So I just opened a Roth IRA (a retirement account which is taxed now, but then is not taxed when I take the money out after I’m 60). Specifically, after reading blog posts like this and being reminded of the awesome power of compound interest, I realized that I very much would like money to retire on and can afford to put a little bit away every month.
I’ve had an ING Direct savings account for a couple years, and have been really happy with it, so I decided to take a look at their IRA mutual funds. I ended up splitting my initial investment ($250) and monthly automatic investment ($50/month) evenly between a general domestic large-company index fund (in theory, lower risk than just straight stock purchases, and moderate-but-steady reward) and a global science and technology fund (in theory, higher risk and higher long-term reward). Idea is that if I get an annual return of 10% (optimistic but historically reasonable for a 40-year investment) and invest just that $50/month (so $600/year or about $24,000 over the next 40 years) it’ll be worth $300,000+ when I’m 63. If I can bump that up to $2000 a year (about $166 a month or about $80,000 over the next 40 years) it’ll be worth over one million dollars by the time I retire. Continue reading '(Financial) Growth'»
Note: I’m trying to go through old emails and post things I think are interesting and useful to remember. This email (subject as the post of the title) was sent to a friend of mine on 11/07/2004. She was directing Vagina Monologues my Sophomore year of college. I auditioned and felt super-awkward about it, and sent her this soon thereafter. She was super-supportive, and we’re really good friends to this day. And, rereading the email 3.5 years later, I can’t even begin to believe how far I’ve come. (Which feels weird, because I’m bad at self-praise!)
[Name removed],
This is a rather selfish email. You may disagree, but – for better or for worse – I’m writing this for my own comfort and stability. I’ve been thinking a lot since auditioning for Vagina Monologues, and quite a bit before as well, and decided that I felt able, and what’s more wanted, to come out to you and tell you that I identify as transgendered.
Continue reading 'I am unable to come up with a good subject on command'»
When I was seven, a flower grew out of the back of my hand. It was one of those flowers that appear suddenly, right when you’re worried spring will never come and it will stay cold forever. Everything is cold and grey, and rain falls with a chill. Then, without warning (or so it seems) the grass near sidewalks and by trees is dotted with tiny flowers, each with a stem, two or three leaves, and a few blue or yellow or red petals. My flower was just the same: one day, my hands were like anybody else’s and, the next, the back of my left hand had sprouted an uninvited passenger with red petals.
I remember feeling neither panic nor wonder when I discovered my flower. Rather, I was curious (but not particularly concerned). I inspected where the stem met my skin, between the tendons of my pointer and middle fingers about a half-inch back from the knuckles. Neither my flower nor my skin seemed unhealthy or particularly distressed by their unusual meeting. I tried to compare how the skin looked around the stem to how it looked around the tiny, pale hairs on the back of my hand. My eyes hurt from trying to focus on something just out of the range of sight. Continue reading 'Growth'»
My vote is “You’re really stressed!”
Dream the First
Only dim memories – this is mostly straight transcription.
G in France; I don’t want to go back to the states.
Visiting fly back, meet at back of ET (I don’t know what this means, though I remember thinking it was a smart abbreviation when I wrote it down…)
Want to stay
Dream the Second
I’m walking around in Paris with a friend and we come upon a baby carrier stuck in a tree with a crying baby. We take the carrier down and begin to walk with it, and sit down to eat at a restaurant. When the waiter comes, we put the carrier on the table, but now it’s a LightBright.
Dream the Third
This was almost a cliche of thinking I’d woken up but then really still being in a dream…
I was having scary dreams, but then was OK because I woke up and G was there. Then G and I were in a bathtub (one of those nonsensical dream transitions) when she started cutting or poking me with safety pins. I remember vividly the blood in the water and the splotches of bright red.
Confront that which scares you. That which scares you is never as bad as it seems. (Unless, of course, it is as bad as it seems. Or worse.)
I came out to the cast yesterday, but it was rather anticlimactic. Things seemed awkward for a little bit (though that have just been me) but then by the time our run-through was over, everything seems normal. I can’t decide if I’m more glad that no one seems to care, or annoyed that, well, no one seems to care…
When G and I were on the train during the trip, I’d play with perspectives. We were facing toward the back of the train, and looking out the window we could see the countryside going away from us rather than approaching. I enjoyed closing my eyes and willing myself to feel the vibrations of the train as “going forward” vibrations. Each jolt of being pushed into the seat and slowing down became speeding up, speeding up became slowing down, turns became reversed with the centrifugal force pulling at opposites. It was like the famous Young Woman/Old Woman perspective illusion where, once you’ve seen both, you can switch back between them at will. I would throw my eyes open and see the landscape zooming past in the “wrong” direction and there would be a moment of disorientation before everything resettled.
Right now, anger and despair feel like that; as if separated by a tissue-paper-thin false wall. If I close my eyes and focus, I can switch dizzily between the two. One deep breath is all it takes, and I’ve moved from being on the verge of tears to on the verge of screaming.
Until I walk in the front door, I can imagine that everything will still be the same. I see the entryway, the stairs up to the second floor (carpeted soon after we moved in to give our dog – a small terrier – an easier time managing them), the living room to the right (with an arched passage from the main entryway and a piano off to the side of the roiom), the dining room to the left (with double doors paneled with panes of glass and the expandable dining room table we bought when we moved in), the hall to the back of the house (running next to the stairs). There’s a watercolor painting on the wall in the hallway of the house, as if seen from the street. It’s summer and trees frame the sides of the house, stretching out and above the frame of the picture and out into the world. The red bricks always fascinated me with their detail, each brick outlined in black and brown mortar. When I was young, after we first moved in, I wondered if – were I to look close enough – I would be able to peer into the windows and see myself looking at an even smaller painting of the house, peering on and on into infinity. Continue reading 'Going home'»
Comments (0) 
Themocracy