Brian's World

415A

So here I am, back at RPI. I’ll be honest, this is my fifth attempt at getting a blog out, lately I must have some form of blog constipation or what not. I’ve gotten a few paragraphs into it and then I say to myself… you can finish this later. So I come back to it a few days later, and its no longer timely. I had blogs in the works for move in day, the day before move in, last weekend, etc but they all got scrapped. Stupid me.

I’m not going to give up on this one, class starts at 11 and its only 10:10 right now. I can get this one out. Whew.

As I started with, I’m back here at RPI. Summer has come and gone, fast like always. Recent discussions have revealed that I really didn’t do much this summer. I worked at Mass Mutual for most of the time, where I wrote a php script to automate my work; and I did a little work in the mornings getting in touch with computers at a lower level. I like to step down off the programming, server, network platform and get involved with hardware and users sometimes. Its gives my mind a good change of thought, no more effeciency questions, no more uptime, just making things work. (pronounce the period)

I’m bad at summer, I think I took one “vacation” the entire time, and by vacation I mean Wednesday-Friday off. That was it, 3 days of actual rest and I’m kind of upset about it. I worked fairly hard, 9-5 or 8-4 most days and I get paid a decent rate (it averaged to $11.75 an hour). I haven’t multiplied it out by the number of weeks, but I’m sure I made a small chunk of change. I’ve been doing this for a little while, the past 2 years I’ve worked 8-12 all summer, so one would draw the conclusion that I’ve made x dollars. And yes, I have gotten paychecks that sum up to x dollars, but the difference comes in at how I can access my money. None of the money I’ve earned through work is something I can freely spend or do as I please with. The paychecks are in my name, yes, the account is in my name (and possibly my fathers) but the money I put in certainly isn’t mine to use. My parents like to control it, and its very frustrating. You know when you are young and people give you bonds/money for no reason. You’re 2, what are you going to do with a $10 bill. Nothing, so my parents would put that in the bank. Then came the time when all that money got transfered into a “college fund”, probably when I was in middle school. I knew little of my finances then, but I was ok having my account drained because I hadn’t “earned” that money, I has just been alive, thats all the work I had to do. Now that I am doing work, I’d really like that money to be mine to spend. I have no problem contributing some of it to my college fund or paying for my books or parking permit, thats fine by me. But I’d also like to spend it on item y, buy a z but I can’t. See the money is at some stupid “Polish National Credit Union”, I’m half polish so my dad thinks we, my brother and I, should put our monies there. Of course our savings accounts require us to physically go to the bank to do anything with the money, great if there was Polish National Credit Union in Troy. Of course my parents assure me that they will transfer funds to my debit card as necessary, but I can’t just say put x dollars on the debit card. (pronounce it) They want a reason, and most of my ideas are not reasons they would accept. I wanted to buy a hard drive this summer, and it took 2 weeks of fighting to explain to my parents what a hard drive was, and how I had filled up the other one. The debit card statement is sent to my parents, primarily because its a shared card with me and my brother… I’m not allowed one of my own, and I’m ok with that. Any drop in funds greater than the cost to fill up the Volvo with gas is scrutinized, it must be explained, accounted for. Yes, if this was their money I would say sure, scrutinize it all you want. But please, its my money, let me do as I please with it. I was the one that worked 9-5 everyday -3 this summer, not you. (I know my dad took more than 3 days off, Mom and Kevin hung out not working).

I dunno where I’m going, it just frustrates me when I can’t do things with money that I’ve earned. Maybe my parents are trying to teach me fiscal responsibility or something like that, but I’m moderately mature enough not to spend tons of money without thinking about it. I get uneasy when I hear people talk about how they spend money, buy this and that, when there are equivalent things, even smaller things, like an $50 stick of RAM I might like, that I can’t get because of the bureaucracy I call home. Its lame and frustrating to me.

Time management is something I need to work more on this semester.. but its been 30 minutes and my time is up. We should continue this later…