thoughts on the future

it occurred to me last night while i was driving home from mountain view (where i had lovely thai food with two friends and happily ran into another couple we all knew and went for gelato with them) that in a way, i'm lucky i never really got a 401k going at any of my previous jobs, since everyone i know who has one has lost so much value in theirs as the market has dropped. so here i am, 35, with no savings of any kind -- but if i start buying mutual funds now, while the market is so low, i'm liable to do very well on it, assuming i choose the right funds.

of course, i know nothing about how to go about doing such a thing, so now i've had to dig out those books on financial planning for women that yong_mi sent me a few years ago that i never got round to reading because i was too busy being a big loser. but hey, if i'm going to be pulling in extra cash contracting, i should definitely invest some of it for the future.

a totally unrelated side note

i got the following email from M2 today:

patty's best friend stacy's wedding ring inscription:

"center of the universe"

her husband's ring is inscribed:

"satellite"

why do people think this stuff is funny? can anyone explain this to me? i don't know, maybe i'm just some kind of freak because i'm hung up on the idea of marriage as an equal partnership. i don't relish the idea of cracking the whip over some hapless husband and playing the stupid power game where they passive-aggressively fail to do housework and then go out and tell all their friends they barely escaped from the ol' ball and chain, while i invite the girls over for tea and we all commiserate about our lazy and clueless husbands.

does anyone really dream of that? is that really something to look forward to? because it sounds awful to me. maybe i'm wildly unrealistic, but i don't intend to settle for anything less but a true partnership, free of silly power struggles.

pfui.

what with one thing and another, i've accomplished very little today. i promised i'd be done with something by tonight that is clearly not going to be done. i really must learn to tack extra onto my time estimates instead of letting my innate overconfidence screw me over.

if i were a GURPS character, i'd have Overconfidence, Loner, Indecisive, Chronic Depression, Laziness, Stubbornness, Shyness, Truthfulness, and a five point fear of rabbits.

which is really more mental disadvantages than most GMs would let you take, in a game, but hey. this is reality, where you can have all the mental disadvantages you can think of.

of course, i'd be completely useless as a GURPS character anyway. unless the party was composed entirely of intrepid writers and editors going off in search of the fearsome dangling participle.