Sad day

I'm sick today. I have a throat thing. And I also have some very sad news to report: the amaryllis isn't working. I'm not sure why, but it's only growing leaves -- no bud stalk. I suspect that means I could keep watering it forever, but it won't have a flower this year. Maybe they lose the ability to flower after awhile? I'm gonna have to call Grandma this weekend and check in on that one. Maybe I'll also have to go out and buy a new amaryllis. Would that be a variable "household" expense? Or a irregular "misc." expense?

Budgeting

I took the advice of Anonymous and downloaded PearBudget, a spreadsheet designed to help you make budgets and track expenditures. I never thought keeping a budget could be so fun! And I have no idea why it actually is fun, but it is. PearBudget has you break your expenditures into sub-categories under variable expenses (like groceries and entertainment), regular expenses (like rent), and irregular expenses (like gifts, vacations, or one-time big purchases). You can make the sub-categories anything you want them to be. I found that thinking about expenditures in terms of whether they're variable, regular, and irregular was really helpful in considering where it would actually make sense to cut back.

I haven't come to any major conclusions about my spending just yet. In January I spent about $80 on groceries and about $250 at restaurants. I thought this might be a sign I should cut back on dining out and cook more, until it was pointed out to me that I'm still spending less than $11 per day on food (seems pretty reasonable for the Bay Area). For now, I guess it's enough to have an understanding of where my money actually goes coming into focus.

Maybe that career in accounting isn't quite as hopeless as I thought.

Champion this

I'm on the phone with Sallie Mae's endless series of recordings right now, trying to sort problems with some of my student loans. The fact that they open the call with a recording that says, "Sallie Mae, champions of higher education!" kinda makes me want to stab someone's eyeballs out.

Quick lessons in negotiations

Some quick tips I've picked up in class so far that may prove useful in your negotiations this weekend:

1) Always make the first offer, unless it is socially unnacceptable to do so.
2) Never accept a first offer.
3) Never reveal your BATNA. You can say that you have a BATNA, but never reveal specifics to the other party.
4) Don't mistake silence for an answer. Wait to hear a concrete response before making concessions.

I know those underwear!

In fact, I have the exact same pair. And I wouldn't say they're underwear, as much as I would say that they're a serious piece of technical equipment. They attach at the base of your bra and provide coverage all the way down to your thighs like bike shorts. They work by sucking everything in, to the extent that you can't really breathe -- they give you a little lift in the ass, and they magically make dresses that are maybe a size too small wearable. They're a borderline miracle product. However, I'm also working on a theory that having your internal organs compressed in such a way may severely limit your tolerance to alcohol and result in embarrassing behavior at formal functions. I have no way to substantiate that, of course, but it feels true.

I'm not sure why Katie is taking heat for wearing them. They're kinda hot. You know, in that wrestling singlet way. And she is married to Tom Cruise.

BATNA

"BATNA" (pronounced bat-na) is a new term I learned in negotiations class, and I'm a little obsessed with it. I think I'm a little obsessed with negotiations class in general.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative To the Negotiated Agreement. In a negotiation, pretty much all of your power comes from your BATNA. A simple, quick example is that if you have an offer from someone who wants to buy your futon for $100, you would never accept an offer from another party for under $100, unless they could sweeten the deal somehow to get it to a value of more than $100 ($90 and they haul it out of your third floor apartment for you, and then give you a backrub?). $100 is your futon BATNA.

I think BATNA needs to be worked into my day to day vocabulary and I'm keeping an eye out for such opportunities. It should have some good applications in conversations about dating.

Hotties

If you do a Google Image search of my name, these are the top four images you come up with:

Update on the resolutions

I have made absolutely no progress on my resolutions so far. I've not signed up for the Y membership and I haven't gone back to motorcycle school. I have no excuse for my poor performance.

I guess that I have managed to consistently track all my spending. In this case, I think ignorance might have actually been bliss. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the data. Spreadsheets? Pie charts?

Even though I now know that I spend a whole lot more on food and transportation than I thought I did, I can't really cut either of those things out. The only other conclusions I've made are:

1) I spend a lot of money in order to be with friends or while I am hanging out with friends.

2) Much (almost all?) of my happiness comes from time spent with friends.

And so,

3) My happiness is expensive.

This would seem to contradict the accepted wisdom that money can't buy happiness.

New semester, new attitude

I've recovered my enthusiasm about being a grad student. Every second of last semester felt like torture to me, but this one is fun and interesting so far. Having friends in classes might make all the difference.

This time around I'm taking Leadership (aka How to be a CEO) and Negotiations and Conflict Resolution. The cool thing about Leadership is that half the reading for the class was published by my group at work, so I'm getting up to speed at work and doing homework at the same time. Plus, it's genuinely interesting material. The cool thing about Negotiations and Conflict Resolution is that you can pretty much use everything you learn immediately and in almost every area of your life. Not to mention, the professor is soooooo dreamy.

Today I turned in an application to head the social committee. If I get appointed, I'll get to make budgeting decisions about happy hours and pretty much any other kind of event we want to plan. It feels a little like trying out for student government in high school, but I'm super geared up about having outside funding to plan parties for people I drink with every weekend anyway.

Blech

I sure do suck at this blogging thing lately. Everything I'm spending a lot of time thinking about these days is unblogable -- either too personal or just not even slightly interesting to anyone living outside my head.

I'm also a little disappointed with Google's new version of Blogger. It makes some things really easy because you can drag and drop the design elements of your blog on the template. However, it makes other things impossible to figure out. They're little things, but they're driving me bonkers. Like the title of this blog, for one. It should be RBlog, not RBLOG. Can't figure out how to change and I've spent at least an hour on it. Anyone know?

Virgin breakfast

This piece of toast has been sitting on a filing cabinet around the corner from my cubical since before Christmas. Miraculously, it does not mold.

Oh, Linda...

Yesterday, Linda sent me a bunch of photos of Jake Gyllenhal and other beefcakes as potential blog content. I guess it was a subtle reminder that I am once again falling behind in my posting duties. Instead of posting any of the pics of hot men, I am instead going to post the response I got from Linda when I then asked her to come to a Tainted Love show with me next weekend. This is a for real email:

"Tainted Love is so fun! I have a Senior Citizen Crab Feed that night, but hopefully it'll be over in time for me to drive back home, change, and cab it to Bimbo's. This is perfect because I've been craving dancing."

Ladies' night

Linda and I are having an estrogen attack... for the last couple hours we've been making a pot roast, drinking wine, gossiping, watching the Golden Globes, and flipping through issues of Us Weekly and Victoria's Secret catalogs all at the same time. The only thing that could top this off would be brownies, facials, and a maybe pillow fight.

Getting my Us Weekly fix while watching all these blinged out stars on TV has prompted me to decide that Justin Timberlake should get back together with Britney Spears for awhile. Maybe just a couple months. Justin just broke up with Cameron Diaz, he could grab massive amounts of media attention with the move, and Britney could clearly benefit from his superior classiness and business judgement (Brit's people might even pay him for such assistance). They were super cute together. He could get Brit's image back on track so easily. Her publicist should make some calls.

Amaryllis 2007

I think some of you may remember the excitement that surrounded last February's amaryllis bloom. I thought I might enhance the enjoyment of the amaryllis this year by creating a little anticipation for y'all. I brought the bulb out of its hibernation spot in the laundry room last weekend and gave it some water. Here's the current state:





Now, just sit back and prepare to be amazed by nature.

A new resolution

I added a new resolution to the other two (no, Jeremy, I'm not talking about THAT one -- though I'm working on it, too). I'm tracking my spending in hopes of eventually developing a budget. I wanted to come up with a budget, but realized that I have pretty much no idea where my money goes. So instead, I'm writing down everything I spend money on each day through the end of February to see if it leads me to any huge revelations. I suspect I will confirm that I spend an embarrassing amount of money on wine, cab fare, and pedicures.

In the meantime, I need to figure out how to organize all the data I collect. The usual categories to budget for seem to be things like housing, food, entertainment, transportation, communication, travel, and clothes. Linda posed a good question the other night -- does dining out count as food, or entertainment? And what if you're paying for someone else's meal? And do drinks count as food? I think I might also invent my own "personal upkeep" category that includes all visits to salons and gym membership fees.