On Keeping and Getting Rid of Things

About five or six years ago, I gave up almost all of my video games. I said goodbye to my PS2 and all the games I played in middle school and high school. I gave up my Game Boy Color. I even gave up the Game Cube I scored from a garage sale for $10. […]

Dream: The Rectangle House

For the past several months, I’ve wanted to write several blog posts, but I haven’t felt right about them. I just can’t quite bring myself to do it. However, I do want to post more of my dreams, which does feels right, oddly enough. The Rectangle House dream happened in December of 2017. The characters […]

Savings Burnout

Well, it was bound to happen at some point. I filed my taxes last week, and I’m expecting a decent return. Now, there are a few things I could do with that money: dump it in my Roth IRA, add it to one of my savings buckets (personal? car? emergency fund?), give it away, or […]

Thoughts from the Gulch

I never have been an athletic person. I still remember the humiliation of running tests in elementary and middle school, when I was usually a person or two removed from the fattest. I started walking toward the end of high school and into college, and, not having grown up in a family that really participated […]

The Protestant Stupid Ethic

At one of my previous jobs, my company put me through a profiling test often used by other companies to fire people. That wasn’t their intention here – they were, in all honesty, a very good company – but there were concerns that I wasn’t very passionate about my work. By matching my profile scores […]

The Edge of Forever

People think you’re weird if you spend too much time ‘taking it in’. We go to our locations, snap our pictures for instagram (if that’s what you’re into), and go home. But I remember when I was a child when I didn’t have the option to get up and leave. I remember I would be […]

Breathing Again

Over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten rid of a great many books, mostly technical books that either duplicated content or covered technologies I don’t need to know. My relationship with books is long and complex, but the gist of the story is that I have, for over a decade, been addicted to books. In […]

Updates and Reflections on 2018

It seems a bit odd to be writing this on Christmas Eve, as I have really nothing to reflect on about Christmas itself. But I am sprawled out on my parents’ guest bed in my old bedroom and I felt it was fitting to write here what’s been on my mind this past week. Updates! […]

Thoughts on Cars

There’s one ideal way to own a car: Pay $0 for one that never breaks down. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be one of the best deals ever? Yeah, well, too bad. Every car decision is some combination of risk. You can pay a ridiculous portion of your net worth for a new car, […]

Personal Returns on Education

One clever life strategy is to carefully select your post-secondary education to maximize its ROI in your personal life. I’m not talking so much about monetary earnings as I am about the utility of specific skills in your life when they are used for you. For example, my degree is in Anthropology. This was a […]