Daily progress: March 18th, 2009

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:45:00 +0000

The first day went well, I think. I felt I had more “energy” than usual, and that I am needing less sleep since I have stopped drinking for the last couple of days, but today I noticed it much more; the novelty here was the 10 minutes or so of exercise in the morning, so that must have been it. Let’s see how sore my body is tomorrow (yes, I’m that much out of shape).

Both lunch and dinner were green salads with bits of ham and cheese, so carbohydrates are low. No breakfast (unless you count a glass of soy milk and coffee) or mid-afternoon meal, but that’s the norm for me, though, as the last post suggests, I will be experimenting with the odd concept of “breakfast” for the next few days. We’ll see how it goes.

No dishes to wash right now, which is always a good thing.

No expenses, either, as I’ve been having lunch at home, and as I work near it, the spending of gas is very low. Unfortunately, I have an itch to buy a bunch of Richard Dawkins DVDs… but I’ll have to wait. And, no, downloading them is not fine. Oh, well, this should all be solved in a few months.

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My baseline, part 4: Money and Wealth

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:34:35 +0000

(Since you may not be reading these posts in order, you may wonder why this post doesn’t focus on career, jobs and so on. That was, in fact, the subject of my previous post.)

Current Status:

Bad. Very bad. And the worst part? It’s all my fault. I have no one to blame but myself.

Even though I have a job, and earn a couple hundred extra euros each month from my websites, and even though I own my home, thanks to the generosity of my late maternal grandfather, which is extremely rare in Portugal for people under their forties (and perhaps fifties), I am still tens of thousands of euros in debt, both to credit companies and to my family (especially my brother and my father). In fact, earlier this week I had to borrow my father more than a thousand euros just to pay this month’s bills and debts… and that was after all my salary was gone for the same reason. While I am more grateful to my father than you can probably imagine, this also fills me with shame; shame because I should be in a much better situation at this time of my life, shame because the reason I’m not is that I’m impulsive, childish, and don’t think things through (not to mention several other reasons), and, perhaps most of all, shame of myself for being a burden to my family, even though I’ve left their home ten years ago.

Currently, the major cause of my permanent lack of money is a loan I took in 2006, when I left work to try to live from blogging and creating sites at home. Everyone at the time told me that I was crazy and that it would never work; that it simply couldn’t be done. They were right and wrong – right because I didn’t succeed (due to my laziness and other reasons I’ve mentioned), wrong because it could be done; just not by me, at that time. Or perhaps it was simply the wrong thing for me. Anyway, the result is that, for the past three years, and for at least two more, about half my salary goes to repaying that loan. It was stupid and impulsive of me; understandable in a way because my job at the time was getting unbearable, but an “adult me” (whom I expect to meet someday) would have simply moved to a more pleasant job, with less stress and more free time, so I could try out blogging and creating sites for money without getting myself into a ridiculous debt.

So now I pay — in every sense of the word — for that childishness.

Another problem I have is a peculiar form of consumerism. It’s not that I just have to “buy things”; however, I do love the sensation of having a “new toy” to play with; mostly video games, but also music CDs, books, movie DVDs, and so on. And for the past few years I’ve been buying them at a rate faster than I can “consume” them; my home is currently full of books I haven’t read, games I’ve only played for minutes, etc. (I haven’t bought music CDs for a while now, and, no, it’s not because I just download them, like most people in Portugal do; as to DVDs, they’re relatively quick to watch after I go to bed, so I don’t have a huge “backlog”).

Due to all of the above, I’m what you could call “penniless”. Oh, certainly, there are many people whose situation is a lot direr than mine; at least I have a roof of my own, and a family that helps me in emergencies. This is not a “poor little me” post, anyway. The point is that I’m inside a “hole”, and I need to climb out of it… which won’t be quick nor easy.

Goals: