errantember

I've been with Chase since time immemorial simply because they had a branch sort-of near my old apartment. Now, with America in the toilet because of their hard-to-believe levels of greed and compassionlessness, including repossessing a long-time friend's house, I felt it was time to take my money elsewhere. So I moved 80% of my money to Velocity Credit Union. Velocity is local, their checking and online bill-pay are free, and so far their customer service over two phone calls and one branch visit has been excellent. I'll move the rest over once my new debit card arrives. If you're not familiar with the advantages of credit unions over banks, you can find out more here.

I've become increasingly aware of how participating in our monetary system enmeshes me in all kinds of side-effects, intended or otherwise. I can't completely escape it, and probably wouldn't if I could, because there are a lot of benefits, too, but I am consciously making the decision to minimize my participation to only what is necessary and beneficial.

One major epiphany was how addicted I was to the system in general. When I think about things like "Where I will live? What I will eat? How I will get around?", like most people, I tend to ask the question "how much money do I need to do this?" But there *are* ways to do many of these things that *don't* involve money, and once you realize there's *one* thing you can with less or no money, you begin to wonder what *else* you can do without it.

I suddenly have more empathy for people who get really upset because, say, their property taxes go up. Because maybe, in their world, they've already paid off their mortgage, and they actually feel like they *own* their property, and that no one should be able to just kick them out of their home because they don't have $1000 more than they had last year. And really, this kind of world-view is *new* to me. I've been floating along in my "life costs money" head trip for my entire existence, and recognizing that money is, at least on some level, optional, is a total revelation.

I'm sure they're be more on this later.

No. Not over fleas. Sorry.

I killed over 20 by hand today.

But we'll talk about fleas later.

Much later.

The Victory I was referring to was, despite not being over Flea-kind, profound and multifaceted. It was a victory over laziness, bureaucracy, the Bush Administration, paperwork, and my own inexplicable emotional issues surrounding The Mail.

Behold!

This sad pile is all that's left of my enormous mail backlog that goes back over three years. Recognizing that while external motivation isn't my first choice, but is sometimes the ONLY choice to accomplish a task, I deliberately mixed my tax paperwork for 2005 in with this huge pile of crap I've had since before I moved into my house. Precisely as planned, panic set in some time yesterday when I realized that NONE of the paperwork necessary to do my return was in the proper place. Instead, it was in THE PILE! The Pile, having outgrown first a shoebox, then a medium-sized moving box of the variety used to fire people, finally took up residence inside a disused weekend cooler. Various sorties through the years have retrieved much of value from the Pile, and also had the effect of rendering large portions of it obsolete. However, the final push came tonight as, file box in hand, I sorted through the ENTIRE Pile. Though I was tempted to stop once I was sure I had all my 2005 tax paperwork, I persevered and managed to churn through the rest of it. What you see in the picture is the garbage pile, proving the axiom that the older the paperwork, the less likely it is to ever be used again. I'm guessing we're seeing about 85% shred-bait by volume.

In addition to cleansing my postal palette, I also finished my return tonight, and somehow emerged with a hefty refund.

Life is good.