Been a little preoccupied with work lately. Yesterday I started filling in a grant application form and I think I had something resembling a panic attack.
Maybe I'm overstating it...this one wasn't too terribly physiological. I've had that response once before, the night I asked [m] to marry me. We were sitting at dinner, and I had The Ring in a box in the breast pocket of my sports coat (hell yes I was wearing a sports coat) and I reached for it. When my hand closed around it I was overcome with a feeling not unlike what I imagine it would be like to be leaning out over the edge of a platform for a bungee jump and at the exact moment you achieve sufficient angular momentum that stepping back is now physically impossible it occurs to you that you don't know whether the other end of the cord is attached to anything. That is to say, the contents of my stomach plunged into my groin, the contents of my groin slammed against my diaphragm, all of the blood in my head departed for parts unknown, and my lungs ceased to function. At this point [m] began to look rather concerned and asked me if I was about to throw up. I hesitated to answer her for fear that opening my mouth might trigger a non-verbal response in the affirmative.
Needless to say, this was not the moment at which I popped the question. That occurred after dessert, coffee, and some deep breathing.
All of this is to say that starting to fill in the grant application wasn't quite that bad...it was merely an overwhelming sense of dread, rather than a physiological manifestation of immediately anticipated death. But still, pretty scary.
On a completely unrelated note, I calculated on my drive to work this morning that if we could own a modest home outright in a place where we didn't need a car and had no residual debt that we could live quite comfortably (i.e., at more or less our current standard of living) on approximately $30,000 a year. Which between the two of us could probably be managed with a couple of part time jobs that have little or nothing to do with science.
3 comments:
I have spent the better part of five years trying to figure out how to get by on less, but then my wife's credit card bills come in and sort of change the paradigm a wee bit.
i've near fully succeeded at getting by 'on less'.
eating is pretty cheap in this land of plenty.
when you already have expenses to the minimum, you need little else.
rule#1: no credit. of any kind.
you'd be surprised at how much you actually have to spend when you dont send so much of it to others who already have a claim on it.
i could live on >750/month, and be well fed and happy about it if the house/car was paid for.
that said: after 4yrs,i am now about to take back the wife. i fully expect everything i've set up so well to go out the window.
It can be done....I've got a junker of a car I rarely use, live in the middle of OWD, and get by pretty happily hear on a grad student salary. God forbid I get sick though....or have kids.
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