March 25, 2013
Needle aversion notwithstanding, I’ve had a long-running desire to give blood. For science?
Maybe it’s the one thing I want to do to fit in because a) Lord knows I don’t care that I don’t “fit in” anywhere else; b) it feels chumpish not to when just about everyone I know can.
Maybe it’s because these past several years, I’ve lost so many dear family and friends to dementia, cancer, heart disease, accidents and medical complications and there was never a damn thing I could do about it. “Helpless” is not a mode I play well on. So maybe giving something of myself, literally, seems to be the only thing that feels like a tangible help.
Sadly, it’s been years since I discovered that the blood bank was serious about their weight limit. And that none of my friends were willing to go along with an illicit donation – they don’t actually weigh you, after all. Apparently friends think that giving that much blood for my body weight would be a problem. Even arguing that some blood draws ordered by the doctor took at least half a pint or more didn’t convince anyone and PiC would just give me The Look. I remain unconvinced that it would be a problem. “What’s the worst that could happen?” occurs to me but I’m not totally willing to risk it alone in case I do pass out… or whatever.
Blood donation drives: the one time my weight makes me feel totally worthless. Dammit.
Then I got to thinking that…
Be the Match blood marrow donations would be a Good Thing: no weight requirement and Asian donors are lacking in the registry. Let me try to Be A Match!
But guess what? Too defective for that. ><
It feels like I’m standing outside banging on the window of society. Hullooo! Have I got today’s leprosy? Grump.
Mid-month I finally decided it was time to chop off the hair.
Tired of sitting on it, and tired of shedding a mini-me every day, I crowdsourced my new style and headed off to the salon.
@PhysicistLisa asked if I meant to donate it since I mentioned a specific length. Ah-ha! Yes indeed! It was quite long enough for that! And I never dye my hair or anything so it’s in good shape. WHEE. Even the shortest layers were about 8 inches, the longest layers measured 12 inches. And that was with the lady cutting a less generous length because she didn’t believe how short I wanted to go.
All that was left was to decide where to send it. I hadn’t made time to research the various possible organizations when this lovely post from A Practical Wedding’s team popped up: Pantene Beautiful Lengths it is!
They only accept the hair they can use with clear instructions on what that is, they give the wigs away to cancer patients and they don’t sell your hair. This is important to me.
The donation lifts a pall over my heart. I haven’t had short hair since I lived with and helped my parents directly, since I still had a mom, our last time together was when it was long, at the courthouse. Cutting it, though I’ve never been attached to hair for appearances’ sake, was a reminder of all this. But this feels right.
And since my recent changes in banking yielded a new set of checks sent in a plastic envelope actually intended for reuse, the stars were clearly aligned. The envelope’s packed, addressed and ready to mail. I’m excited. I’m finally good for something. 🙂
Can you donate blood? Are you registered for the marrow registry? (Or can you be?) Would you donate your hair if it was long enough?
April 16, 2010
It only took, oh, 15 years and 7 months to get myself back into gaming. Not only could I not justify the cost of a new game system, I then couldn’t bring myself to spend money on games.
Thanks to generous early adopter friends, I have an awesome new-to-me Nintendo DS, and San Diego mom gave me games for Christmas. But it turns out that my latest pasttime, being a PF blogger, has ruined me for gaming.
Y’see, the game I’m playing is Ninjatown which is a hilariously cute game based on Shawnimals. It’s a simple tower defense game: you versus a bunch of baddies. The Goal: don’t let them cross the bridge/eat the bridge/otherwise touch the bridge. Defense is accomplished by spending Ninja Cookies to buy and build Ninja Huts which each contain two defenders of varying strengths and skills who deploy to fight the invading hordes.
Personal finance makes me fail on three levels….
Spending
You start every level with a set number of cookies. You have to spend them to build your defenses. As you play through the level, each enemy is worth another 5 or so cookies, and as you earn them you should be spending them to build more, upgrade more, and generally make your defenses more awesome. My first dozen rounds I kept dying because I wanted to save my cookies, not spend them!
No Saving
You can’t save your cookies from level to level, either! They all have to be spent within that level to win because it mocks you mercilessly if you lose. And you get graded, on top of the mockery, so not only do you get scored on how many cookies you earned, you’re judged by how well you used those cookies but not how many cookies you saved! What kind of lesson is that to be teaching kids these days???
Depreciation/resale
You can actually sell your huts and towers if you want to …… at a loss. Which is, in this economy, totally true to life, but it also means that I refuse to sell anything, ever. Even if I placed it poorly, even if my shoulder spazzed out and put it completely in the wrong place and it’s totally ruined my strategy, I refuse to sell it at a loss. Because in real life, I’m a buy and hold investor. If I bought real estate as an investment, I would expect to be in it for the long term and get a renter in there to defray costs, etc. Selling at a loss would be my last resort. In a ten minute game, you don’t have time to buy and hold or reach the last resort.
Clearly I have trouble with suspending disbelief to immerse myself in video games, but at least that means I bring one important skill to the table: TENACITY. I don’t care how many times I get the “You seem to be having trouble defending this area [snerk], would you like to play in Easy Mode [snicker]?”
NO. I will not wuss out and play Easy Mode. I’m defending Ninjatown in Regular Mode because there IS no Easy Mode in real life!
March 22, 2010
“Finite means, and deciding how to spend them, has a delicious tension that infinite means can’t supply.”
– From Carla Power’s The Pleasure of Pinching Pennies on Oprah.com
I can’t tell you know much I love that sentiment. The paragraph continues …
“If the lamp’s genie had granted Aladdin limitless wishes instead of just three, where would the fun be in that? The link between thrift and being fully engaged with life’s possibilities was recently noted by Barbra Streisand, of all people. Back before she got famous, she had to stretch her $45 clerk’s salary all week. “Those were amazing times,” she told a talk-show host, “when you have your future ahead of you, and the challenges of making that $45 last, and appreciating every penny.
Spoken like a true multimillionairess, you may scoff. The glamour of making ends meet frays pretty fast when you’re worried about losing your house or going without health benefits. There’s thrift, and then there’s fear, and nobody should confuse the two. But for those fortunate enough not to want for basics, there is a glorious discipline in trying to stretch your money to fit your vision of the world. Like a good workout, or great sex, weighing up how you spend your money recenters you, allowing you to feel the reach and heft of yourself moving through the world.”
The distinction made here between thrift and penury is critical — there was absolutely nothing fun about working 80 hours a week, trying to make decent grades in college, all the while wondering if I was going to bring home enough to pay both the rent and utility bills. There was nothing glamorous about dropping silent tears over my checkbook, willing the numbers to match up and stay in the black.
But years after that was over, when I graduated and started making a little more money, I made choices for myself. I started to appreciate what was truly important and why they meant more to me than eating out or buying Stuff. My parents’ choices made more sense: buying used clothes; handing clothes down through four cousins; only allowing me to borrow, not buy, books; and helping displaced family with comparative luxuries like take-out food, money and shelter. It took some years before I realized that they were making perfectly acceptable sacrifices for their kids to provide basic necessities to our extended family.
When you have just enough to get by, your choices are your values. Your lifestyle brings out the grit and creativity that usually hides deep in your bones.
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My post on buying a car (should I or shun’t I?) was included in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance! ’twas rough times out there, the Carnival is overrun by the classic ninja vs. pirates vs. nuns vs. fighting robots vs. real estate agents vs. zombies!
December 18, 2008
The weather caused the cancellation of dinner with my friends last night, and delayed the delivery of my new gadget by a day. Rats!
I was so looking forward to opening up that box tonight, but it’s probably for the best that it won’t be delivered until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that there are more productive things I should be doing tonight that don’t include endlessly playing with a pretty new computer.
I’m glad the weather’s back to bright skies, though still frigidly-cold, because my friends up in the desert have been snowed in since yesterday. She scared me when she told me about their driving home from dinner. They were sliding all over the road, and had to help dig out three neighbors when they finally arrived at her sister’s house, as well as the ambulance and the fire truck that got stuck in a drift. They had to dig out a fire truck. That’s just wrong. And weird. And for all of you cold weather dwellers out there laughing at me, laugh away. A foot of snow + SoCal drivers who forget how to drive in rain = freaks me out.
July 16, 2008
*arms raised in victory* I have reached my first milestone: my first hundred dollars earned for my House Down Payment Fund! The money hasn’t quite reached my account yet, so I’m pre-celebrating but I’m really really excited. These haven’t been easy months, and it’s so nice to be able to have reached one goal without sacrificing another one.
It actually feels like I’ve made progress despite all the other obstacles in way, nibbling away bits and edges of my salary, and that’s always good for morale around here.
The next hundred will now be cycled to my Travel Fund, and the next fifty after that will be for the Suit/Clothing Fund. I might add a Laptop Fund, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, and I don’t want to dilute this source too much. Obviously, as Blunt Money just pointed out, saving IS addicting.
