Fire
Joined: May 31st, '09, 14:54
Posts: 5729
Hugs: 111453
|
|
|
Kit: My oh my! That is expensive!  Where was he traveling, and how was he doing it, for it to be that much?!?
We're living on a little less than a grand a month while traveling. When we were living in Mass, we were on 1,200. So we're actually saving money by traveling... 
Granted, we travel cheaply. We buy tickets in advance, and take less-than-optimal flights for cheaper rates (it took us five full days, and fourteen modes of transpiration, to get from Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica to Sant'Angelo di Brolo, Sicily), we NEVER do hotels (we either stay in privates at hostels with kitchen access, or do month-long airbnbs to get the half-off rate, or do dorms), we make all of our own food instead of going to restaurants, we use public transpiration instead of renting a car or taking taxis, and we don't go on guided tours and save our excursions for hikes and museums and cathedrals/temples/palaces. But there's totally a way to travel cheaply! We've done it on 3 continents so far (Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Central America, North America) and are on our way to Eastern Europe next, in 7 countries. It takes a lot more research, it's a lot less luxurious and seamless (14 hour night buses throughout the Vietnamese countryside where the lights get turned on and off every hour, and you are shaken awake by a man who doesn't speak your language to tell you its your stop when it's pitch black outside and you're dropped in the middle of rice fields as the sun rises multiple kilometers from town, with all of your bags, got old REALLY quick), and it requires a lot of patience and flexibility to roll with the punches as little things go wrong, but traveling, for me, is so rewarding that I never want to stop. For me, it's worth sewing together the holes in my clothes because I don't want to pay for a new wardrobe, or not being able to play the newest video games that come out because we can't bring our consoles with us, or not going out to restaurants or cafes because we make all of our own food, coffee, and tea homemade. I've had this talk with many of my friends who were naysayers when I first started - this lifestyle is not, inherently, expensive. It's all about how you spend your money. We don't have a house, so we don't have mortgage payments. We don't have a car, so we don't have car payments, or insurance, or gas money, or maintenance, or registration costs. Both of us worked our asses off with two jobs each during uni, and beforehand to get scholarships, and purposefully chose cheaper schools, so that we could graduate without student loan debt. We don't buy new clothes, or many souvenirs. We make everything homemade - no coffee shops, no tea shops, no restaurants, no TV dinners or microwave meals. Every month, our expenses are rent, groceries, transportation, and either activities (ie visiting museums/castles/temples/national parks) or programs (both my fiance and I are getting certs to do freelance web dev and machine learning work to support ourselves). Any lifestyle is expensive. You just have to sit down and have a long, hard period of self-reflection to decide what are your NEEDS and what are your WANTS, and what you are willing to give up for the things you want. It's always a balancing act.
I have a friend who lives with her parents, works full time, and doesn't go out much, who needs way more money a month than the two of us combined. Why? She chose a summer internship that required her to buy a car, so she "invested" in a brand new car that she makes payments to every month, which she still has now that her internship is over, because she didn't trust public transportation in Boston in the afternoon. She spends her money on new video games and hair dye. She goes out to restaurants with her friends. She goes to concerts. She went to a school she couldn't afford because she really liked the program. I am not saying her decisions are wrong - she just values things differently than we do, and her priorities reflect how she spends her money.
I encourage everyone to take a month, track every purchase, track where every dollar goes, then sit down and have a real long talk about your wants and your needs and what you want out of live and what you value. It's all about making the lifestyle changes necessary to live the life you want. Yes, some lifestyles are more expensive than others, but most lifestyles are not unobtainable - it's all about how your prioritize things, and what you choose to spend your money on.
Now, the chemo thing I cannot relate to - the closest I had was an appendectomy that went sour last year that resulted in me being on bed rest for a month, hospitalized twice, and has resulted in permanent muscular damage to large portions of my back and shoulders that made it so I was out of work for a long time and am still in recovery learning how to move again. Chemo is expensive. And I dearly hope that the bills are the only lingering thing you have from that experience. I am not saying I understand your particular situation - maybe you have outstanding debt from mortgage payments, or car payments, or student loans. Maybe you have dependents, like children or elderly parents. Maybe the monthly payments from your chemo treatment are more than I could ever even imagine. I'm never here to preach. I just always want to challenge people who are unhappy or unsatisfied with their current situation to really take a hard look at their assumptions about what they cannot change about their lifestyle. A poor college student, recently graduated, who has only moved out of her parents home six months prior, a month of which she was out of work on bed rest, and the other five months she could only work part time because of her full course load at uni, and a second job that was time consuming and mentally taxing that offered no pay, should not be able to turn around 7 days after graduation and fly halfway across the world to begin a life of travel. That girl should not be able to visit 7 countries in less than a year, traveling and having the time of her life, at the age of 21/22. But yet here I am. I made some hard choices and some difficult sacrifices to get here. I went to school full time, worked an over full time job, and a second part time job, all while moving into a new apartment, and supporting my fiance who was working 80-100 hour work weeks at one job, part time at two others, and going to school full time, just so that we could graduate on time and have savings left over to leave as soon as we finished. Nothing worthwhile in life ever comes easy. But this was important to me, and it was important to my fiance, so we made it happen. There's always a way. I don't believe in "can not's". Watch me.
Leo: I bet your colors wouldn't be a mess at all! You are talking to one big walking blob of emotional train wrecks.  For a long time I hated the chaos in my colors, because I've always felt way too much. I have a host of mental disorders, so existing is...one hell of an adventure. But I've come to realize that the more colors I feel, the more my color pallet can expand, and the more I can paint on my canvas of life.  /The corniest
Whoah! Those glasses sound so cool! I should look them up...
I've never really believed in auras myself. I don't really believe in any religions, and I don't really believe in magic, or energies like that. But it's just the easiest way to explain it to people.
I think a lot of science is just things that people thought were magic, or gods, in the past, that humanity later learned how it worked. That's what I love about science - it makes me feel like a wizard!
They found the tumor a few years back, while I was having some...issues. I gave a brief overview below, but it's pretty gnarly so I wanted to put it in a spoiler so no one has to read it if they don't want to.
Spoiler Within a day, I went from physically fit and taking 3 hour hikes through the forest every day, to being a cripple, out of nowhere. One day, we were watching the football game during dinner, I went up stairs during half time to do laundry, bent down to grab my clothes and my legs crumbled beneath me. Couldn't walk anymore. Didn't stop me - I still went on those daily hikes, and even outpaced my classmates, with double metal leg braces, dragging my legs behind me with each step. I am nothing if not stubborn. Then came a host of panic attacks and panic disorders. Then came the seizures. And the hallucinations. And the temporary amnesia and severe memory loss. Then tunnel vision that made it so I couldn't see anything that wasn't directly in front of my face. Then the PTSD flashbacks started. And that's on top of my laundry list of mental disorders I had had previously. I baffled doctors all over the state! Experts could only say that my brain was shutting down, and no one knew why. I was dying. The benign tumor on my brain that affected my depth perception and equilibrium was kinda low on the totem pole at that point. Besides, it was my second cancer scare within a couple of months - the doctors first thought it was cancer in my knee that caused me to become a cripple instantaneously. Turns out that one was just a bone abnormality, and, like the tumor on my brain, I was born with and really wouldn't affect my life any. I decided I didn't want to die...so I didn't. Through sheer stubbornness, I pulled myself out of that situation, learned a shit tone of coping mechanisms, bullied my brain into learning how to put myself into self-induced comas and fight off massive seizures, forced my crippled legs how to walk again, learned how to stop panic attacks in their tracks, forced my hallucinations to stop interfering with my life, and turned my life around. Even with being absent so many times that my high school threatened not to let me graduate, I graduated with honors, got a scholarship, and started uni...all within six months. None of it ever went away...I just decided I wasn't ready for my life to be over yet. I had battled being suicidal for too many years to die without my own consent. So I didn't. I'm so stubborn, even the reaper couldn't take me. 
So, yeah. All in all, the whole "benign brain tumor removing your ability to see depth or hae your equilibrium function properly" thing didn't really matter too much to me.
 (0)  (0) |
|
|
|
|
|
☾⋆✳⋆★⋆✧⋆╰☆╮⋆✦⋆✩⋆✳⋆☽
✦✰★✧79x Paper Airplane ✦✰★✧~✦✰★✧1x TikiTaki Mask ✦✰★✧
☾⋆✳⋆★⋆✧⋆╰☆╮⋆✦⋆✩⋆✳⋆☽
|
|
|
process error 404
