I spent the first half of the day working on my finances. I use a spreadsheet to track all my income, expenses etc. Because I work freelance on an exclusively 1099 basis, my income fluctuates from month to month. As a result, budgeting can be quite a tricky thing. Until now, I have not actually budgeted my money. I simply paid my bills as they came and trusted it would all work out in the end.
I have been lucky so far.
Today I figured out a system that would calculate my budget based upon a percentage of my monthly income. It accounts for regular known expenses like rent and metrocard, and then calculates other items like dining out as a percentage of the monthly income. It is very complicated. Lots of math. I have not used my math so much in quite a while. It actually makes my brain hurt a little. Not the math part so much as all the cross-referencing between various sheets that have to delineate between income and business expenses and personal expenses and mixed expenses. Oy vey!
The second half of the day was spent working out for myself matters of aesthetics. I have been in a very introspective mood recently and have felt more of a need to reflect on my own thoughts and actions than to pontificate in public.
It is really difficult to narrow that stuff down. I have written extensively in this space about various matters of aesthetics and so on. I have gotten into numerous discussions about the meaning of this and that. Yet somewhere amidst all the words I got lost. It became talking about talking about talking.
And so, I picked up a copy of Dante’s Divine Commedy. I vaguely remember reading The Inferno in high school, but any real details were lost to me. I never did read Pergatorio or Paradiso. I am currently five Canto‘s into Purgatory. It is quite a trip! Very good reading to accompany an aesthetic introspection.
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it
I must talk about things other than good.
Tags: divine comedy, finances, money, path, practical theory
The Divine Comedy gets worse the higher up he goes.
I don’t know, something about the shameless deification of someone he never touched is a bit too much for me. I thought Vita Nuova was better at pulling that off.