Go Be Scared. It Might Be The Time You Live.

Be scared. You won't die from being scared.

Even going into 2018, the same things that scared me at the beginning of this big move continue to scare me now. I don’t seek to remove the fear. I don’t care about being scared. It isn’t unique to me since everyone is scared of something. I’d rather be scared. At least the fear makes me go “I’m David and I’m about to do…” It forces me into the moment and that’s where we truly live.

If you’ve ever moved out of your parents’ house to another state to do anything else and begin the whole starting your own life sort of thing, it’s scary. Whether it is supposed to be scary or not is another thing but it’s stepping out into the unknown in a more dynamic way. You leave the nest, you separate from the herd, you become the lone wolf for a period of time and try to make your own way. I couldn’t sleep for more than two odd hours a night because it was so quiet in my new apartment. I have two younger brothers that are as loud as I am and I’m not used to much silence. I had to fall asleep with my music on because my room doesn’t have a fan in it and I’m one of those sleepers that needs the white noise to know that there’s something else there. I never understood the psychology behind why some people can’t fall asleep in pure silence but eh that’s for another time. I fall asleep with the bathroom fan on most days after work because I literally cannot fall asleep in pure silence. For the first two months I was scared of somehow just being buried under stress. Which is stress itself. Can I make ends meet and continue to save money? How will I handle grad school on top of working this much? How much more punishment can my body take because less than three hours of sleep a night adds up to your body either getting sick or not recovering properly and you end up constantly dragging your feet 24/7. The worry hasn’t gone away. I still constantly worry about that. I don’t trust that it’s going to be okay soon enough. I don’t trust that I’m somehow going to figure it all out or that it, “it” referring to life right about now, will all work out in some weird form.

AND THE GREAT THING ABOUT IT IS THAT I DON’T NEED TO.

It's like Yosemite Sam met philosophy.

Call it bleak or negative or whatever else you want. It doesn’t make sense to me why I have to constantly seek harmony when it comes to work, socializing, fun, grad school, and anything else I want to throw into my day. Jeff Bezos mentioned in an interview he gave that he doesn’t like to call seeing a work-life balance a “balance”, as “balance” implies a strict trade. He calls it harmony. That presupposes that harmony can be found. My first semester of seminary told me that harmony is usually a coerced presumption when we read the Bible or look at church traditions and try to make them systematic. Why do we act as though we can’t, and I mean lack the ability to function in any way or shape or form or manner or mode or concept, live in the tension? I don’t have to know that it’s going to be okay. I don’t have to lie to myself that it WILL be okay soon enough. I’m here now in some strange city at a strange school trying to live dynamically but I don’t understand why you have to not be scared. The fear never goes away, usually you’ll be told to mitigate it and to me that makes little sense. Maybe I’m a strict Nietzschean in this regard. Trying to become something truly special, becoming the best possible version of yourself, hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. You’re supposed to suffer. Don’t reconcile it with yourself. Be scared. You’ve been scared before. Children might be scared of the monsters under their beds but we grew up to recognize that we face monsters everyday. Instability, fear of loss, death, fear of poverty, failure, not becoming something special, failing your loved ones, recognizing your potential may have been realized already and you have nothing more to contribute to your immediate communities, you know, the typical existential dilemmas we all have at some point in our lives. If you’ve ever been in line for a roller coaster and felt scared while being in line and STILL WENT ON THE ROLLER COASTER WHILE YOU WERE SCARED, you know that being scared won’t kill you.

*gets off pulpit*

Click to Pay $200 to Pass Go: Money, The Abstract Concept

It’s really cheap to be in debt. And when you think about it, force yourself to come to the potentially uncomfortable conclusions, and learn what to do with the newfound knowledge you have, you learn that you can’t get anywhere meaningful without being in some kind of debt.  Home ownership? Debt. A nice car? Debt. College in its many forms (bachelors, graduate, doctorate, and the many iterations of specialty schools)? A lot of debt. And you do have to wonder WHY DO I JUST KEEP SAYING YES TO TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF LOANS? I do my best to be a pragmatist when it comes to everyday life and realistically speaking, receiving training in a field that has incredible earning potential requires accruing some form of debt. It’s really easy to say yes to a loan for $10,000+ for schooling because your return on investment is very high (depending on what you’re doing). Someone going to school to become a doctor will see the debt as worth the risk because of what they know they will be earning. For someone who is going to study a less lucrative field such as myself with a music degree, debt takes on a different form. Debt and my generation go together as well as pacemakers and roller coasters yet we’re missing a few things to this puzzle.

1. It’s really easy to be in debt. Functioning with debt in America is the norm now.
2. The debt disparity is large and the stress about the debt is scattered. It’s either a minimal (comparatively so) amount of debt or six figures for advanced degrees with individuals either caring about their debt too much or not at all.
3. You’re clicking a button on an electronic screen to approve of your being in debt. And this is where the article sits.

I’m 23. If you wanted to harness the amount of energy that I have used to take my debit card out of my wallet over my current lifetime, you can power a small Midwestern town for ten days. It’s really easy for people my age to just open their wallet, swipe whatever card has whatever amount of money, and then put their card back in their wallet with perfect insousiance. I’m guilty of it and the best apology to my bank account is changed behavior. I thought it was a joke that carrying cash in your wallet will make you spend less at most and be more mindful of your spending at the least.

IT WASN’T A JOKE

I tried this out for a week and some of the money was just sitting there. I didn’t want to touch it at all except for gas because my commute to work and school is proof that God has a sense of humor and He’s in Heaven laughing uncontrollably. This week was a bit different (11/16) because of a few things I’ve forgotten about in the chaos of preparing for finals and a holiday rush at work. For the most part I’ve kept consistent with keeping money in my wallet to function for the bare necessities such as gas for my car and that’s really all. If it was a busy day and I didn’t bring food with me from home, and if I have gas in my car and cash left over, I can find something to eat for cheap. If I need gas and I’m hungry then I don’t eat. I’ll wait until I get home. I’ve begun to use my card when I absolutely need to now. I recognize now that I look at my cards in my wallet with disdain. Which in some sense is what I want. It’s a symptom of trying to tame the bull that is money and spending. It’s such an inconvenience to have to find an ATM that doesn’t charge you a useless fee to take out your money, or you have to go to a store to go get cash back on a purchase so you have to spend your money to get your money out, and commit to wrangling the bull/not spending it frivolously. Getting cash is somewhat annoying but it isn’t enough to just commit to not spending. You need to understand how you view money and why your spending might be reckless.

Cash to my generation is an abstract concept. We know of its significations in the form of debit and credit cards. Amazon has made it even easier with buying things with one click. Disney made it even easier with a wristband that allows you to make purchases with the simple motion of moving your arm. Mobile gaming and now console gaming has made microtransactions the industry norm. Student loans are approved of online. Cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is a volatile yet growing economic sector. One-third of purchases are made with cash now and we typically buy things on our electronic devices. We don’t view our phones or laptops as wallets, we view them as social connectors or devices for work, not exclusively devoted to money but possessing the capabilities of payment (https://www.consumerreports.org/shopping-retail/how-you-pay-can-affect-how-much-you-spend/). Every family gathering at home me and my brother and my cousins, all of us being around the same age, play Monopoly. It’s a family thing at this point. I’m more careful with Monopoly money than my own debit card.

I want you to reread that last sentence but slower.

I’m. More. Careful. With. Monopoly. Money. Than. My. Own. Debit. Card.

This. Insert Expletive Here. Needs. To. Change.

In a TedX talk I watched at work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VB39Jo8mAQ), which was really the source of this entire thought process, Adam Carroll mentions the same concept with his children playing Monopoly and being rather careless about their spending within the game. You always want to buy out Boardwalk or Park Place because they’re the one punch knockouts if you can get your hotels on them and you don’t care much for the railroads so you let others buy them even though if you own all four you can consistently make $200 in one go round on the board (CDs, treasury bonds). Typically Baltic Avenue gets ignored because it’s cheap but if someone lands on it then it’s an easy $60 and it’s a stable payment (bonds). If you buy all the orange properties or pink properties (index funds) then you statistically have a better chance of making money because everyone lands there at some point. Free Parking is usually played with the money from the tax space going there so whoever lands there gets all the cash that everyone gets (gold and precious metals investments, when they pay out they pay out big). The green properties such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina Avenues are a bit pricier but pay out well if you hold on to them (real estate and high yield dividend stocks). And as said before, Park Place and Boardwalk are the knockout punchers (Benjamin Graham might label this as “mad money”, very high risk with very high reward, so they’re like international stocks or emerging market funds). But it’s just Monopoly money so what does it matter?

Now where did I put that bailout money?

Carroll’s experiment can be surmised with the question “What if it wasn’t fake money? What if we made the money real?” He swaps out all the Monopoly money with his own real money and watches what happens. Some of his children played the same and some of his children played differently. The latter became more aware of where their money is going. It’s tangible now. It’s in your hands. It serves a purpose of advancement (buying properties, paying debt in the game, expanding your influence against the other players). It’s easy for me to say yes to student loans because I’ve never held $10K in my hands before and I’ve never seen it in person anywhere else. A $30 purchase? I’ve held $30 in my hands before, sometimes in all singles and sometimes in varying multiples, but I’ve held smaller amounts of cash. I can make changes there. I can say yes or no to a purchase that small much easier than I can conceptualize something like a home loan or a car loan solely because I’ve never seen more than $3000 in my hands before.

Attempting to tame your money means forcing the abstract to become material. The number on your laptop screen matters. It’s there. It’s not fake. It’s real and it has immediate consequences. When your card get declined and you’re redlining your gas tank and you still have another ten minutes to get home is when your abstract concepts of cash suddenly become as real as ever.  Even opening my own portfolio exposed me to a wider world of potential money. Do you think I can envision Apple’s $878 billion market cap when I can’t even envision $100 in my wallet? These are abstract numbers. If Apple’s shares tanked tomorrow then my index fund drops to Hell also. These are real consequences. If I, and hopefully you, want to one day have your money actually behave the way you want it to, then realize that it’s never just fake money you’re agreeing to when you take out loans. I owe debt, which means someone owns me. It’s real money. I could buy a few cars with the amount of student loan debt. It has to put things into perspective if you want to be free of your money leashing you around rather than you owning your money. And I want that.

Earn, Save, and Give All: Ambitions and Musings on Starting Investing For The First Time

This past Wednesday (11/8), while I was late to class, I bought my first share in a company. This past Monday (11/6), while trying to jump on the D Route to head to my car in the parking deck on the other side of campus, I opened a brokerage account with Charles Schwab. Turns out they don’t charge you to open one up and I’m still irritated that nobody bothered to mention that to me but that’s in the past now. “Excitement” is an understatement. For the past few weeks I had been reading everything I could get my hands on when it came to investing, an interest that appeared overnight. I moved to Georgia in August and the next few days following the move I remember not being interested in the field of investing or the stock market at large and then suddenly becoming hungry to read more about the wide world of P/E multiples and expense ratios and two-leg spreads, which made me want to keep reading but then proved to be so underwhelming. But the more I realized I didn’t know about this new world, the more I read on and it led to this moment of my being cold at the bus stop and opening a free (free, which should be affordable in everyone's budget) brokerage account with Charles Schwab. Once again, free.

For those that don’t know, Fedex Express opens a 401K with Vanguard on your first day of employment, for both part time workers and full time workers. I’ve been with them for what will be a year and a half next month and I credit (pun intended) this job with exposure to investing in any sense. My pre-tax money, the money I worked for despite my frustrations and exhaustion going to work morning and night, was going into an account which I had, and still have, very little idea as to how it worked, what exactly is in that account (stocks and bonds and odd mixtures of all of them), and why I should care about it at all. They match 100% up to 6% of your pre-tax contribution. Well isn’t that great, free money from a company that already pays me rather well (I’m almost at $15 an hour so honestly I can’t complain much for a person my age) but is it enough money to put away for retirement was what I had to ask. And the answer is no. Only 6 percent? Any financial advisor would laugh at me to my face if I said that it would be enough. Apparently you should be putting away 12%-15% of what you make a year (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-14/how-much-should-you-save-for-retirement) and even then it might not be enough when you consider that your retirement money has to last you a third of your life, through medical bills and vacations and car issues and natural disasters and plumbing issues and wanting to move away from your neighbors because you want to be the hermit you’ve always wanted to be after socializing with them for so long and all that money has to last you for ⅓ of your remaining life. So the amount you save is important as of yesterday. Because retirement, at the minimum, is projected to last at least 30 years (https://investor.vanguard.com/retirement/savings/how-much-to-save) which means that ball should’ve been rolling years ago for someone like me.

I started out reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel’s work on economics, and it drives the point home that if you want money and lots of it then you better be patient because the best way to do it is with index funds, ETF (exchange trade funds), and mutual funds. Boring and about as exciting as a second coat of paint, the only thing more exciting would be listening to Ben Stein cover Don Moen’s early work in a cappella format. Doing the high risk stock game you see in movies is a surefire way to end up broke and disillusioned with a system that allows you to make money and lots of it if you’re patient, can control your urges for instant gratification, and are willing to not be distracted by seemingly immediate roads to riches like Bitcoin, Tesla, and Amazon. Patience, self-control, and discipline, being the things that most people my generation lack. Which means more money for me. Let me put it to you this way: There’s over $15 trillion in the stock market right now. Who said I can’t have some of that money? Who is going to stop me from trying? I work for a company valued at $61.8 billion dollars. Which means there’s more money out there than what my job makes in a year. So who said I can’t have some of that money?

I finished A Random Walk Down Wall Street and The Richest Man In Babylon by George Clason. Malkiel’s aforesaid work makes beginner concepts of the stock market easily understood and introduces you to some of the seemingly intimidating terms that involve your money and what it does. People my age, and what scares me is this next point, have zero clue about investing. Ask someone my age (23, too old) about the stock market now or about retirement. You’ll either come up with a nonsense answer, no answer at all, or something regarding “Retirement? I can barely cover my rent this month.” There’s some research showing that millennials are actually better when it comes to investing than our parents were (https://www.forbes.com/sites/shannarajohnson/2017/09/07/are-millennials-better-investors-than-boomers-and-gen-xers/#4b9ba6d85ec1). To be fair, we grew up in the wake of the 2008 crash. Anyone who hesitates to jump head first into buying stocks that promise no return, or at the very least a return that we’re not happy with,  will think back to a time of severe economic stress for their families. “Why let fear stop you like that?” would be my question. Malkiel’s argument goes the way of slow, steady, progressive investments in the broader market (S&P 500 index funds, because he has a love affair with Vanguard and he isn’t afraid to show it) over a given period of time (translation: 20-30 years) will bring back the best results on your investment. The Richest Man In Babylon, though nothing extensive like Malkiel’s work, puts financial principles about individual savings and investing into easily read and easily understandable parables set in Babylon. You’ll notice the motif of ease here so run with it for a second.

Is it somewhat hazardous of me to want to invest what meager restitution I bring back home when I have to cover rent and utilities and put money away in case of emergencies? Yes. It’s a worry I do have and I can’t downplay it lest I be considered irresponsible. Is it somewhat worrisome to me to look at my friends that don’t think about this at all and when we blink our eyes we’ll have families and they’ll have children whose financial future will make them wonder why they didn’t start saving or investing sooner? Yes. I care about my friends and their futures and I don’t think you can love someone fully, me being a Christian, without caring about where they’re headed in the near and far future. I don’t want to work forever. This job and the various headaches, exhaustion based illnesses, injuries to my joints and tendons and ligaments and skin, hearing loss, bruises, latent hernias, and overall stress, has told me I don’t want to work forever, let alone want to continue waking up at 3:00am to get to work at 4:00am to clock in on time. I get to call the one share of Coca-Cola I bought (because all the reading I did leading up to the moment of stock told me that index funds and ETF and mutual funds should be the base of my portfolio, not the be all end all, so I bought a dividend stock/a stock that pays me to own it) my own. Suddenly every Coke I’ve had since then (all of two) tastes so good. I put what probably amounts to a fraction of a penny, and that’s being generous to myself, I get to put back into my pocket and it makes me get to say that I’m playing into a game that not a lot of people my age want to play.

I was born and raised for a time in Staten Island, NY. When I hear the name "Rockefeller" I think of the tree. And it's that time of year for the tree...and eggnog. Most importantly, eggnog.

So where does that leave me to go? I just started reading The Intelligent Investor so I’m going to be going through that for what will more than likely be a long time. I have a semester in grad school to finish up before I work peak season (holiday rush) non-stop as they hand out overtime in spades. I have so much learning to do when it comes to putting my money to work for me. There’s over $15 trillion in the stock market right now and I want some of that money. Why shouldn’t I have it? It has to go somewhere so it may as well go to someone like me who can use it to pay off his student loans or buy a house and tell the bank to go to do something to themselves that I probably shouldn’t go into detail on considering the prudish eyes that read this (sorry mom, dad, and the church leaders that I hold in admiration) because I’d like to pay off a house in cash and not live in one with a mortgage looming overhead. Arthur Guinness and John D. Rockefeller, both men of Christian faith in two wildly different traditions and different time periods, heard the same message, “Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.” Guinness heard it from John Wesley,  the Anglican who founded the Methodist church, and Rockefeller heard it from a Baptist preacher. Guinness’ beer is world renown and Rockefeller is still the richest man to have ever lived (basing his renowned generosity on Luke 6:38- “Give, and it will be given to you…”). Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.

So game on. I’ll play this investing game.

Short Story: Grandma Brooklyn

We got the call that she had fallen and didn’t get up. This was years in the making. The first time we got that call was when we were on a vacation in Florida. My crying yet unsurprised mother had been somewhat waiting for that call but really never being ready. When are you ever ready for the call that a family member you love has died? Fortunately for us it was only a scare. The next few years had this collectively held breath within our minds, waiting and knowing that any phone call can be the last. And we got that call in May of 2013, the day after I had come back home from my freshman year of college. We let the collectively held breath go, and so did she. We planned a trip to Brooklyn in a matter of hours. Knowing my dad, and I lived with him for 23 years so I can say I know him, it usually takes him two days to not be tired from a long road trip. From Georgia to North Carolina takes a solid six to seven hours if you get stuck in regular traffic. From North Carolina to Brooklyn is eight to ten hours. On top of what we had to deal with, we weren’t going here on the best of terms.

Ten hours in a car, as a regular staple of my childhood, has made me hate road trips. My friends love them and I can’t stand them. When you spent as much of your childhood traveling by car, you’ll understand why you hate being in them for anything longer than an hour. She lived in this senior living apartment on Evergreen in Brooklyn, maybe a good ten minutes away from Flushing Avenue where the G train stops, near an Episcopal church the name of which escapes me. On the fifth floor, the place forever smelled of old people and I can never get that smell out of my mind whenever I go anywhere. It’s not an unclean smell or a damp or moldy one. It’s a distinct one that I always fail at describing. The next four days were pure exhaustion and pettiness. This was the week I found out how petty my family really is.

The casket wasn’t supposed to be open. She looked terrible. The funeral was early in the morning and really we just wanted to get it over with. Both of my parents being pastors, dad was officiating the funeral. When my parents were dating, grandma (technically speaking she was our great grandmother) played a really big role in their lives and helped a lot as they got themselves off the ground. He owed a debt of gratitude to her and it showed. In Hispanic culture, grandma being Ecuadorian, what abuela says is law. You respect her. And so he did. And it went well with him all the days of his life. The room was filled with lives who were grieved at her passing. The microphone was passed around, grieving mouth to grieving mouth. People struggling to hold it together as they remembered how they first came to the states and she opened her doors without concern or repayment or help of any kind. She was a pious Catholic. My family came from South America here, a large chunk of them, and grandma was the door that helped them survive here. The room was filled with love for the open casket. Which wasn’t supposed to be open. I looked to my mother, looking at the sleeping body, and I go “She looks horrible.” I have no sense of reverence. I thought she, in true Hispanic fashion, would take her shoe off and hit me with it but she agreed with me. It wasn’t supposed to be open. Family infighting and a sense of entitlement to controlling the terms of the funeral left it open.

Me, my father and younger brother, and a lot of other family members, carried the casket into the funeral car. Inside the casket was my childhood, the ridiculously amazing chicken soup with was more whole chicken than it was soup, the Christmases and birthdays, and the spanish culture and stories I’ll never know. That day she joined her husband of thirty years and three or four of her seven odd kids gone before her. We jump into our van to go through Brooklyn traffic and follow the funeral car. What amazed me then, and now, years later, was that the traffic didn’t stop fully but it seemed to slow down more so than usual. Like the city knew the kind soul that it had lost, and took its ball cap off in respect. The way you do in church when you wear a hat and someone starts praying so you take the hat off in respect. This wasn’t a cheerful sort of funeral where you go “Let’s celebrate her life and remember her for who she was.” Oh no. God no. This was one of those funerals that could be summed up in a collective sob. I wasn’t like that. I was nineteen and this was my first funeral. I was watching and paying attention. It was all I knew how to do. And so we stepped into the cemetery where she now rests.

The cemetery workers lowered her into the ground, all of our hands holding a healthy rose. The flower was probably the most alive thing we had seen all day, a part of us being lowered into the ground with her. We all dropped our roses onto the casket, sitting as a testament to a part of our lives now gone. I looked at the other gravesites, various tombstones stuck into the ground. Years later I read while browsing online a quote someone had written that said “A cemetery is a place full of people that said ‘I’m right’”. It’s haunted me ever since. She joined her three or four children and her husband of thirty odd years. She never dated again or remarried by her choice. The cemetery workers started throwing dirt onto the plot and we all went to our own ways. My mom, leaning into my father, finally let go. She tried holding tears in for too long. It was the early afternoon and we had a long drive ahead of us. Another ten hours in the car. Nobody said a word the entire trip.

Don't even get me started on the piragua guy that works here.

This past November, fast forward to 2016, my dad texted me to bring back coffee for the house I drank all of it to make sure I can speak coherently at work. I go to the Publix near the house on Kildaire, and walk through the coffee aisle to get the only coffee suitable for our liking: Cafe Bustelo. Before I found it on the shelf I saw this small plastic jar with coffee in it a few steps away from the Cafe Bustelo. Sanka. It had a yellow twist off top to it. Grandma always made cafe con leche when my parents were there and we always wanted some because we wanted to be grown ups and drink coffee for fun. My brother and I used to want to drink coffee for fun. That’s how young we were. And she used Sanka. I remember being six years old when I climbed a footstool to open the cupboard to look for something and I saw that on the wooden shelving. I was twenty-three when I saw it again. And I remember going, in my head, “That looks famili...oh.” I bought the coffee, and stepped into my car. The remainder of the grocery visit was silent. I pulled the skin on my face down with my left hand, breathed a frustrated sigh. Now it affects me. Now it kicks me and when it does it kicks hard. But why now? I may never know that answer. I drove home in silence.

Short Story: Waffles

I’m up at 2:15am and I’m ready to head back home. I had decided to go to bed early the night before so I can drive through the night and cut through rush hour traffic in Charlotte. I brushed my teeth, threw my luggage back in my car, and realized I needed something to eat. Seven hours on an empty stomach is a surefire way for me to hate myself and other drivers. My going to bed early resulted in me getting two hours of crap sleep because commanding my body to do anything is an exercise in futility. I wanted to go home and get away from the week. We couldn’t agree on a place to live and we were nearing a deadline for when we had to move somewhere, it turns out that picking a place to live for the next year is a bigger deal than I had thought, and it left everyone with a bad taste in our mouths and I wanted to go home and detox. Slowly seeping into my head was the fact that I was going to be living in this area and it was going to be a lot sooner than I had previously thought. I didn’t want to think about any of that. I just wanted food.

Oh you know you're doing something wrong if your heart isn't calcifying by looking at this photo.

I throw my things into my car as quietly as I know how to throw anything. I had been staying at a friend’s place for the trip and I didn’t wanna wake anyone up. Now, I’m about as quiet as a car accident when I’m trying to move around but I guess trying to stay quiet counts for something in my mind. I turn my car on and let it sit there while I close my eyes and run my hand through my hair, sighing the exhausted and defeated sigh that we all sigh when life doesn’t go our way. This was the week that I saw in practice the life lesson I still refuse to accept: Just because you’re willing to bend over backwards for someone doesn’t mean they will reciprocate. Compromise was a one way street this week. I could feel my hairs graying in my hand as I drew the color out of them when my fingers parted through knots and frayed ends. I wasn’t ready to move but I wasn’t afraid of it. I didn’t want to think about any of that. I just wanted food. And I knew there was a Waffle House nearby. Saved.

Waffle House sits well in my soul and in my arteries. While you may end up at other places like Denny’s or Huddle House, Huddle House being Waffle House’s trampy younger sister, you go to Waffle House. There was never a time in my life that couldn’t be aided by a bowl of cheese grits and a waffle from a waiter who still reeks of the Newport cigarettes she huffed down in a hurry in the parking lot, that small window being the only break she may have had in the past ten hours of a busy night. Waffle House locations are either strategically placed or hidden away somewhere. It always looked weird to me that there were Waffle House locations in building complexes, nuzzled away inside the complex like a big Lego piece. Those locations are typically smaller and they look limited. The ones that are hidden away, like this one, you have to look for because they’re an oasis in a desert when you’re driving and want something to eat.

It’s about 2:30am now and I pull into the parking lot of this empty Waffle House. The last small group of people, about two our three people that are maybe slightly older than me, head out so it’s just me and the waitress. I worked the night shift at a convenience store. America wouldn’t exist without people like us. Idiots who are willing to work at 2:30am for meager pay, long hours, and never hearing that you’re doing a good job. This waitress is tired, doesn’t wanna be there, and she basically knows she works at Waffle House. I’ve never worked in a restaurant before, I don’t intend to start, but I imagine the realization of you working at a restaurant that is socially known as a place where you go to settle a belly full of liquor isn’t exactly the best way to establish self worth. She looked like she hated herself for even thinking working there was a good option. But I don’t imagine people in good life circumstances to choose Waffle House. It’s more like the circumstances force you to pick working there. I work for Fedex. You don’t go to work there. You end up working there. It’s the same principle. It turns out that she more or less ended up there.

She was a nurse in Ohio for years and then moved down to the Lawrenceville area to get away from her family. I was trying to find out why she would exchange being a nurse for a waffle cook. I didn’t get that much information out of her and I don’t think I wanted to know. Some of those kinds of questions have answers that I think would scare me out of wanting to move out of my parents’ house. I don’t even remember how we got on the topic of her moving down here, all I know is that we were talking about it. She kind of avoided the questions a bit, you’re not a social person if you think working at 2:30am is a good choice. You do that so you can avoid people as much as possible. And I understood that. I just wanted my food and that was it but I also knew that the waitress serving me my food is just as human as I am, if not more.

I eat and then I get up to go pay. Nothing special there other than my eating habits resembling that of a lion feasting on the broken throat of its kill. As is Waffle House tradition I hand her my card. Now this is the important part. Because our cards have our full names on it she looks at my card and she stops for all of one second and she looks at my card and she says “I have a two year old son who died in 2012 and his name was Joshua David.” It is 2:50ish in the morning right now, I’m at a Waffle House in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and I hear this sobering statement. I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised that this is what I experience at Waffle House, really I just don’t have any expectations for Waffle House trips other than the cooks not spitting in my food. So far, so good on that one. But this? This is new.

And she gives me what I call “The Mom Look”. And I’m sure everyone has seen this look in action before. It’s the look where you’re doing or saying something and the mother nearby looks at you as if what you’re doing and what you’re saying is reminding you of their own child. As if they’ve mentally swapped you out for their kid and they get that parental glaze in their eyes, for better and worse. That’s how this waitress looked at me. I don’t know if that’s why she left Ohio. I don’t know if that had anything to do with her working at Waffle House. That look she gave me still hasn’t left my memories and I suspect it to never leave. It’s a stamp on a hard reality check that these normal workers are just as shattered and devastated at life’s relentless cruelty as we are and my God my heart still breaks for that woman.

How do you respond to that? Are you meant to respond to that? Nobody gives you instructions for how to deal with that. I figured that I would have some sort of pastoral training embedded within me, having grown up with both mom and dad as pastors and being perpetually active in their church. Nope. None of that kicked in. All I knew was how to be human and part of me was not only grieving but sought to grieve too. But what could I say to her? I’m sorry? That doesn’t bring her child back. I didn’t name myself? If you wanna go down the “I’m a scathing asshole” route then yeah but it’s 3:00am now and you don’t need to do that. As Nanny told Janie, she’s a cracked plate. Whatever healing can take place has taken place and is still taking place. Sometimes you’re not meant to respond. Sometimes you can’t help them. You don’t have to be okay with that. There is a natural human trait, inborn in all people, of wanting to help others that we perceive to be in trouble. If my mind was a punching bag then that inborn trait was Mike Tyson in the second round of training his signature right hook-left hook combination. There was nothing I could do. No Jesus to give her. I figured that Jesus is still grieving with her anyways.

I get back in my car and drive home. Five of those seven hours were in complete silence.

Short Story: Slow Cooking

My friend Jared mentioned to me, laughing and in some defensive spirit about my character, that he talked me up to a mutual acquaintance of ours. I just happened to find her very attractive so he played the role of the good friend that tried talking me up, which is an exercise in futility. There is very little good to talk about but I’m biased. He said that he told her:

“Yeah he may be an ass but he will take good care of you.” And honestly it surprised me how confident he was in that assertion.

Did I just read that....yeah...you did just read that.

When I moved down to Atlanta I knew that coming down here would be exhausting. I set out to build my home down here. A place of refuge and stability that I had growing up and then some. I knew it would be hard work but I didn’t know how exhausting it would be. I wake up everyday for work at 2:45am with Sundays being an exception. I wake up at 5:55am for work. Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I work mornings and nights. Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays are days I have class. Mondays I run after class ends at 7:00pm to work at 8:30pm, and Atlanta traffic is set up to where I’m getting to work with five minutes to spare, even though I’m only a few exits away. Wednesdays and Fridays are slightly easier but not by much. It’s work, school, and maybe sleep. Sleep ends up being in the work break room. A dimly lit room with one  bright florescent light that bleeds through your eyelids, a television that’s always set to ESPN to let my coworkers dream their high school athlete dreams of playing. I don’t have the heart to say anything insulting about that to them. I never understood watching football or basketball that avidly. I don’t want to discuss anything like sports at 12:30am after loading planes. I want my body to stop hurting at that time.

My joints ache and I routinely feel my bones losing cartilage. My feet are crushed against the steel tips of my boots and my sweat sits within my clothing like rain on a car’s windshield. My elbows shred inside my skin and my fingers ache coldly, regularly bending and inappropriately contorting and hitting machinery. Never breaking or dislocating but never sitting comfortably either. I’m young enough to recover from this kind of physical beating but I know in my forties I’m going to be vacuuming enough Tylenol and Advil to kill a bear. I woke up one morning on the break room couch, two hours of crap sleep in my system, and I could feel my lower body fricasseeing in my clothing. A fever. Oh boy. Just the thing everyone wants when they wake up from what really was a nap at work on a stiff couch. I woke up to my body slow cooking like a well seasoned rotisserie chicken in my pants and I was hemmoraghing sweat. The back of my skull pulsed and throbbed like Stravinsky’s orchestra the night that his Rite of Spring premiered and I was boiling.

I didn’t go home. That would’ve been too easy and too smart of me to do. I got up, put my work boots back on, and felt every fissure and crack and crevice in my body fill with lava. I was on fire and my blood could probably boil a tea bag. I was cooking inside my own skin. I run my hands down my face slowly, stretching out the forming wrinkles and newly grayed hairs that stood as a testament to time bitching at my body. A testament to stress and my capitalist worship. I walk into the ramp office and lay down there against the long desks that overlook the ramp and the taxiway. Five planes in, two planes out. Three and a half hours of this and I didn’t want to die. There isn’t a difference between being stubborn and being stupid to me. I mixed those two lines together back in high school. It was at this point that I could feel my sweat velcroing my skin to my clothing. I could walk out right now and go home and still get paid for doing it. I’d get written up and ruin any potential of having a good reputation here when I leave but I would be okay with it, all I had to say is that I had gotten sick. Yet I’m stubborn.

I can’t sleep with my upper body slumped against the counter like that so I just keep my head down. It stopped the kick drum playing triplets on the back of my head. I look up and see against the computer monitor stand is a little white package. I reach out for it and my arm feels like pure steel. Heat and pressure pushing against my elbows and phalanges as I try to use them at least one more time before I willingly die from what could be classified as a low boil going on in my work pants. Extra Strength Pain Relief. That’s what was lying against the small space in the computer monitor. I looked at it for at least two second before I felt, not heard, a voice, in the sound of the silence that was in my head, say “You have to keep going”. I felt tears wanting to form. I couldn’t explain to you how I felt cared for in that moment but I did. Like my mom was looking over me and could hear her son’s blood boiling in his veins as he wanted to die from this new sickness. You really have to be a special breed of dumb to continue like this.

Musings on Tithing, Investing, A Sisyphean Work Ethic, and Me Remembering I Own a Bed That Isn't The Break Room Couch at my Job.

For the past month or so my mind has been everywhere and anywhere. I work two different jobs, I go to grad school part time, and I somehow find meager time in between for my hobbies and what little socialization I can manage. Clearly, I don’t sleep. I’m convinced that I don’t live in an apartment but I live at work and my bed is the couch in the break room. I just happen to visit an apartment on Saturdays when I don’t have work and I sleep in a strange bed and shower in someone else’s shower but that someone else’s room is being covered by my rent money. Then I realize that it’s my room and to me, maybe this is just me, but it shouldn’t feel or seem like I’m in someone else’s room even though I’m almost never there.

One of my main focuses now is investing. I want to open my own brokerage account and play games with the big boys. I was hired by a company that gives all part-time employees a 401K. Honestly I lucked out in that department because in my head I always knew that it was a good thing to invest and play with the stock market but it was always a paper thought. Nobody really explained, and nobody really explains now, how to begin investing or who you call to buy a stock or the different ways to invest and all those kinds of accounts. I’m blessed to have mentors in the form of trusted minds that have walked me through a lot of these things like the dense verbiage that investing sits in. I’m 23 and the first time I encountered the terms “index fund”, “bear/bull market”, “expense ratio”, and my personal favorite, “dividend” was this month. I feel late to a game that’s already well within its second half but I wanna play alongside everyone else in the game called “Give companies my money so I can see it back in 40-60 years”.

As a millennial, the enterprise of investing is lost on our mentality. Classify my generation all you want with just loving concepts as instant gratification and impatient, you wouldn’t be wrong in doing so. Especially when it comes to money. Investing is glamorized in a way as if it can make you rich just by pressing a button on your phone. Very rarely does it work like that and if it does work like that then I’m sure the SEC would like to talk to you for a little bit. Now, I don’t care much for the whole “impatient” schtick. I’m too patient for my own good. I don’t care for instant gratification. Rome wasn’t built in a day but Rome was being built a little piece at a time every day. Let me enlighten you readers on what a normal week has been like for me while I begin to make my home in Georgia.

Monday: Class from 1:30pm-7:00pm. Leave for work immediately after class is done and get stuck in traffic until I’m almost late for work (thanks Atlanta). Work at night from 8:30pm-11:45pm, sleep at work either on the break room couch, the floor, or in my car.

Tuesday: Clock in for work at 3:55am, when you live 30 minutes away from your job it makes going home seem kinda dumb because you only have not even two hours to sleep before you have to force your groggy bones out of bed. Work from 4:00am-7:30am, go to a second job until 12:00ish, go home (a rare gift that God gives me when He sees me half dead from putting up with people and with a schedule like this) and go comatose for as long as possible. Wake up, do homework, go back to sleep.

Wednesday: Wake up at 2:55am, leave the apartment by 3:15am and drive 30 minutes to get to work on time, work from 4:00am-7:30am, get stuck in traffic (THANKS ATLANTA) from 7:40am-8:40am, class from 9:30am-2:30pm, get stuck in traffic on the way home, get home at 4:00pm, sleep until maybe 7:00pm, leave for work at 7:30pm and get stuck in traffic again (THANKS ATLANTA), work from 8:30pm-11:45pm, sleep at work.

Thursday: See Tuesday. Second job and all.

Friday: See Wednesday.

Saturday: I don’t have work.

Now you may be asking yourself a justified and rational question:

WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS TO YOURSELF

Ignoring the fact that I was raised by two hard working parents who did their best to instill a Sisyphean (read: Hispanic) work ethic in their children, it’s because part of my paycheck goes to a 401K. So why let a tiny amount go into it when you can have a lot go into it? It reduces your taxable income, it gives you a sense of uniqueness knowing that you’re unlike other people your age because investing hasn’t really caught on to most people age 23 (less than a quarter of people in my age group, 18-25, have anything in the stock market, older millennials are marginally better but that’s not enough to drive a claim about millennials investing in any grand way), and it forces you to talk about your life when you’re in your forties. WHICH IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR ME BECAUSE I DIDN’T THINK I’D LIVE PAST 21. When I was a sophomore at Emmanuel College I tried hard my first year to envision myself graduating and honestly it was just a black screen in my mind. I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t a template for it in my head. There isn’t a template for anything in my head anymore as far as life plans go. Which is why I thought that I’d be dead by now because it’s just the day by day and I can’t stand it. But life doesn’t ask me my opinions of itself and how it chooses to discern its path for me. So actually having some sort of investment strategy in the form of a retirement account forces me at 23 to think of myself at 65 in coherent terms.

I don’t want to work another day in my life past 40, max 45. I don’t yet I’m also supremely jaded from working this ridiculous schedule. I know I can get away with beating my body to shit day in and day out and I can sleep for two hours or so and wake up ready to go for another day and some change. It’s not ideal. I can feel my joints shred and throb whenever something goes wrong and I’m probably going to be a case study for the prolonged effects of coffee and sleep deprivation on the human mental condition when I die from what will more than likely be exhaustion related. I know I have to pay a price for this later and it’s a price I’m willing to jovially pay. Why? Because I know I can find a way to make my work ethic get me to my goal of retirement at 45 or I will make a way to make it work so help me God. Speaking of God, tithing got a lot easier for me when I moved down here.

It also seems to me that investing sort of undermines the idea of "give us this day our daily bread". The Israelites were told not to save their manna otherwise it would turn to worms. 

I’m not someone who is fascinated by lavish lifestyles. I like to eat a lot but that’s really it. I don’t find myself drawn to flashy apparel or cars or anything like that. Money frustrates me to no end. Not because I find it constantly leaving my hands (read: GAS IS A BITCH WHEN YOU DRIVE AS MUCH AS I DO), but because I find it pointless to have money as an endgame. It has to accomplish an objectively meaningful end. Investing is an objectively meaningful end. Money corrupts people but it can’t corrupt God. So honestly if he wants 30% or more of my check then take the damn thing. He can do something better with my money than I can. I can see why tithing is difficult to sane and reasonable people. You’re taking money, money you probably made on that shift that you didn’t want to work because you may have been sick or you see that coworker that’s just too touchy feely for your own liking (or at all) and everything goes wrong and your manager wants to behead you because you might be the easiest target for them to chew out and get away with, yeah that shift? Give some of that money to a God who you believe doesn’t even listen or answer your prayers in the way you want Him to.

My answer to that statement: “OKAY TAKE THE DAMN MONEY I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO USE IT. I BOUGHT A PURPLE HOODIE WITH MY MONEY YOU THINK I KNOW WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING WITH IT?” (Seriously, my thought process at work)

One of my friends told me that they don’t know anyone that works as much as I do even if it meant survival. And I took pride in that. This sort of thing I’m doing is inherently unique. It’s inherently unique in its stupidity. I know it’s hitting some sort of diminishing returns here because I only have so many hours in a day but damnit I’d rather work like hell now and not have to work at all when I’m my parents age (sorry mom and dad, but your jobs and love for them HAS ESCAPED ME. AND I’M GLAD). I’m constantly exhausted and dismayed by people that don’t want to work as much as I do, I have high expectations for people who don’t care to want what I’m after, or don’t care at all in general, and I feel like every passing day I get to see my friends establish the life I’m working so damn hard to make for myself. I’m stubborn, I really am. I won’t quit. Even if it means my manager has to drag my passed out from exhaustion ass off the plane I was helping to load.

I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

Emory was a lot bigger than I previously thought. I'm not very sold on the idea that leaving home was supposed to be hard. I went to school here for 4 years as an undergraduate in the northern part of the state. I thought those previous four years of life in Georgia would carry over. I expected ti be what I could more or less label "picking up where I left off". In some ways it is and in the ways I needed to be that sort of continuation of my virtues, however biased I am in saying that, it isn't. My arrogance and brashness and pride, for no better and all the worse, isn't here. Uncertainty and fear have quickly replaced it and I'd rather my contrived arrogance and brashness be there. That's how I know to be. That's how I like to be. Rather, I've never been so willing to go with the flow and back when I was in undergrad, even during the year I took off before coming to Emory for seminary, I rode into each day recalcitrant and unapologetic about it. I had a plan and I stuck to it and I was able to be that way as much as I saw fit. Now if I search in my head for that obstinacy and pompousness it pulls up "Error 404: File Not Found" and I refuse to be okay with that.

It doesn't even feel like grad school yet. My roommate and I went to undergrad together, I'm closely connected to most of my friends from that time period, so the feeling of "grad school" is more like "Bachelors+". Which can't be good. This is Emory. A world-renown university that somehow looked at my application and went "Yeah sure we need someone to fill this seat". I'm pretty sure I'm not even in a high enough tax bracket to wipe my ass here. To be on Emory's campus itself as a student means, for you fans of the movie The Prince of Egypt, you're playing with the big boys now. This isn't small time college anymore. Messing up or succeeding here can really take a toll, for good and bad, on your future career aspirations. However, it's no more pressure than I was already putting on myself back in undergraduate only with the difference being one of actualization. My fear is that I'll run myself too thin at all the worst possible times.

Currently, if the registrar can update my student page, I'll be doing the first semester of seminary part-time. My biggest scare here is biting off more than I can chew. While I think it's valiant for anyone to do that (it's the academic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and I always admire anyone who does that for some odd reason I have yet to figure out), doing that here and now is a great way for me to drop out of school with failing grades because of the stress that I let get to me. Biting off more than I can chew, in school and at work, ends with me being jaded and bitter at everything. Back at home I took a job at the airport in Raleigh that I decided to take with me to Atlanta to assure myself that I'd have some form of steady income. This is the same job that had me up at 2:30am to get me to work at 3:30am, the amount of coffee I consumed could give a horse a heart attack and be measured in terms of tonnes, and the amount of money that the government has taken out of my paycheck (if anything, going out and working has turned me more liberal than ever before, rather than the "When you get a job and start seeing the government take out taxes from your paycheck, you'll turn into a conservative" I've heard and read as if it were some unwritten gospel floating around in its receiving communities) could probably lift a tiny Singaporean village out of poverty for at least six months. Seven months if they want to avoid paying for sanitation services. This is the same exact job that I will be doing at the airport and will have homework to do on top of that. I've never been one to turn down a challenge and this is the biggest one I've ever faced and will be facing for the next year.

I know I'll survive and be the best damn thing anyone here has ever seen. I just want to know how I'll do it. But let me give you two things I've taken away from the past few days here so reading this will have salient points.

I. Peace of mind is a luxury.

Even parking my car in front of my apartment complex leaves me worried that I'll wake up to find it on the blocks. I don't think Lawrenceville, GA is going to be that deprived of basic human decency and respect for other people's property but I don't know my neighbors. I don't know who these people are so therefore I don't trust them. The lease is only for a year, and while a year really isn't understood to be a long time anymore, it doesn't mean that it can't be a busy time. This is the first time I've ever had to do anything like this before and have the added pressure of making it look like I have it all together (when I'm clearly admitting that I don't here, if you haven't been paying attention). While some people are skilled at rolling with the punches, I'm terrible at it. I can take a hard punch but even Jericho fell. I would love guaranteed stability and consistency in my daily life between now and when I die but the moment I left home to move to GA for school was when I saw my peace of mind, created in the form of the parents I love and the home I grew up in and the social circles I helped create and thoroughly enjoyed, stay back in NC. Right now I'm in the process of finding peace of mind again and trying to create it and I'm not doing so great with it right now.

II. Blue Collar Jesus.

I work for a shipping company whose logo is purple and orange and whose services are entirely too expensive for you to be shipping your clothing and college textbooks with but that's just me. Now this is a difficult thing for me to say because I don't really know how to structure it but let me be as clear as I can: "I grew up around enough money to consider Emory an option whether it is an option that is realized through student loans or grants and scholarships" is the way I've characterized this school. Now I grew up with Hispanic parents and they are the two people that gave me the work ethic I have today. I don't like working hard but I dislike even more how it feels to be lazy. Even not exhausting myself with working as much as I was at home makes me feel lazy now. But working at the airport gave me a blue collar Jesus. Now that's not to say that my fellow students don't know how to work hard. Some will and some won't and I think the first year of seminary will weed out those with a crap work ethic. Seminary comes off as a monetary enterprise to me. The people that Jesus reached out to wouldn't be able to afford feeding their families for the day, let alone consider going to school for something as low-paying as seminary, let's be honest with ourselves. This blue collar Jesus isn't the Jesus I want. White collar Jesus is much more appealing to me. White collar Jesus is "I have enough money to afford reading 'give us this day our daily bread' as metaphorical rather than 'if you don't provide my literal food today then my family and I will starve'. I have a Jesus that is the latter. It's not the Jesus I want but it's the Jesus that I probably need and, whether I like it or not, this Jesus isn't going anywhere.