My Baby Sister

My mother has a story she likes to relate about a peculiar interaction I had as a young boy. Another kid approached me (at church of all places) and informed me that his big brother could beat me up. I am told that I responded unfazed, I responded: "well, I can take care of my little sister all by myself". How do you respond to that?

 
 

It was not at all obvious to my young Catholic friend that caring for family was an impressive feat, and that's telling. Although it's a silly story it reflects pretty well our modern model for masculinity, which seems to vacillate somewhere between caricature and near non-existence. The standard is either an exaggerated gun-toting action hero or else the bar is set so low that its definition is someone who can appropriately appreciate football and beer. In other words, our model for masculinity is that of an adolescent. And yet at some point we expect men to grow up and become "domesticated" and are somehow surprised when they fail to meet our expectations.

 
 

For someone stepping into the workplace and economic independence without my dad as a model, this void is particularly disappointing. There has been an attempt on the part of some to create a kind of alternative model. The Art of Manliness a blog I follow is an attempt to get back to a different conception of masculinity, relating more to personal strength and responsibility than swagger and bravado. The internet can be helpful in helping me find out what I have to learn on my own, from teaching myself to cook, jump a car and invest my money, to the bigger question of how to negotiate my own way towards manhood.

 
 

I differ from the standard American 22 year old pretty substantially to begin with. I live in my widowed mother's house with my two siblings, one in college and the other in high school. I have a job and pay my mom a little bit of money to help pay for utilities and I cook dinner most days. We have a "family meeting" every week to discuss who is responsible for various tasks that need doing, like putting out clothes for Easter Seals or removing that fallen tree from our backyard.

 
 

In the United States it isn't a widely accepted practice for an adult to live with his family during the period after graduating high school and before getting married. But in the developing world, like my father's side of the family in Guatemala, expectations are very different. Children very rarely move out of their parents' house before they are married and since universities tend to be clustered in the same urban centers as the demographics lucky enough to attend them, college kids tend to commute from home; my dad and I commuting to Case together was an oddity in the US, but is identical to how my cousins got to college in Guatemala City.

 
 

So while my family doesn't quite fit with the norm, we try to carve out some kind of system that functions and I try my best to be useful. With my dad gone, I have tried to take on some of the responsibilities associated with being, as the cliché goes, the "man of the house"…with mixed results. It can be difficult at times to straddle the lines between being a mature older brother and a support to my mother. There are challenges and I don't always know whether I am doing the right thing. But I try. Maybe I can't quite take care of my baby sister (who can almost drink legally) "all by myself" but I feel proud of pitching in how I can to support the people I love. Taking care of your own family is way manlier than beating up someone else's.

    

A Daily Spoonful of Strong Kicking Medicine

Sitting around in the studios WRUW, I stumbled across this message from jazz drummer Peeter Uuskyla. It comes from the liner notes of the album medicina by the swedish trio of Peter Brotzmann, Friis Nielsen and Uuskyla. Even if you don't like free jazz (and not many people do) I think a lot of people can relate to what he says about music, the act of creation and life. I've produced it here in its entirety:

At work, the everyday job to make the living, ones daily bread. Thinking of breaking the chain of doing this samething. How bored do you have to be? How much money will you get for all these hours, days and years you are selling off from your lifetime? Will be there enough for your kids and the ones you love? Will there ever be enough and who will not get enough? Why must it be boring to earn ones bread? Must it always be boring? So if it's not going to be boring all the time, you have to shorten the boring time and use it as a reference point when defining the good time. To make the good times happen at least once a day, you have to get in touch daily with your dreams and visions. [bold mine]


Music comes first. The sound, the noise, shaped into form while letting it pass your body. It's difficult to keep and own the music, it's not like a piece of art. Maybe you can borrow it for a short while. You can anyway never just buy it and keep it for yourself. It's abstract and untouchable and therefore difficult to dissect. This music is never perfect or complete. It is always in progress. You can change it's direction, like your path in life. It's give and take. You must put in some of whatever you have, leave your fingerprints ringing, loud and clear. You are able to change the over-all sound by the way you are adding your own sound. Like painting and writing, but on the run, you never go backwards for correction. A living music is more ritualistic than a package of rehearsals and concerts. It continues day after day, changing slowly or fast, like life. It sounds now, in this moment, every day, living only once you have to act in every now situation. There is not too much time to talk about it while you better play it, guts out, music as life security, as a daily spoonful of strong kicking medicine.

And you may maybe be able to handle reality.

I'm Gonna be Rich

Well, not for a while...

While I'm spending the year as an AmeriCorps volunteer, I'm being paid just enough to cover, bare expenses.The Corporation for National Community Service, which pays my salary, bases our pay on the federal poverty level for the state in which we serve...which is not much.

Clearly I'm not in this for the money.

A friend and I were once having a discussion about our careers and I mentioned that I'd be interested in doing something different and interesting, even if I didn't make a lot of money doing it, arguing that being young is the best time in my life to not be making very much money. In econ-speak (because I'm a big dork) the "opportunity cost" of doing something like joining the peace corps is much lower when the amount of money you'd be making in anything else is less.

My friend replied by saying that "this is the main difference between you and me. I don't think about things in those terms". Asking what she meant, she explained that she didn't equate things in life in terms of money. Other things are more important.

Now I feel that the distinction is really a suckers choice: at its core money is just one abstract measure of the choices you have available, both how many and what kind. Trying to make the most of your resources does not need to be about some heartless pursuit of wealth for its own sake, but can rather be about getting what you want out of life. It's not money I care about. I care about my family, food, music, a good education. All of these require resources to sustain them somewhere along the line

That's also the philosophy of blogger Ramit Sethi, whose book I will Teach you to be Rich I discovered through a friend and who maintains a blog of the same name. He writes about personal finance and one of his core philosophies is one that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me; that money isn't an end in and of itself. Personal finance should not be about bragging about the hot stocks in your portfolio, but about helping you get the things you want out of life, whether it's saving up for an education or being able to retire someday and travel the world. For most people, money isn't really something that they want to spend energy caring about--as Sethi puts it, getting your personal finances under control allows you to worry about more important things in your life.

I bought Ramit's book and started on the six-week plan for managing my finances (such as they are), which isn't nearly as corny as it sounds like it is. As I figure out what I'm doing I'm learning some stuff and some of it I'm finding kind of interesting.

Ok. So maybe I am treating financial knowledge as an end unto itself. Maybe though, if I share useful things I find and my own experiences my friends and neighbors can benefit in some way. That would be rich (now that is corny).