Man’s search for meaning Part 2: Plant your garden

The Penny-Arcade guys are awesome.  They started out as a couple of dudes with a web-comic.  They’ve taken that web-comic and their fame and channeled it for something much bigger.  Yes, they run conventions, but more impressively, they started an awesome charity called Childs Play.

This charity, aimed at showing that video games are not evil incarnate, and that gamers can do good, connects children’s hospitals with games, books, toys, and other resources to help sick children keep their minds off their illnesses.  Donations started small– one hospital and the PA guys’ garages as storage facilities, and they made deliveries themselves.  Now they’ve ratcheted up into a large non-profit that connects with and ships directly to hospitals.

You can donate here.

And now for some negative griping.

Compare the PA guys to the onanistic navel-gazing you see from other movements.  The minimalists.  The travel the world folks.  The motivationalists.  [Note:  we are not saying that all minimalists, world-travelers, self-helpers etc. are onanistic con-artists, but you know they exist.]

The Penny Arcade dudes are real.  They have authenticity.

So much of that motivational crap seems so hollow and insincere, aimed just at making money off other people.

For the most part, they’re not actually doing anything.

The P-A guys, OTOH, are teh awesome.

And that, perhaps, is why I don’t expect them to get mid-life crises.  When you’re busy doing things that are real, you don’t have time to feel like life is meaningless.

also:  I like the word onanistic

Man’s search for meaning: Part 1, in which we do not understand

I was recently talking with someone wealthy and somewhat famous (on the internet).  He mentioned that since he’s become wealthy he’s been searching for meaning.  I was all, dude, I’ve noticed.  Not really into that.

We are from the midwest.  That means we are pragmatists.  We generally keep our navels covered so we don’t spend much time looking at them.  I thought that, but didn’t say it.  We do things because they’re The Right Thing to Do.  Not because of some grand purpose or passion or destiny or whatever.

Back when I had a ton of free time (see:  K-8), I would sit around in the back yard and analytically ponder the meaning of life.  I decided that the only true meaning of life was that of reproduction.  We were put on earth to reproduce.  I thought as a species that we had done (more than) a fine job of doing that, and we were at a point at which the human race would be fine and people could make their own decisions about reproduction using their rational minds.  (This was before I figured out what made boys so interesting and got the urge to go through the motions of reproduction without actually, you know, reproducing.  Er hem.)

Given that our main duty in life was being taken care of by the race as a whole, that allowed us to pursue other purposes.  I decided that I liked hedonism as a guiding philosophy and I would do the things I liked.  Being from the midwest, of course, I also had a large lump of responsibility.  So to quote the Wicca, “An it hurts no one, do what you will.”

I’m pretty sure I haven’t really thought about my purpose since.  Maybe at 3am in a college dorm hallway, but I probably just related the story above.  I have generally had better things to do and think about (like how sexy my partner is!).

I do, however, sometimes wonder why some people spend so much time on the question.  I sort of understand the self-help gurus– they like to separate desperately unhappy people with money from some of that money.  It’s the unhappy people who have no real reason to be unhappy that I just don’t get.  If it’s chemical, then why aren’t they searching for solutions in a doctor’s office?  If it isn’t chemical, then why are they allowing themselves to be unhappy just because they can’t find their “purpose” in life.  Whatever that means.  It seems like pondering the question just creates more angst.  So why not stop worrying about finding meaning in life and, you know, live life instead?

But, as I said earlier, we’re from the midwest.  We are incapable of understanding this coastal melancholia.  Perhaps that means we’re somehow incomplete or there’s something wrong with us.  But you know, pondering that question might make us sad for no purpose at all, so why ponder it?  If a person has that kind of free-time, that’s why God invented the modern novel.  (Or Cervantes invented it, depending on your view.)

*Some women search for meaning too, but we’re mostly too busy.  Second shift and mental load, dontcha know.

Do you spend a lot of time searching for meaning?  Do you think doing so affects people’s happiness levels?  Do you think this is something mainly done on the coasts (particularly the West Coast), and if so, why are there regional differences?

Why do I do this to myself? A research rant!

Why do I put projects down and not pick them up forever?

I spend so much fricking time trying to figure out what I was doing a year, two years, five years ago.

A lot of this is my coauthors’ fault.  I hate nagging and other coauthors don’t, so I’m often low on the queue.  And sometimes there will be something they have to do that I can’t do.  And months will pass.

But… that doesn’t explain why I do this to myself on single-authored papers too.

And I always swear to myself that this time I will leave myself better notes.  More complete files with better comments.   Ugh.  Unfortunately whatever it was that caused me to put something down often keeps me from putting it away neatly too.

One benefit of having to figure out what the heck it was I was doing– I often find mistakes.  But really, I’d prefer to find those mistakes in a faster way.

#2 chimes in:

Cripes, I do that too!  I have so many things that are around 85% done.  All the hard part is done!  If I just put in a few hours, fewer than 10, I can send this stuff out for publication by the end of this month.  But yet, I don’t do it!

There are various reasons for this.  Sometimes, I stall out when I don’t know what to do next.  Instead of asking for help like a reasonable being, I try to pretend nothing’s wrong.  I have some fear that the project somehow isn’t right, in some way (not rigorous enough?  stats not correct?), and that reviewers will, I don’t know, laugh at me.  This is silly because peer review, whether through a journal submission or  just asking colleagues for informal feedback, will catch existing problems and make the paper better.  Maybe those problems aren’t even there and I’m just imagining them!

Maybe I have a fear of success.  If this article is great, I have to keep producing great things!  What if the next one isn’t as good, or I can’t get the next one done?  I better hold on to this one in case I need a submission for next year.  (??!!?!?!?!?)

Sometimes, I get distracted.  For example, I have to get my RAs started on data collection for the next project, and that takes a lot of time and energy, and I don’t make it a priority to finish writing the previous paper.  I’m dumb like that.

Sometimes, it’s just hard work and I’m tired.  In my head, I have found great results and know what they mean.  Or found not-great results and I’m already working on a follow-up study that fixes this one’s limitations.  Taking the extra time to explain complex results for an audience can be tedious.

Sometimes, I can’t face the thought of all the work still to come.  I can submit for publication and forget about the paper for a while… yay!  But then I might get a revise-and-resubmit, and have to do YET MORE work on this project that I am mentally done with, and that would be tedious.  Or I could not do the revisions, and send it somewhere else.  This works a surprising number of times.

On the upside: A pre-tenure push to clear the backlog has really paid off for me.  But I need to try not to get such a backlog in the first place.

Grumpy readers, please smack us upside the head and tell us to stop being dorks, ok?  Also, send cookies. (Do you do this kind of stuff too?)

Ask the Grumpies: Should I stay or should I go now?

Pessimistic grad student sent a question to us, to Wandering Scientist, and to Isis-the-scientist.   We’re curious to see their responses!  (And we’ve bumped this week’s Google questions to next week– sorry!)

She asks:

I’m a female PhD student in a natural science.  I originally entered graduate school because I wanted to teach and conduct research.  I knew the job market wasn’t great, and that women still had mountains to climb, but it seemed scalable.  Now, the further along I get, the more insurmountable the challenges appear to be.

I’m also frustrated that gender/ motherhood still seem to hold so much sway in career prospects:  women receive about half the PhDs, but rapidly drop off in the postdoc ranks and have a low representation in tenure track jobs (the well-referenced leaky pipeline).  Part of me wants to pursue academia and fight the good fight at a liberal arts college (not R01) type school and not contribute to that leaky pipeline.  The other part is more jaded—with such low job availability (and even if you land a job, terrible grant odds), it seems like the more realistic and practical option is to pursue a non-academic path—either after a postdoc, or just dispensing with the post-doc altogether—instead of 5+ years of frequent moves/ low job security/ lack of guaranteed retirement benefits/ maternity leave.  The other factor is that non-academic jobs may offer better ‘balance’, and be more portable.   I’m also trying to balance the desire to be close to my spouse—I draw the line at long term long distance, after doing it before—and my desire to have kids sooner rather than later.

Non-academic jobs for my skill set tend to involve government work (also less hiring these days) or non-profits—there isn’t really a traditional industry option in my area (without extensive retraining), otherwise I’d love to consider it.  I could potentially also look at teaching only (community college or non-tenure track lectureship) jobs if I avoided the adjuncting dead-end.

I’m conflicted.  I’ve planned to pursue academia since high school (!), with no deviations along the way.  Abandoning that career path feels like giving up on a dream.  I also don’t want to give up before I’ve really started, particularly with the ‘lean in’ mindset of Sheryl Sandberg and others.  However, I’ve met enough older, jaded post-docs, with no career prospects in sight (at a very highly ranked department) to make me wary of following their footsteps.

The most logical step is likely to reconsider my direction after a post-doc.  But, I’m finding that my pessimism is harming my enthusiasm for my work, and I’m wondering if that’s a sign I should strike out in a different direction sooner rather than later.

Well, we’re social scientists and the job market is better for us.  We have met folks with your exact same story (minus the being female part)… in graduate school to get a social science PhD after ditching natural science graduate school, and another with a degree in physics from a top school who was doing RA work for an economist after he graduated.  Several schools have masters programs in which they train scientists to become finance people who can work on Wall Street.

We might have a post up next week titled, “Academia is just a job”… it’s almost finished but we haven’t gotten around to finishing and queuing for the week.  But it is true.  Academia is just a job.  The PhD is a certificate that you need in order to do certain kinds of jobs or to get a certain salary scale (for instance, in gov’t work).

It is true that it’s a job that has nice perks, like flexibility, academic freedom, tenure, working with other PhDs, and so on.  But it also has downsides– you don’t get to choose where you live, lower salaries, the tenure clock can be harsh, you may not like those other PhDs you’re tenured with and see all the time, and so on.

Still it is just a job.   Even after we have tenure, we may not stay as professors forever.  The siren call of Northern California is always in the background, singing to us of its weather and food and natural beauty.  Not to mention all of our other friends from high school and a few from college.  (Oh, and also the $.  But that’s kind of balanced out by the cost of living.)

I really like academia, but when I started I said that I would not make any major sacrifices in my life just for the sake of a job.  Because I would feel bad both not getting tenure if I’d made those sacrifices and if I got tenure having made those sacrifices.  In each case I’d feel better off seeing if I could have done the same thing without the sacrifices.  That’s not the same as leaning in– I figured I’d try for both tenure and a family and if it didn’t happen, well, I’m a smart, educated, skilled, person whose abilities are worth far more in industry than they are in academia. And so long as I enjoy the journey, it doesn’t really matter if I make it to the prescribed destination.

I do not think that industry offers better hours than academia.  Both industry and academia will try to take as many hours as you let them take.  You have to set limits for yourself– at some point the job no longer becomes worth it if you kill yourself to do it.  Cloud also talks about how you start screwing stuff up if you work too many hours.

I’m also not sure that fixing the leaky pipeline for a field that has too many phds and not enough jobs for them is the best use of your woman-power.  There’s still plenty of trail-blazing to do outside of academia as well.

My advice… figure out what you want to be doing next year.  Are you interested in the projects you’ll be working on?  Do you have other opportunities you’d like to compare?  Think about several different 2-5 year plans.  Make your fertility decisions separate from your employment decisions (there are a few cases in which you would want to combine the decision, but not with most civilian employment).  Save up enough money that you have an “FU fund” to turn employment risks into calculated employment risks.

And remember, even if you’re in theoretical physics, you can always make a ton of money working in finance.  Yes, there’s retraining, but it isn’t as much as you think.  That PhD taught you how to learn.

Grumpy Nation, if you haven’t already given your wisdom elsewhere, how about sharing it here?

I had a midlife crisis in class today

There comes a point in a young professor’s life when nobody in the class gets her jokes anymore.

So today, I made the off-handed comment, “Not only am I the hairclub president, but I’m also a client!”

Student 1:  Wait?  You’re the president of a hairclub?

Student 2:  Huh?  Obama uses rogaine?

Student 3:  I think she means the college president.

So after my little mid-life crisis, I pulled up the commercial on Youtube so they wouldn’t think I was too crazy.  They made fun of the cheesy 90s music.  “This commercial is sooo 90s, ” student 4 proclaimed.

That made me feel even older.

The new assistant prof told us over lunch the other day that she had a nightmare that her students were laughing at her.   A more senior associate and I told her that our students laugh at us all the time, and sometimes even when we intend them to.  I also pointed out that I read somewhere that they’re more likely to remember material when there’s humor.  So that’s good, even if the humor was unintentional.

So my joke didn’t go over the way I planned today, but they did get a hearty laugh out of my mid-life crisis.  Hopefully that will help them remember non-linear functions.

Help me feel better!  Do you have any interesting stories to share about feeling old or people just not getting your jokes anymore?

More on jealousy

#1 : I think imma have to stop reading Suzie’s blog for a bit. Her son is finishing his PhD and getting tons of offers from great schools in gorgeous locations. Must…. quench…. jealousy… of petroleum engineers….

#2:  you wouldn’t want to be a petroleum engineer

#1: no

#2:  and they have to work, with like, oil companies.

#1 : he was like, Oh mom, what should I do, I have so many places wanting to hire me… I was like, I smash you.

#1: he has an offer at [school in Awesome Wet City]

#2 : don’t be jealous

 #1: why not?

#2: you don’t want to be a petroleum engineer

#1: it’s like, I know exactly why it’s bad to be jealous, and how unfounded it is, and how everyone has problems, yadda yadda, but thinking I shouldn’t be jealous doesn’t stop it.

#2: yeah, but in this specific case

  you don’t actually want to be a petroleum engineer

  you wouldn’t actually trade with this person

 #1: I don’t. But I might want a job offer at [Awesome School].

#2: but not a petroleum engineering job.

I’m afraid you probably wouldn’t get tenure at [Awesome School] in petroleum engineering.  You’d have to do petroleum engineering theory or something (does that exist?)  You would have to be really good at faking it.

  “This theory is so brilliant no one can understand it!”

#1: hahaha

 no, not in petroleum engineering. No petroleum engineering for me.

#2: You have my permission to be jealous of the profs [in your field] at Stanford. That at least makes sense.  While you’re at it, stick to being jealous of the tenured ones

#1: arrrrghgghghghghhhhh

  stanford won’t hire meeeeeeeeeee

#2: no, but at least you want that job more than one in a petroleum engineering dept…

 #1: true

#2: or maybe it’s easier thinking about being jealous of the petroleum engineering department in [Awesome Wet City] because deep down you don’t really want to be a petroleum engineer in [Awesome Wet City]

 #1: true

#2: because if that’s been your goal all along, you’ve made a few really odd choices

 #1: hahaha

Grumpeteers, do you indulge in jealousy?  Do you prefer more realistic targets or less?  Do you feel like you’re being jealous of the right people?  (Or should you aim higher or lower?)  Is there anything that stops it???

I used to only have crazy friends

#2, of course, has mellowed considerably over the years.  :)  [But is no less entertaining!]

When I was younger, I enjoyed being friends with dramatic people.  People who always had crazy things happen to them.  Who thought crazy things.

Crazy people were interesting!  Normal people, not so interesting.

Some of those crazy friendships in the past came to bad ends, and pretty much always for the same underlying reason (at least according to my decade and a half later armchair analysis), whatever the external catalyst.  I have a strong personality and crazy people, even super-popular crazy people, tended to get a little co-dependent on me.  At about the time that I decided they didn’t really need me (my work here is done, fly little birdie) or I got uncomfortable with the situation and I wanted to let go, they would come to that realization as well but wouldn’t see that I wanted to let go too.  So they’d do one of those crazy blow-ups that people do or I’d get the silent treatment that people do when they don’t want to have a crazy blow-up.  (Or, most recently, one let me know that her therapist told her to stop associating with me.)  And I’d cry (because I care and because I feel like I’m in middle school and I wonder what is wrong with me) and move on with my life.

These days I’m old.  After the last incident (the coauthor whose therapist thinks God knows what about me), I said, that’s it, no more crazy friends.  And that was that.  My work is interesting enough that, unlike Matilda, I don’t have to find new ways to keep my super-agile mind occupied anymore.  (Although I did do a geometry proof during a really bad job-talk last week, but I digress.)  My life has been much more peaceful since then, probably because almost all of the drama in my life was vicarious through or directly caused by said crazy ex-friends, and with them gone I didn’t create my own.

The person who started this pattern, a college friend, emails me every few years to apologize for what she did to me back in college.  I always email back saying no worries, great to hear from you, and basically ignoring the crazy part of the email.  And that’s that.  She also put me on a mailing list for her business a few years back (I took myself off multiple times).  I hear from other folks about some of the more major dramas in her life, husband cheating, new husband, a baby (I think), and so on.  I don’t need to know the details.

In college she was surrounded by adoring fans.  She was beautiful and vivacious and popular like a movie-star (and a little bit of a user).  I wonder what must have changed that she feels the need to keep contacting me.  Or if nothing has changed, and she just needs more adoration than most folks have once they leave the institutionalized environments of high school and college.

In any case, I’m about to write my standard, “Great to hear from you… [broad personal and professional updates].”  But nothing more.

Tell us about your friends from the past and what has changed as you’ve gotten older.

Students will drive me out of academia

When I was putting together my tenure binder I had to do the awful thing of reading my student evals, and that was horrid in every way.  And I cried to my partner for hours about it and we worked it out, but the fact is, I still have that job.  I still have the job where, in every class, there is one student who will write inappropriate things that are extremely mean, and I don’t know who that is, so all students are the enemy.  I have the job where a hundred 19-year-olds judge my appearance, and then my boss reads it and it goes in my personnel file. HOW IS THAT OK?!??!?!?

It shouldn’t be.

But that’s how academia is.  19-year olds are going to insult me for the rest of my career and say mean things about my appearance, forever.  And I don’t get to say mean things about them, because I have to be professional and they don’t.

It’s not even necessarily the ones earning bad grades who are writing hurtfully inappropriate anonymous evals.  I mean, it has to be correlated, but it’s not direct, I’m sure.  I suspect some former A students among the worst commenters.

You might say that nobody cares what 19 year olds think except advertisers.  To which I reply, AND THE DEAN, and the provost.  Though maybe they won’t have the time to read my evals anymore after tenure.  Who has that kind of time?

This time around the evals hurt when they shouldn’t have because they picked one thing I was already bothered about and poked it.  ASSHOLES.  Rationally I know they’d just make fun of something else if it weren’t this one thing.

For just that reason, I considered investing in a completely crazy and very weird-looking hat, just so that I would know what they would criticize.  It would be like a hate-catcher.  Except they’d probably say it was cool.  They’re messed up like that.  Goddamn bastards.

I have a job where they get to lash out at me and say whatever they want, and I can’t lash back.

And I’ll probably get to keep this job forever, if I want it.

But I don’t have to read the evals anymore.  Ever again.  (Unless I want to go up for full.  Your eval numbers have to be even higher than for assoc here.)

I can worry about that then.  Stupid @#$%ers.

pout

September Mortgage Update: Changing Plans (Help?)

Last month (August):

Balance: $100,747.56
Years left: 8.5
P = $803.97, I =$410.44, Escrow = 621.66

This month (September):

Balance: $99,268.01
Years left: 8.25
P = $809.78, I =$404.63, Escrow = 621.66

One month’s savings from prepayment:  $2.62

This month I was going to talk about being under 100K and playing with the amortization spreadsheet, explaining exactly how mortgage loans are different than student loans or credit card loans, and go into the details of how student loans and CC loans basically recast automatically, but you have to pay money to recast a mortgage loan.  Instead a modified version of that post will be next month.

The tenure committee voted 7-1 against tenure for DH.  He’s teaching 4 days a week, with a 3/3 load not counting the capstones he is advising, no graders or TAs, and they just switched out his elective with the second introductory course.  (He’s already teaching the 101.  Now he has 101 and a new prep for 102.)  The department is dysfunctional, the students are terrible (though the worst ones flunk out by the time they get to the 300-level courses!).  As a spousal hire, he makes about 20K less than the other folks hired the same year.  And quite a bit less than someone with his degrees and experience and productivity should be making.  I do *like* having his salary, but today we decided we needed his time and happiness more than we needed two years of salary.

So he’s going to withdraw his tenure packet on Monday and leave the university in August 2013.  We don’t know what he’s going to do next.

I still don’t want to go on the market this year– I’d still like to stick around another 2 years.  I have an interdisciplinary project that I would really like to finish and it is a 2 year project.   Though going on the market would be worth a raise of at least one month’s worth of summer salary equivalent, so maybe that’s not reason enough.

So this weekend we sat down with our credit card statements and bank accounts and calculated how much we actually spend each year.  It’s a lot.  (Where does our money go?  Childcare, mortgage, private school, insurance, food, limited but overpriced travel to such exotic places as the rural midwest, medical, auto upkeep.)  Then I added projected childcare expenses for DC2.  Then I calculated my projected take-home pay with projected additional benefits with DH on my plan.

If, once DH leaves his job, we stop prepaying the mortgage and stop putting extra away for retirement, and stop the 529 payments, then our spending is about equal to my take-home pay.  There’s not a lot of wiggle room.  We can recast the mortgage (from 8.25 years back to ~18 years) and that will bring our required monthly expenses down about $530/month (0r ~$6300/year) given our current pre-payment so far.  We also already have a nice emergency fund saved, so it might not be horrible if we didn’t have extra to add to that immediately.

I did a few thought exercises… if we spend $200/week at the grocery store, we would have to stop shopping for almost an entire year to save $10K.  If we assume $100 of eating out per week (I don’t think we actually spend that much), not eating at all would take 33 weeks to save $10K.  We already went through and negotiated on things like insurance and cell phone bills and so on.  It makes more sense to try to make additional money.

My interdisciplinary project has been funded for one year with promise of a second should this year work out.  One of my colleagues who wants me to stay has also added me to a two year grant to replace a colleague who just left for greener pastures.  If these work out then I’ll have two months of summer money for two summers.  I have an additional two grants awaiting word from the government, one of which may actually get funded, though only for a year.  Pubs are light this year, but grant applications were heavy!

DH is also worth a lot more than what he’s been paid.  But I want him to be happy more than I want him to be a wage slave.  He’s a scanner (in Barbara Sher’s terminology) and contract work may be a better fit for him than working locally (unless locally means moving to Northern California), but contract work takes some time to build up into real income.  So I don’t think we can count on him bringing in regular income, at least not right away.

So that leaves us with the question of what to do with DH’s salary this year.

With the two-year plan, we were going to put his additional salary towards the mortgage rather than towards the 457 plan he’d been funding this year.  Then in the second year we were going to put the extra money towards cash in case we have to move.

Now we’re on a one-year plan.  I’m not sure what to do.

(Note:  We’re required to put 12% of our income into a 403(b), the retirement savings I talk about below is on top of that saving.)

DH is going to stop contributing to his 457 plan.  That frees up ~15K.  Some of that money is going to be going to mother’s helpers who are more expensive than daycare will be the following year.

Maybe we should cut off my extra 403b payment as well and/or DH’s, for an additional 16.5K in cash (each), though we’d have to pay some of the retirement money in taxes come tax time.  And what would we do with that cash?  Another year and a half from the mortgage is still more than 5 years remaining (and still only cuts another $50 off a recast monthly payment).  If DH starts making income sooner rather than later, or if I get nice grants, we might regret the decision not to put money away while DH still has access to these tax advantaged funds (though presumably we could figure out a SEP if he did contract work).

The mortgage may not be the best place to put the money.  15K would cut 1.5 years off the mortgage as it currently stands, and after a recast an additional 15K would only cut $50 off each mortgage payment, or $600/year.  Since we have 8.25 years remaining and are going to have to stop any pre-payment to keep up with expenses in August, we can’t pay the mortgage down enough to make a real difference in our monthly payments.

We could even stop the pre-payment on the mortgage we’re already doing.  That’s about $650/month or $7800 for the year.  But where would that go?  Cash?

Cash is still paying nothing, and we’re not sure when we’re going to need to tap into that money, or if we’ll need to tap into it.  I can’t get fired, so our first tier emergency fund generally sits at 2 months of regular expenses (plus whatever we’re saving for the unpaid summer).

I’ve already funded our 2012 IRAs (had to sell some taxable stock because a company was getting acquired), but we could put 10K towards the 2013 IRAs in 2013.  Roth IRAs can be used as emergency funds if you’re willing to take out principal.

We could buy taxable stocks with that money.  We could even undrip dividends in the future.  The risks would be that the stocks could lose rather than gain value before we have to sell in the near future rather than the far future.

Another thing we could do would be to convert taxable stocks we already own into tax-deferred savings.  But then we no longer have that secondary emergency fund.

We don’t know what we’re going to be doing in two years.  On top of that, the uni has messed with sabbaticals so in two years when I’m eligible again I may have to be able to commit to not getting paid even half a salary if I want to take time off.  The timing between applying for a sabbatical at the university (October) and applying for and getting an external fellowship or external teaching assignment (generally March) doesn’t mesh with the new competitive sabbatical process at the uni, so having money I can access would really help with planning, even if I don’t end up needing it in the end.  I suppose I could try to sabbatical at Berkeley or Stanford assuming that DH would get a real job to pay our bills.  Not so easy to get a real job if I sabbatical at say, Michigan.  (#2 is insanely jealous that #1 has already had a sabbatical, and has even the chance of going such awesome places as Stanford or even Michigan.  Sigh.  I am in the wrong field.  Whine over.)

So I don’t know what to do.  Keep money in tax-deferred savings we can’t access, move it to cash where it won’t be making any interest, buy taxable stocks, pre-pay the mortgage?  What we can’t do is get used to having it around and spending it.  I’m really going to miss having that income cushion– the knowledge that if I screw up with money one month I can untap DH’s hidden salary in the future to make up for it.  When your income and your outgo are really close, you don’t have that luxury anymore.  I really liked not having to worry about money and it is difficult to have one’s income cut rather than having it grow each year.  But more difficult having an unhappy DH who has no time to do anything other than teach and do service.

(#2 thinks DH needs to quit sooner rather than later.  Otherwise, I got nuthin’.  Help out, homies! #1 notes that DH is contracted through the year and wants to quit responsibly and we can use the transition time money-wise, so quitting any sooner isn’t really an option.  We did talk about quitting at the semester but he doesn’t want to.)

Any thoughts?

Growing needs

Tiny babies fuss, (murfle, make expressive faces and wiggles,) and cry to communicate, but the communication gets more difficult as their needs grow.  Here’s what seems to be the ticket for us so far (and the order that we check things in… hungry?  wet?  need burping?)

On Day 1, all DC2 needed was milk from a breast and ze was happy.  Ze would fall asleep with a smile, tiny arms wrapped around a ginormous breast.

Day 3, DC2 discovered that wet diapers are uncomfortable.  If a breast didn’t satisfy, check the diaper.

A few days after that, DC2 discovered gas.  Gas problems could be solved eventually by walking, patting, and eventual burps or poops.

Sometime in the second week, DC2 got a bit more existential and came up with two new needs.  The need to direct hir own locomotion, something ze is mostly physically unable to do, which causes a lot of frustration and forces us to be very careful that ze doesn’t just fling hirself from our arms to the floor, and the need not to be bored.  We think these are related.  Initially lights and ceiling fans kept hir from being bored (the trip from the hospital to the car was *amazing* to hir for that reason), but they seem to have lost their initial luster.  It is darned hard to entertain a bright-eyed often awake newborn who is no longer satisfied with the same sights and cannot yet hold onto a toy.  So we do a lot of walking around.  Thank goodness for big sibling, and thank goodness DC2 seems a bit less traumatized by tummy time than DC1 was.  I guess we’ll be going out a lot once I’m fully functional and the two week don’t take the newborn anywhere moritorium has been lifted.  (Also we have a mobile in the mail as DC1′s mobile broke into component parts sometime in the past 5 years.)

I could turn this into an analogy about life-style inflation, but I don’t think it fits.  I think a better analogy is one of ambition.  Needing more than a serving of warm milk can be frustrating because warm milk is easier to obtain than a lot of things.  But having more needs, especially existential needs, can also be a driver for growth.  Ambition can help us do things we never knew existed when we were satisfied with a full tummy.

But still, we’re not looking forward to when DC2 discovers that tummies can be upset by things other than the need to burp or poo.

What evidence do you see of growth and growing needs in your life?  Are you satisfied with being satisfied?