My Math teacher gave me a writing prompt. How dare she, right? Anyway, I was annoyed at the beginning, but when I started writing, I actually had fun and went way beyond the one paragraph that she asked for. Albeit nerdy sounding, I kind of liked what I came up with:
Recently I’ve tried to refinance my house, because interests went down. Unfortunately, along with interests, the value of the home went down as well. It was just four years ago that home prices were soaring. Buying 10 years ago and selling five or six years later would have given us a large profit just by sitting on the house. Also, I recently learned that my employer is not paying for my retirement anymore. Some teachers say that that’s fine because the banks will go bankrupt anyway and they will lose all their investment, so why waste their money in that way? I’m not so sure about that. I believe that I will have something to account for when I retire (I have to!), and that if my investment continues to grow, I will be in good shape. I am in an aggressive plan, such that even if my investment goes down a little bit one month, it is bound to go up again. Diversity also helps, so if some of the investments go all the way down to the point of becoming worthless, I will have enough other investments that will tend to go up and make up for the loses. In theory, these aggressive plans make greater profits in the long run (I’m talking 20 or 30 years here) than more conservative ones, in which the profit goes up steadily but very slowly.
And that’s life. Things go up and then they go down. It seems that inconsistency is the one constant thing in my life. Imagine a parabola that goes from negative infinite to positive infinity waiving up and down in the way. I like it that way, though. Who wants to live a linear equation kind of life? There’s no excitement, no surprises. Of course, if I want to convert dollars to some other kind of currency, or if I want to calculate the time it will take me to go from point A to point B when driving at a specific speed, the predictability of linear equations works wonderfully, but I rather die than to know exactly what is going to happen next each day of my life. I might lose everything by being in an aggressive retirement plan, while if I’m in a conservative one I will definitely make some money, but then there’s no excitement. There’s no jumpy line going up and down from month to month that gives you the temporary hope that maybe you’ll be rich by the time you retire and you may end up sipping Piña Coladas (virgin ones, by the way!) in your private island after having worked 30 years as a teacher, even if they odds of that happening are not very encouraging! It’s not fun to be stranded at the side of the road with a stupid car that won’t work after thousands of dollars in repairs, but hey, next time I have a car that actually works, I will appreciate it even more! All the pain and heartache that came from not being able to have a child for years made me appreciate my one year old more than any of my friends appreciate the twenty children they had in the last five years (it’s mathematically possible. I calculated it. Oddly enough, it tends to happen more frequently in Provo, though. It must be the water).
Even though I tend to be over-analytic and I like to understand everything that happens to me, I wouldn’t like to reduce every aspect of our life to numbers, unless, of course, I did it in order to make sense of the ups and downs of what already happened to me than to figure out how to make my life more predictable. I could have used math to figure out the odds of my wife and me having a child when we did, or even when I’m bound to pass away, but what would be the fun on that? After all, almost everyone would agree that roller coasters are much more fun than Mary-go-rounds, right?
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