My Homer Simpson Brain
Well I’m back to work after my lovely four day weekend, where I went to Seattle to visit my friends Amanda and Jeremy. I had such a wonderful time out there that I can’t wait to get back. I got back home on Sunday night, but decided to take Monday off as well. I had hoped to sleep in, but alas, I woke up at 7 a.m., as usual. That’s okay though, because it was very easy to fall asleep Monday night.
Amanda had wrote in her blog awhile ago about making a vision board for her family. I got a chance to see them while I was out there and decided to make my own. Vision boards are based on the laws of attraction. So I sat and meditated on what I want for myself, my surroundings, and our world. It just flowed right out. Then I went through my magazines and cut out images, words, and phrases that matched up with those desires.
I created four boards.
1. Self, body, love
2. Home, lifestyle
3. Wealth, career
4. World, community
I like the result!
Also, I wanted to note that I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was fantastic! Probably one of my favorite books that I’ve ever read. So now I’m finishing up The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. A new book I want to read is called Nudge, Improving the Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. It’s not a self help book, but a political theory book about choice architecting our society. Because essentially, we all have an inner Homer Simpson that makes really bad choices. Slate.com published a review on it and this excerpt is from it:
The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors’ view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your “automatic system” (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your “reflective system” (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental “heuristics” or cognitive “rules of thumb” that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month “free” trial ended (“status quo bias”) and why we buy lottery tickets (“unrealistic optimism”).
Very interesting!
So, last night I went out to dinner with Brian. We went to Noodles because it was an election night, and we’ve figured out that Noodles gives Barack good luck. It’s probably just a big excuse to eat yummy Noodles, but alas, it is our superstition.
Brian had a bad day at work and so I cheered him up and made him realize that things will get better. After dinner we went back to my house and we watched some of the primary coverage, and then he went home. It was a nice night.
Tonight I’m thinking about going to the Farmer’s Market or to Sunflower to stock up on some fruit.
I’ve been doing pretty well at eating the food I buy and bringing food to work. Funds are a bit short right now and so I haven’t even been bringing my purse into work so that I’m not tempted to go to the UMC. This has been working lately. I pack my breakfast, my lunch, and my snacks, and I bring in my 32 oz. iced tea. Well today it backfired a bit. You see, a couple of weeks ago I bought the two-pack Einstein bagels from Costco. Well I ate my last bagel yesterday. So for breakfast today I thought I would make some toast here since I’ve been keeping some bread at work to make PB&J and cheese sandwiches. Well I got here and the bread was moldy! So no real breakfast for me, because I don’t have any money with me. I made it work though by just enjoying my iced tea and deciding on an early lunch.
I’m so totally torn about buying food from the market or eating out in terms of cost savings and waste. Clearly, I just have to find a balance. Bringing in my own drinks to work is going to save me about $60 a month. I was spending $3.25 a day on fountain drinks. Now I spend $.11 a day with one 32 oz. iced tea, and then 32 oz. of water.
Bagels are another story. I was spending $1.60 on a bagel and a cream cheese from the UMC. Now I’m spending $.75 by bringing my own. That means that my usual breakfast is costing me $.86, instead of $3.20. That’s a savings of $46.40 a month. And I use organic cream cheese, which isn’t like the cheap stuff you get in the UMC.
Anyway, much like everyone else I know, we’re all trying to save some green. I guess every little bit helps. All it takes is a bit of discipline.
I’m thinking about trying another way to actually save money, like put it in my savings account kind of of saving. If my Homer Simpson brain begins to take over and I’m about to spend money on something useless or bad for me, I think it would be a great reward for my ability to resist those temptations by putting the money I would have spent into my savings account. Transferring money in (and unfortunately out) of my savings account is super easy to do. Maybe I’ll make a little savings account chart to have on this blog. So far today, I should add in $1.60 for the bagel and cream cheese I didn’t get. I seriously thought about going out to my car to get my wallet so I could get a bagel, but I resisted. We’ll see how this goes.
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