The Winged Heart

It’s only just over a week since I left my job, and I’m already feeling guilty about not making money.  Or rather, I’m feeling guilty about spending money without contributing any.  When I was working, I didn’t have a lot of time for hobbies that spent money.  Now that time is abundant, I suddenly have a wishlist a mile long.

So I’m going to complain about all the things I want to spend money on, or need to save money for.  I know, in the long run, it’s all trivial.  I’m not out on the overpass asking for change.  I have food on my table.  But in my day-to-day experience, I have to have something to occupy me, and the things that catch my interest happen to cost some money.  Maybe if I write about it, I’ll be able to transcend above my worldly desires to sew myself cute dresses and re-paint my old furniture.

Vacation – Nick and I have been talking about taking a summer vacation/1st anniversary celebration in September.  I mentioned before that we had been talking about doing a cruise, but I think we’ve decided it’s not worth the trouble to drive all the way to Florida where the nice cruises leave out of, especially if we’re just doing a 3-4 day cruise.  We didn’t really talk about the fact that it was also pretty expensive.  We’ve decided instead to do Six Flags since it’s so close.  We’ll leave early on Friday or Saturday, spend the day in the park, and get a hotel in San Antonio.  It will be fun and cheap, I’m pretty excited about it =)  So this one isn’t really guilt-inducing anymore.

Sewing – Thinking about going on a cruise got me thinking about what I would wear on a cruise, and got me longing for all the lovely dresses at ModCloth.  Those lovely dresses are quite expensive, though, and many are supposedly of poor quality.  Now that I have so much time, I really want to do some more sewing, so I went on a sewing shopping excursion to find materials for a dress.  I wandered like a zombie through Hancock’s trying to find suitable fabrics for the patterns I picked out, but I didn’t have much luck.  I got a lot of cute patterns on sale, and fabric to make a plaid tunic shirt and fabric to make kind of a nautical print dress.  All in all, I spent less than the price of one ModCloth dress, but I still felt a little weird spending money.  I also want to go to some of the eclectic indie sewing stores downtown tomorrow to find cuter fabric, but I’m worried they’ll be pretty pricey.

Furniture – I was so happy that Mom and Dad brought us a bunch of old furniture from my late grandparents’ houses, rather than us having to buy a bunch of new furniture.  A lot of it is pretty blah-looking though, painted beige (why beige??) a long time ago.  After reading Design*Sponge every day for months and months, I can hardly contain my excitement to strip all these shelves and chairs and dressers and repaint them in funky colors, with wallpapered insides and Anthropologie hardware.  But I couldn’t bring myself to make the Home Depot trip after my sewing expenses today.  I don’ have any idea how much the materials for stripping paint will cost, and it feels weird to just walk in and buy everything on my list without a thought.

House – I have mild House fever lately.  Really the only two reasons I actively want a house are to be able to play the piano without disturbing any neighbors, and to be able to get a kitten.  Neither of those are priorities.  But when you start looking at houses and convincing yourself they’re affordable, they just seem like the most awesome and wonderful thing in the world.  A house!  Of my very own!  To paint and decorate!  With an extra room or two for all of my crafts and hobbies, so Nick doesn’t get mad at me for using the couch as a workspace and leaving no place to sit.  And we live in Austin, so there is no shortage of cute little houses painted in funky colors.  But a house payment would eat up pretty much all of our extra income after bills, not to mention all of our savings for a down payment.

Loans – I still have a lot of student loans out there in the aether, I’m chipping away at them bit by bit.  Plus our car loan.

InDesign – No matter how much money I refrain from spending, there is one impending purchase that will overwhelm all my saving efforts, and that is InDesign.  It’s the one thing I must spend money on in order to make this cosplay calendar happen.  Back when I bought my Adobe suite at the student price in college, I think I saw InDesign in the Design Premium and thought “InDesign?  I’ll never use that!”  and then saw all the cool flashy video programs in the Production Premium and decided to get that one instead.  And now that CS4 has been outdated by CS5, my only options are to buy InDesign by itself for a ridiculous amount of money, or to upgrade to the CS5 Design Premium for a nearly equally ridiculous amount of money.  One more option is to enroll in a community college course for the fall and buy the program at the student price, for a very reasonable about of money, plus ACC tuition (which still comes out cheaper than options 1 and 2, plus I get a class).  By the time I decided that was an option, it seemed like most of the classes I would be interested in were full, but maybe I’ll take another look.  I’m running out of time to decide on that one though.  I know the program will be a good investment, and it’s pretty silly that I don’t have it considering it was the number one skill I learned at my last job and now I have no means to utilize that skill.  It’s just such a big chunk of change.  Maybe since we exchanged our cruise for Six Flags, I can buy it with a bit more ease.

New Computer – This is one Nick wants to buy for me, and we almost got one the other day.  My laptop overheats frequently and I can’t use half the programs and cool stuff I have for it, especially my tablet and Photoshop.  Nick also might want me to play the new Final Fantasy MMO when it comes out, and I would need a new computer for that.

So those are all the things that are plaguing me money-wise.  I know if I had them all, I would probably find a whole new list of wants to replace them.  Blah.

Nick and I have never really had a “my money” “your money” thing going on.  Even when we were just dating, whoever had the money paid for the date (well, not so much date.  Fast food dinner).  When I was working  at the library part time, I paid.  The semester after Nick had worked a summer internship, he paid.  I don’t remember talking about it that much.  The same thing happened when we moved here.  I had a job for about two months before he got one, so I paid for everything when we went out.  We haven’t gotten a joint bank account yet but that’s just because we can’t decide on a bank.  As for my purchases now that I’ve left my job, I’ve still got plenty of money left in my account to pay for them myself.  Maybe I should consider that money to be my whatever money.  I’ll pay for my student loans with it, and I’ll ration it out for sewing projects and InDesign and other things I want.  And when it runs out, I can figure out what to do next.  Maybe by then I’ll be making some kind of income myself.

Still, I can’t help but feel like I should be making money.  The one thing I always go back to is commissions.  Whenever I’m browsing deviantArt, and I see an artist who does commissions, I always check their prices and policies.  I always think to myself “I could do that.  I could make $20 off a drawing.  I can draw.”  There’s something so self-sufficient feeling about it.  It’s hard to make a living off of freelance art, but what an amazing feeling to just create art on demand and be paid for it.  I think that’s the most appealing aspect of it to me, that I might have a skill that I could be paid for, right now.

But me and art.  We have an unstable relationship.  I don’t have the self-confidence I used to.  Every time I think “I could do commissions, I draw as good as that person,”  I also immediately think “Are you kidding?  How many times have you tried to do drawing projects for other people and failed?  You can’t even draw for fun anymore.  You can’t even make yourself do one drawing a day.  You can’t draw anatomy, You don’t draw arms, or legs, or hands or feet.  Your ink work sucks.  You have a friend waiting on you to finish page 3 of the web comic you eagerly agreed to help with, he’s been waiting for about 6 months now.  Do you really like to draw or do you just like looking at pretty drawings?  Do you really think you can draw well, or did you just used to be able to draw well compared to other people in your age group?  Your computer can’t even handle using the tablet and photoshop you own, you’re never going to get good at digital art either.  You just don’t have the dedication to be good at art anymore.”

Blah.  I’m not feeling any better after writing this, and I might have made myself feel a little worse.