I'm going on a cruise! Amazing, strange...more spontaneously than I usually do things. Friends found a great deal and asked if I'd like to go along too. 5 nights, with stops in Costa Maya and Cozumel.
Graduate school is not cheap, nor do I make much money. My life is provided for by loans and the minimal 10-hour a week job I am able to hold. I'm not extravagant, but I'm not incredibly stingy either. This cruise, however, feels extremely extravagant.
I talked this through a bit with my mom (who has always been a great financial advisor, helping to sort through what it would mean to spend or to save). She mentioned that it seemed somewhat strange that her children in their 20's were doing things like going on a cruise that she and my dad would not really think of doing. But then, feeling to me like a bit of permission and a bit of helping me rationalize, she said that there are certain things that we should do before we are loaded down with other debts and responsibilities. She equated this trip in some ways to her mid-college summer trip to Europe where she was a housemaid with time for travel.
Spending money walks such a fine line. Making decisions about when to spend and when to save, what is the responsible choice? When should I jump and take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself?
I'm not sure that this choice is the most responsible choice I can make, but, especially as I hear that some of the female professors at school are talking among themselves about how wonderful it is we are going on this trip, I realize that responsibility does not always need to be the determining factor. So, here I go, down the road of some responsible frivolity.
1 comment:
I totally agree. All work and no play makes seminarians overworked and burned out. Self-care is a very important part of being responsible, and getting away and doing something fun with your friends is a very important component of self-care! Let me ride my German hobby horse for a second: It is a legal requirement that all people who are working full-time here get 5 full weeks of vacation (6 in the former East). Part-time workers get their part-time equivalent of 5 weeks. The law calls this something like "rest and recovery" vacation. And people TAKE vacations, too. There are amazingly cheap and correspondingly popular package vacations being advertised in every travel agency. And traveling is all the more popular here since up until 15 years ago, it was all but forbidden. Anyway, enough of that. :-)
Just as an aside, we have some really cool female professors, don't we?
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