Resolutions
Review 11: Your Money or Your Life
24/07/07 22:12 Filed in: Books
The book attacks the concept of money from both the philosophical perspective and the nitty-gritty of saving pennies. One of the core concepts is that money isn’t power or esteem or even time, because you surely cannot swap it back to get more time. Money is a representation of what we have traded our life energy for. That $20 bill represents 4 hours of our lives spent working to earn it. But wait, you say, no one makes $5 an hour. I’m making at least $12 in (insert random job here). Dominguez and Robin push readers to find their real wage after calculating all the time spent getting to and from, dressing and shopping for work clothes, bitching about work after work, decompressing and taking escape holidays and THEN subtracting all of the costs of work, from expensive lunches and drinks from the pop machine to part of the cost of maintaining your car and having a nice office outfit.
The results are pretty shocking. I felt pretty good at making over $20 an hour at Aeon, but that wage was cut down to $8 when I factored in all of the extra work I did and the expenses of going there. This piece of information is critical because it lets one see exactly what you are selling yourself for. And, as an extension of that, knowing that a $40 night on the town actually cost me 5 hours, not 2, at a job that I wasn’t ecstatic about, makes the purse-strings tighten up considerable.
The other angle of the book, now that the reader is feeling somewhat miserable about how cheaply they are prostituting themselves out to company X, is to show how we can all live on much, much less money. So much, in fact, that some of his example people started earning more money by quitting their expensive jobs and working closer to home or doing all those expensive things we pay others to do for us. The authors take the reader through several ways to account for every single penny and then to look at how she feels about spending 30 hours of the month on a shoe habit or on boozing. From that feeling, frugality is internalized, not by unrealistic, external spreadsheet budgets that are as easy to break, but by a shift in values. So while that doughnut habit of mine is becoming less attractive, I don’t feel bad about spending $150 a month eating out with friends because that’s a really important way for me to enjoy both good company and great japanese food. Spending money on books is foolish because I currently have more books that I can possibly read in the next year. Spending more money on dates and girls is an absolute necessity if I want to actually get a girlfriend, and I value such a notion as getting laid here and there. Essentially, the authors are aiming at the idea of enough. True fulfillment is at that tipping point where less would leave you wanting and more wouldn’t matter - it is up to us to take a long look at how we spend our money and see what is enough and what is too much.
While some may feel this is all just stingy penny-pinching, it is, in my view, an affirmation of life and its transience. If I have to work to earn money to live, I am going to put that money to its best use, towards the best kind of life. For a guy who used to say that money was evil and soul-sucking, this book has really changed how I earn and spend money, how I spend my life. Highly recommended.
Review 10: The Soccer War: Ryszard Kapuscinski
03/07/07 10:22 Filed in: Books
--Remarking that the most pivotal writers in several stages of my life have been K writers -- Kipling as a child, Kazantzakis in university, and now it seems, Kerouac and Kapuscinski.
--Starting with the current assault on reporting and investigative journalism as newspapers become merely parts of media empires trying to make a buck.
--Pointing out weird synchronicity - as I sat drinking tea in Kyoto, learning about Kapuscinski and his life for the first time, he lay dying in Poland, his Africa battered body to succumb that day.
Kipling, Kazantzakis, Kerouac (to an extent) and Kapuscinski all share something other than a letter - each writer is an explorer and evokes a sense of wonder for the places they trace. Kipling, my favourite childhood writer, was an Englishman born in Bombay, and most of his life’s work deal with the strange and fantastic, the jungle and Indian culture (the Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim being the most famous).
Kazantzakis, my favourite writer period, wrote the ur-voyage poem - over the course of 12 years he penned a sequel to The Odyssey that is twice the length of The Iliad and the Odyssey combined, all in verse. The poem (which I am still reading, but nearly finished) follows Odysseus’s journey to the ends of the world and the philosophical limit of human being, transcending vice and virtue, God and hope.
Kerouac is another famous traveller - both geographically and psychedelically. Although I have only read On the Road, I enjoyed his pursuit of something elusive across the American landscape and the new cultural ground the beats were breaking.
And then there is Kapuscinski. Investigative journalism ain’t what it used to be, as large newspapers shed subscriptions left and right while the successor to print media, so-called citizen journalism on the net, often merely amounts to armchair commentary on what has been read in the Associated Press. But Kapuscinski! In the 1960s and early 1970s he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency under communism. So, if Poland wanted it’s own reporting, rather than buying it from another country, Kapuscinski was the man. You may see on the news — “and now let’s turn to our London correspondent”. Kapuscinski covered Africa. All of it. Not only that, but his book, The Soccer War, is a refreshing take on journalism: while Western journalism strives for objectivity, apparently the tone of Eastern Europe is more personal and more poetic license is permitted. Kapuscinski has been criticized for taking poetic license but that same license to bend facts creates a better sense of narrative and moreover, allows poetry to enter into the otherwise dry reportage of conflict in the faceless continent of Africa.
After reading The Soccer War, I couldn’t believe that the bleachblond bimbos and this crazy Pole are in the same field of work. The various chapters cover a handful of the 25 different coups, wars or revolutions that he was present for. He shows you the bars of Leopoldville in Congo where Lumumba first spoke, the foreigners’ hotel stormed by gangs of furious men after Lumumba’s assassination, the airplane from the UN whisking them into the apparent safety of Burundi, the jail cell and deadline to execution he faced when he arrived there. Kapuscinski crosses the road that no white man could cross, beaten, robbed, doused in benzene and nearly immolated. He crawls along the uncertain border between Honduras and El Salvador with a soldier that only wants to take boots off of corpses back to his family.
All of his episodes stun the reader at both the barbarity of man and the insanity of the author, driven to go where the action is and avoid life behind a desk at all costs. Most importantly, they helped put a face and character to the vastly diverse nations of Africa, and did so far better than the latest report on Sudan.