Self-inflicted poverty

I have never had this little money. In the past I have always had some savings to rely on. I think that was a combination of all the Christmas and Birthday money that I had gotten from relatives from a young age, plus the money a made working full-time and not paying rent for a summer before I started college. The fact that I didn't until recently develop a habit of buying things very often helped out too. Leaving Beijing in June, I had thought that all the money I had managed to save that year (a good deal, I think) would work out pretty well for me. Not well enough, I guess. This whole post is a bit untrue, though. I am not, and likely never will be, poor like a young family that can't make ends meet and sees no future. I am not poor like a woman or a man in *pick your favorite developing country here* who will die with little more (or less) than he or she was born with, with a life of pain and struggle in the middle. As a smart and adaptable individual I have great potential to earn money. I just wish I could borrow a couple of thousand from the financially stable 40-year-old Joe to help the 23-year-old Joe.

It isn't like I can legitimately whine or complain about having hardly any money left (about $250, plus debts). After all, if I hadn't been so loose with my money while in Beijing buying things that I didn't really need, spending more on food than I had to, and even buying meals for friends, than I would have more now. Of course, I view my financial choices during the summer as having a greater impact, since I had a good amount of money when I finished working in Beijing. I choice to attend Isa's wedding in Spain. It cost me a lot, but I am very glad that I did it. Not only was it a great experience for me culturally (as a newcomer to Spain), it also helped to cement my friendship to Isa. We really didn't have to be friends. We were just acquaintances at Kalamazoo. But when she came to visit Kalamazoo (during the summer of 2008, was it?) I happened to be there, and I was so happy to have her come that I went to pick her up at the train station. From there we chatted every now and then online, but when I went to Chicago (for my Chinese visa) in 2010 I stayed on her couch. We watched her favorite show, I met her boyfriend, and we gossiped and exchanged life updates. I feel that we grew much closer. Julie would say "bosom friends," but I would just say "someone I love and trust." While I was in China she gave me the news that she was engaged, and I knew that I wanted to attend her wedding.

Aside from that there was the cost of the time I spent in Madrid, and the cost of spending time in Berlin to visit an old, dear, close friend who lived there. She was probably one of my oldest, dearest, and closest, actually. The price of attending the European Juggling Convention in Munich, much of which (food) I hadn't foreseen, also helped deplete my funds.

None of these were things that I had to do, but were choices that I consciously made, without considering how much they would cost me, both financial and (Berlin especially) in terms of emotional energy and friendship/personal relationships. I made the financially sound decision to spend the remaining part of summer on a WWOOF farm in Spain, managing to spend no more than a few dozen euro during the entire month. That was more than offset by the cost for me to fly back to the U.S. in order to claim my visa to work in Spain, that round-trip flight being the most expensive visa regulation that I have encountered to date. Certainly if I had arranged my schedule differently(such as not attending the wedding, or not visiting Germany) then I could have avoided that cost, but these were things that were important to me: attending the wedding of a close friend, seeing a best friend that I hadn't seen in nearly two years, and attending the biggest juggling convention on the planet, were things that I prioritized, and I am (for the most part) still glad that I made the general choices I did, although f I did I would go back and tweak a few things (aka: still attend the events, just be more frugal).

I certainly gained things from my summer too, experiences and memories, new juggling friends, stories to tell, a few words of German and somewhat improved Spanish, boasting rights for having spent a summer romping around Europe... I just didn't gain anything that I can exchange for food at the grocery store or give to a landlord for rent.

So I (am trying to) live simply again. For food: potatoes, pasta, and rice. When I saw a 3kilo sack of potatoes for less then 0.5 euro per kilo I snapped that right up. Anything that is more than two euros per kilo is just out of the question, which means that meat and butter are not on the grocery list. Shampoo? Not necessary, I have water. Towel? Not necessary, I have air. Reminds me a little of some weekends in high school when I just had one or two bowls of ramen and nothing more in an effort to save money. In college some people told me that they liked ramen, but I found it impossible to like it after that experience. For entertainment: my roommate has a wifi network, and the local library does too. I have spend a lot of time at the library so far, reading and researching online, studying just a little bit of a new language (Russian!), and slowly hacking away at my to-do-list that I have accumulated. Thank god entertainment, learning material, and most of the things I want to read online are still free.

I'll be trying to get more work here, so I can earn more money. I have to earn more than enough to live on, both to pay off my debts (which increased substantially this summer; the only thing keeping me from complete bankruptcy), and to save up for an airplane ticket to get me out of here once this small chapter of my life finishes. Maybe I will stay in Spain for a second year, but there is no way that I will stay in a city this small in Spain for a second year.