. I have friends who make their living as poets, and I can't imagine there's a big 401(k) plan out there for that. So, I guess it's a choice between which situation I hate more: having to go to the neighborhood health center when I feel sick and freaking out about how to make ends meet, or being covered by insurance and having to spend certain Monday nights with a calculator.

It all sounds so dumb now that I write it down, and I'm afraid I'm not being very coherent. But it feels like a lot to think about.