April 7, 2008
Not Starring: Denis Leary.
More than ever, I’m realizing how blessed I am by the generosity of my friends. We all hear people say, “Let me know if you need anything,” knowing that we’re never going to ask them for a helping hand. I know I’ve been guilty of that myself, both in extending vague offers of help with the best of intentions, and accepting the sentiment but never actually taking the gesturers up on it. I’m simply not the girl who waits a knight to ride up on a horse of any color to dramatically save me from my lot in life, and actively discourage any such pretensions from the get-go if I share my “tales of woe.” That’s a pretty big if, since I know that some of my back story easily sounds like a plea for pity or martyr points, and that’s just not the game I play.
It’s a whole different world, however, to have trusted friends who actively enable you to join them and leave your worries behind, or descend upon you as A did to me yesterday, and kidnap you for an entire afternoon of talk and being away from home. Her immediate response to my stressful day was simply beyond price.
A took me to Fuddrucker’s for lunch, my first experience there, and I had an amazing turkey burger with about two inches worth of toppings and condiments. I like my veggies š If you’ve never been there, they have build-it-yourself stations with fresh lettuce, sliced tomatos, sliced onions, diced tomatos and onions, and pickles. There’s another station with all sorts of condiments: ketchup, BBQ sauce, three or four kinds of mustards, etc. We settled in with our massive burgers and had a good long discussion of how things stand at home, and the short talk I had with PaDucky about my need to leave. He was very accepting of that statement, but I don’t know if that’s because he was taken by surprise and didn’t know how to react, or if he simply understands. I can only hope it’s the latter.
Another friend joined our chat, and we had a chance to mull over some of the decisions I’m going to need to make. This won’t happen overnight, or immediately, but it helps to have sounding boards, and it’s a little comforting to know that my decision isn’t completely crazy.
April 5, 2008
Remember my great couple friends? Last week, they invited me to join them this weekend for a play or musical. They’d been getting tickets on the cheap, they’d said, and threw out a $20-ish price range. Even though I’m on a pretty strict spending diet, I’ve never seen Phantom of the Opera, and getting out for a cultural experience for $20 sounded great.
Sadly, the tickets were priced out at $70 yesterday, and I had to decline. I can spare $20, but definitely not $70. Instead of letting me off the hook, Friend C offered to pay the rest of the ticket’s cost. I felt like that was just too much, and I told him so, but he insisted that not only was it not too much, he was perfectly happy to do it. Still, uneasy with his spending that much on me, I told him to think about it and be absolutely sure he was ok with it before buying my ticket.
He called me this morning to let me know that he’d picked up our tickets, and in a little over an hour, we’ll be bound for the Performing Arts Center. I’m really excited, but mostly keep thinking that they’re way too good to me.
June 18, 2007
My friend, she of the recent elopement, has also bitten a bullet recently. Since her wedding, she’s begun to seriously listen to finance advice and become involved in the mystical world of personal finance.
Until now, she’s had the good fortune to be parentally-funded for some portions of school, and living expenses, and self-funded for the rest of her wants and needs (ie: travel, internships, living on her own, etc.) She’s not, now, financially up a creek, but she and her hubby are integrating finances and live on a real live budget which is completely foreign to her. If anything, she used The Force. She could afford to as a young single professional woman. There wasn’t any real need to deny herself, and the alternative was always the terrible example I’d set of working too much, and denying yourself. Yes, you turn into ME. š
Thankfully, her hubby has been budgeting for himself as a member of the military for a good number of years, and has a good savings plan set up so now it’s really a matter of “training” one another. Ok, it’s a matter of training her, but she’s up for the challenge and I introduced her to my pets this weekend: Yodlee and PearBudget. Thanks to GoogleDocs, she’ll be able to share the budgeting tools with her hubby (still currently long distance). My friends are growing up and I’m so proud of them!
June 8, 2007
So it begins. Sure, it started with an unexpected elopement, but real wedding plans are beginning to surface for the first of my dozen closest high school friends. Since we’ve only managed to pair off one pair of friends within the group as a couple to reduce the number of weddings we’re going to have, that’s left 11 weddings on the forseeable horizon. We’ve even plotted out the pairings, assigned prospective years to each couple, and charted the bridesmaid rotations — we’re (organizational) geeks. The goal is to spread out the weddings so we don’t have more than one a year, and so we don’t have to attend a batch of weddings each summer and shiver in the winter cold, broke and sad.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s past time to start saving up for the merry-go-round of wedding gifts and dresses. Or maybe I can get one nice dress to serve as my all purpose wedding-attending dress! Is that too cheap?? š
Seriously, though, these are all close friends so I should expect to spend roughly, on average, $200-600 per wedding, whether it’s for a gift, clothing, travel + lodgings or any combination thereof. A small part of me hopes that almost everyone gets married here in California. While it’d be great fun to attend a wedding in New York, weddings – plural – could be a budgetary disasater. My wallet cringes as I’m sure we won’t be able to cram everyone into a friend’s apartment for free. Two to four freeloaders? That’s fine. 20? Eee…. probably not.