Happy Friday! The most difficult part of the Big!Work!Upgrade! happened today and I am beat. It went really well in my opinion. Very few bugs and faster performance. I give it 2 weeks until I am free of it and can go back to fretting over data.
And here is the Friday 5. On time, even. This week’s theme is Wolf! And everything ties into Aesop’s fables!
- When are you the tortoise, and when are you the hare?
I am the tortoise at work. I’m not slow, but I don’t rush either. And I get the job done. I am the hare when blogging. I create a schedule for myself. Great! I outline and set up blog posts thinking all I have to do is add photos and some words and I’ll get them out on time. And then I end up doing something else and all of a sudden I miss Currently and Friday 5 comes out on Saturday and I have to rewrite the “today is my birthday” post to “oh yeah I had a birthday.” - When are you the grasshopper, and when are you the ants?
I feel like I’m always the freaking ants, working and saving and planning. I know social media isn’t the definitive record of a person’s life, but sometimes I look at other peoples’ lives and wonder: when do you clean your house? I work from home, don’t even have kids, and don’t even have super-high standards for cleanliness and yet if I went out as often as some people do I feel like we’d be living in filth.
In terms of another moralistic story, I’m the Martha to others’ Marys. Hats off to Martha for keeping things running while Mary was philosophizing and Lazarus was living and dying and living again. - When were you the lion, and when were you the mouse?
I think it’s a pretty equal split. I’m very lionesque in a “nobody can help me I’m in this by myself o woe is me” way, but I’m also pretty helpful to people who think I can’t be. - Are you more like the town mouse or the country mouse?
I would rather have simpler things without fear than extravagant things with fear. I’m not brave. And this is a lovely lead in to the next question: - Which fable told in your childhood has resonated with you through the years?
Buckle up. When I was young, my mom won money at a casino in Atlantic City and bought me a big hardbound book of fairy tales (probably one of the most NJ sentences written, but I digress) and in it was the tale of the Fisherman and his Wife. Summarized thusly and probably inaccurately but the moral is still there: a poor fisherman and his wife life in poverty and squalor. One day he catches a fish and the fish starts speaking and says if the fisherman releases him, he’ll come when the fisherman calls and grant his wishes. All the fisherman has to say is:
“Flounder, flounder in the sea. Come I pray thee here to me!”
The man agrees to the deal and wishes for a nicer house. Boom. Done. His wife is painted as the greedy one, and she keeps demanding that he wish for more and more. So henpecked husband keeps going back to the flounder and escalating his wishes. He ask for riches, and a mansion, and then to be a king. They are never happy with their riches and blessings so one day the wife asks him to ask the fish to make him God. And the man does. The flounder becomes irate and rightfully cancelled all of the granted wishes and the man and his wife are once again poor and live in squalor. The end.
I think of this every time I know a person who is never happy with what they have and always strives for more material things. Because the flounder almost always wins in the end and yes you may end up with THING but it might just tear your family up or you go into debt and lose THING. And every time I witness someone (and sometimes myself, I’m not perfect) take that fall I say “Flounder Flounder” in the same tone you’d say “oh, well…”
And this is a Grimm fairy tale and not an Aesop’s fable but it has a moral and I’m sticking with it.
And that’s that. Now I’ll study for my CAE exam for an hour. Tonight is movie night. Tomorrow I might head to the farmer’s market and try to spend my CAE study time to catch the waning days of summer.
Need some more email in your life? If you’re a regular reader but forget to check in, you can subscribe to a once-a-week email with links to the week’s posts! Click here to sign up!
I was just wondering last night if I’m too focused on income. I live simply, and a recent pay raise has helped me live simply with far less stress while also paying down debt AND putting stuff into retirement. But maaaaaaan I would like to live less simply. I work in fundraising (while not being a fundraiser myself) and almost every day I ask myself, “How do people have three million dollars to just give away?”
I don’t have answers. I think I’ll meditate this evening just thinking “flounder…flounder” and see if I can find a little more peace. Thanks for the thread.
Thank you for the questions!