A Demystification: Eve

Day 16: Money

WORD COUNT: 953

Lyn doesn't care about money. It's a means to pay her bills because pay her bills she must, but she has never even attempted to hide her disgust for the stuff. It was difficult for her, growing up with a family that practically worshiped the stuff, to turn away from the mighty greenback and live a more bohemian lifestyle. That was not to say that her family had a shrine to the Benjamins, or anything, but her parents had always fostered the belief that money was practical; it made life easier. It was the reason most of her family had gone into "useful" careers: lawyers, professors, engineers, scientists, computers. Even Lara, the artiste extraordinaire, had a day job as a graphic designer that made her enough money to take a vacation out-of-country every year.

Perhaps Lyn should have listened to her family. She worked for $15 dollars an hour at a bookstore cafe, and it took her four years to get there, having taken the job after graduating from college with a degree in British Literature. Her boss had hired and promoted three times in those years, always passing over Lyn in favor of someone else. The assistant manager had been hired almost a year after Lyn had, but every time it came to promotion time, Lyn found her application denied. Apparently, her manager had assumed she would only be there a couple of years before she found a real job (especially since she had a degree) and her still being there was a marker of a lack-of-ambition. He was willing to let her work full time, but until she could prove herself worthy of promotion, a barista she would remain. So a barista she remained.

It was enough to pay the bills and pay for any of her eccentricities. She had a car, but she'd paid that off two years before, and insurance was low because she was a "safe driver". Her cable was pretty cheap because she didn't get any of the premium channels. Frankly, as long as she had BBC America, she was good. And everywhere had free WiFi these days. She'd been fortunate enough to get out of college without any debt--her parents had set aside for her from an early age, and she'd earned several scholarships--and her bills were pretty low. Her biggest expense was her books, and she got those at 50% off because she worked at a cafe. In the end, Lyn actually managed to put several hundred dollars away a month for...well, that was the problem.

Lyn didn't know what she was putting the money aside for, except for some vaguely held notion that it was good to save. She couldn't undo all of her parents' lessons, after all. It would be nice if they left her alone to make her own way a bit more, especially since she seemed to be doing just fine, but since her parents insisted on making money a marker for success in life, she supposed that she was the 'unfortunate child'.

She was happy the way she was. That was the point her parents never seemed to understand. She was happy. Money was just a means to an end. Maybe it was just a lack of discipline on her behalf, but the idea of sitting through years of schooling to get a job that would make her miserable just because it paid more money...that seemed stupid. Why sacrifice your life, your youth, and your passion on paper that only has meaning in your imagination? Especially if you can do just fine doing something that made you happy? If money came as a side effect of that happiness? Great. But Lyn didn't even know what she would do it. There were vague plans of going back to school to get an M.B.A. so she could open her own cafe slash bookstore, but that was mostly just to appease her family.

In reality, Lyn had no idea what she wanted to do. And that included what she wanted to do with her savings. Investing seemed dumb since it was almost impossible to get your money back in its entirety, but that really seemed to be the only thing she could do. Or she could put it into a high-interest-yielding...you know what, this was why Lyn hated money. It was stupid and it was just another thing to worry about. Hell, it was the biggest thing that people worried about. Didn't it seem dumb that people worked so hard at jobs they hated (most of the time) for decades at a time, just to have money? It was an on-going battle for the biggest everything that only the makers of everything won.

Lyn was not particularly bohemian. She would never fit in at bonnaroo, for example, because she liked electricity and running water (and showering every day) too much, but she did appreciate their free-spirited lifestyle. Provided, of course, that she wasn't required to compost her own poo in order to free her plants. That was going a little too far. And most of the people at bonnaroo are on drugs, which Lyn would never do. But aside from that, Lyn was totally down with the bohemian lifestyle. It meant that there was someone else out there who thought money for the sake of money was stupid, and she hoped they understood (in a way her parents never could) that life was mostly about searching for something, maybe because they were searching for the same thing.

Probably not, though. But maybe. Maybe they were looking for something to define themselves, for an understanding of themselves within the context of the universe. And then they could care about something as stupid as money.