Tonight, Mikey dozed off beside me for a grand total of 20 minutes while I lay beside him working out theoretical financial statements for the next five years of my theoretical business.
Sucking at math when I entered college has served me well at this point, because by having to repeat it, I’ve developed some semblance of math skills (i.e. I can divide and multiply numbers larger than a hundred). So it’s not the number crunching that gets to me when it comes to accounting: It’s the optimism that comes with having to forecast sales and losses for the next five years.
I don’t even know what’s going to happen in my life for the next five months, heck, I don’t even know what I’m having for lunch tomorrow, and I’m supposed to forecast what’s going to happen to my money for the next five years, how i’m going to make it grow and every little component that figures into that plan.
And as tedious as it all looks, there’s this unshakable element of romance to the whole endeavor: the plans you make, the emotions you invest when you devote yourself to something, even in theory; that whole act of folding and letting yourself cave in the face of something you want.
Tangent: I remember sitting in class with the CT girls and talking circumstances, and then Yas asked me “Why didn’t you wait?” which caught me off guard. Specifically because I had no answer, save for the one I could conveniently pull out of my ass, which was “I don’t know how to.”
So, yeah…Mikey, bed, 20-minute nap. I’m not saying the romance is gone because that whole element of planning and investing that we had 4- years ago is beyond us now, battered down by the reality of all those things we have no control over: work, time, even money. But watching him lying there reminded me too much of that same place we had in mind when we started making plans 4 years ago.
Alice Sarmiento 