Ruminations on $

Three months of working life have forced me to confront and challenge my perceptions of money. Whereas in school I only had to verbalise my belief, in the real world I have had to fight and defend it. What had slipped so easily off the tongue has turned out to be incredibly difficult to uphold.

The power of money lies in its ability to become almost everything. If you have enough of it, it can become a Ferrari, or a jet plane, or a house by the beach. And because money is the only quantifiable measure of the unseen qualities of objects, experiences, and even people, it becomes the de facto barometer of value.

With that power comes the ability to define. We can omit every single detail and let the price tag do the describing for us. A million-dollar car. A two-dollar shirt. Both need no further adjective for our minds to be filled with a fairly accurate idea of the object.

But the weakness of money lies wholly in the almost. I’ll leave it to all the happiness studies and famous quotes and well-worn cliches out there to flesh out the point that money cannot buy everything (a cliche in itself).

And so I stand behind my belief that money is but scraps of paper; it is spending power to buy the things that are not really important.

I guess the hard part wasn’t defining money for what it is. The hard part was - and still is - preventing it from defining me.

<3

 

On a random day in August, my true love gave to me:

 

Three loving postcards;

Two packs of goodies;

One matching pillowcase;

 

and I’ve never been so happy.

家

A blog entry is like a photograph in words. It is a snapshot of life in one particular moment, a freeze-frame of one’s mind in a point in life. It is said that reading without understanding is like eating without digesting; perhaps the same may be said about living without putting each significant event down into black and white. And that is what motivates this entry.

Living with my boss has made me understand not just the lifestyle of a businessman, but also a man with a family (he has two toddlers). From the crying at night to the trips to the hospital to the cuddling and kissing and laughing, I realise the sacrifices that a parent must bear. Seeing parent and child, and being a person in between the two stages, I am flooded simultaneously with memories past and dreams of the future.

The paradox of wanting to both rewind and fast-forward is a strange one. But had I the power to choose I would choose the former, and give up everything I did right for the chance to correct everything I did wrong, to the people I care most about.

A breather

Am blogging this from the study room in my boss’ house; have managed to finish my tasks for the day early and so am taking full advantage of my break to sit down and write down something longer than three sentences for a change.

It seems so long ago that I stepped out of the exam hall feeling lighter than I’d ever felt in the preceding months to the final exams. The feeling of liberation then is truly unforgettable, but now it seems so stale, like a yellowed photograph from a time long past.

It has actually only been two weeks since I began working full-time at Luzerne, staying over at the MD’s place learning the ropes, commuting up and down the UK meeting clients and business partners. (I’ve driven more than 2,000 miles since passing my driving test last month).

Now I really am lighter, from the 17-hour days, the skipped meals, and from carrying all those cartons of heavy chinaware to and fro. Mentally it has been even tougher, knowing that JY was in faraway Coventry and my friends were living it up celebrating the end of exams, while I worked alone in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. But at the same time, I have never felt so alive, doing real work, learning real things, and earning real money.

From making coffee for clients (I’ve made at least 30-odd cups), to delivering product samples, to stock-taking an entire storeroom, to creating invoices, to planning shipment loads, to creating marketing leaflets, I now have a faint idea of what lies under the umbrella of “doing business”. For that alone, the sacrifice has been worth it.

Chopsticks by Amnesty International

I’m a big fan of Amnesty’s marketing, but I don’t get the concept behind this one: What do pencils disguised as chopsticks have to do with torture by the Chinese government? It seems to me that all it does is perpetuate the stereotype that chopsticks = Chinese.