You must understand the whole of life.

I have run myself into a dilemma.

Somehow it seems I've spent a lot of money this month. Well, a lot for me that is. First there was the bike, $60.74. Then random yardsale-ing $18.50. For whatever reason I finally decided to actually get a new camera battery recharger and the Kodak website sucked me in. There was a little kit on sale for $15 that included a good charger and 2 sets of batteries. It was significantly cheaper than it would normally all be so I got sucked into an additional $15 purchase of a gorrila-pod, which is incredibly fun. $8.69 shipping for the order. Plus theres still the old random and unnecessary expenses of my pot-garden,$62.92, the aquarium, $8.54, and I even splurged and took the boy to the circus, $43.60.

Thats a ridiculously large amount of discretionary spending for someone who rarely spends discretionarily. Or well I do spend some but it's generally budgeted and over half of this months was not budgeted for.

But anyways all of my spending got me thinking. And I decided that if I had enough dollars to be spending willy-nilly like that I ought to be saving more. So I decided to double my Roth IRA contributions each month, 50% retirement 50% house, so that I'm investing $200 a month. Good for me.

Then this weekend I got it back in my head that I'd really really love to take dance lessons. So I started looking up studios in the area.

At cheapest you can get an hour lesson for $10 at quite a few places. So that doesn't really seem too expensive. But then the more I think about it the more it adds up in my mind. Thats $40 a month minimum. $80 if I go the ballroom route and drag M.

And while it's completely do-able for me I still have a hard time justifying it. $40 a month for 4 hours? And what about starting up flute lessons again. Or even if I could find a piano I could work that back up. I've invested millions of more hours in music previously to be letting everything slide like I am. Or I could use the dollars and take some kind of class from the local community college. Or stash it into any of the multitude of savings projects I always have going on.

Everyone thinks I should do it. They laugh at me when I go on about all of this. But really, these things matter to me.


"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life."