It's Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas
Yesterday someone put up a decoration that played Santa Clause is Coming to Town on a loop in terrible 8-bit quality. I think I've identified it as a wreath at my neighbors place, which is somewhat reassuring because hopefully that won't have this on a loop for anything more than 100 times.
When I was a kid I whole heartedly believed in the tooth fairy. I guess since I was hispanic I also believed in El Ratón Pérez which is basically a rat. For whatever reason I wasn't scared of a rat or a fairy visiting my bedroom at night, maybe it was because they would give me money and leave me a note. I remember trying to stay up late to catch the tooth fairy, but I'd always end up falling asleep.
Once the tooth fairy forgot to show up. So the next day my mom faked a call to the tooth fairy, except I suspected that it was fake. I demanded to speak to the tooth fairy, but of course wasn't able to. I remember trying to compare the handwriting on the notes to my mom's writing. I was interested enough in getting to the bottom of who the tooth fairy was, after all why would you leave such a wild mystery like that unsolved. However, I wasn't smart enough to consider that if I discovered the tooth fairy for a fraud that the $5 per tooth that I was getting would no longer show up.
I'm pretty sure that well before all my teeth fell out I had gotten to the bottom of who the tooth fairy really was, but I don't know if I just made the exchange transactional and demanded $5 per tooth straight from my parents, went through the whole ruse, or decided not to collect on the free money.
I have an interesting relationship with the truth where I often feel compelled to tell people the truth. For instance, I have told 3 different women that I didn't enjoy the act of kissing. Effectively one women after the other. One of those women knew me well enough to more truthfully communicate in some capacity how she felt. Anyway sometimes if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all? When I told this story to another women she said if someone said that to her she'd jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
My intention was really only to explore my desires, and what I enjoyed, but when you're telling the only other person engaging in the act of kissing with you how can they not take it personally. I think a weakness of mine is being able to anticipate how bad a social / emotional experience is like until I've been through it myself. When my brother broke up with his ex it seemed like he stopped eating for a few days, and was super sad. I couldn't relate and didn't understand until I experienced something similar myself. I'm sure one day someone will tell me that a shared intimate experience they had with me was pretty bad, and they might not even mean that I specifically was the bad part of it, and I'll feel terrible. Until then it's hard to grasp the feeling. In any case I don't know if I'll lie to my kids about the tooth fairy.
A feeling I never bothered thinking too hard about was being excluded by Santa Claus. Growing up in majority Christian countries it's hard to not see the influence of Christmas. There's so many Christmas songs, movies, Coca-Cola is even making ads with Santa Claus, and of course there's children receiving presents from Santa Claus. Either I don't remember feeling excluded by receiving gifts from Santa Claus or I never did feel excluded.
What I felt more excluded by was going to my neighbors on Christmas and seeing all the gifts that they had received. One year they were busy playing on their Nintendo DS, or their Wii. They had remote control cars, new skates, new clothes. It was American exceptionalism delivered right to my face. At school people wouldn't bring in their gifts so I wouldn't notice, but at someone else's home you could see almost the entirety of what they had received. Meanwhile my brother and I wouldn't really receive Hanukkah gifts. My mom explained to me that she could buy us things whenever we needed it, and we could use our allowance to pay for the things we wanted.
It's also not like we were deprived of video games or other things. We had a basketball hoop, bikes, skates, a skateboard, at one point my brother had a unicycle. We had video games from gameboys, N64, Xbox, PS2, DS's, Xbox 360. I thought we would never pay for an online gaming service, but we also had that. My brother and I were one of the first people to get Guitar Hero and later Rock Band. We also had a lot of musical instruments enough to host band practice at our parent's home, and our parents were nice enough to for over the course of many weeks put up with friends coming over and practicing for a few hours.
We had a bass guitar, a guitar, and a keyboard. Amps for some of these instruments, and a drum set! We also weren't deprived of other experiences. My brother and I participated in recreational leagues, had some private music lessons, and went to camps in the summer. Although it wasn't super common I did go to a sleep away camp for a week once, which was a band camp.
When I was in my senior year of high school a friend learned that I didn't receive presents for Hanukkah, nor for Christmas. I think jokingly he said my parents didn't love me, and that he would adopt me. I may have given him a baby picture to carry around in his wallet as my adoptive father, but this is a dubious memory. Generally though I love the carrying a baby picture of someone whose is not your child bit! I think the one thing I got from my "adoptive father" was that he asked to borrow a $1 and mentioned that he would return me $2 after, and he did. Maybe he was trying out some pyramid schemes.
The main thing my real dad was pointing out today was that we weren't able to go on vacations every year, and that sometimes things were tight. My dad spun the financial tightness as an opportunity for us to be mindful of how we spend our money. Sometimes we might expect a rich family's children to be spoiled, and have their own set of problems for always getting what they want. On the flip side if someone had a really tumultuous childhood particularly related around finances that could also effect their upbringing.
The day before my mom had pointed out her dad was not as careful about saving money as my dad's parents. This morning I was trying to figure out what the difference was, and my dad was relating it to upbringing as well. He was saying if you struggle as an immigrant then maybe you'll be more careful. It's interesting because my dad at one point was yelled at by his mom for not spending enough money on vacations.
I would say that the upbringing I had did come with its own financial insecurities. For instance, to this day I still make a pretty active effort to not spend a lot of money on restaurants. Although, I lived in a luxury apartment in SF I did have a roommate for the entirety of my time there. It kind of took my brother moving to SF and me observing him to get more comfortable with spending.
In October of 2021 I joined the climbing gym for a month because they had waived the initiation fee. The gym membership was like $90 a month. Growing up I had never paid for the gym, and the local gyms maybe were like $10 a month. In fact the local city gym where my parents go is $50 a year. Anyway a climbing gym is different than a regular gym. I really was enjoying going to the climbing gym. I think it was a benefit for my physical well being, it was an okay way to meet people, and I was making a lot of progress as a beginner. Largely due to the cost I didn't want to continue. There was an element of me that viewed climbing as frustrating, and not something that I wanted to continue, but I think the main reason was the cost.
A little earlier in 2021 my friend found a great deal on a gravel bike. A week or so earlier I had taken a fall going down Hawk Hill, and that day he went and bought a bike that I was going to check out. A little later he found me a great deal on a bike. I wasn't thrilled about spending 1k+ on a bike. I also didn't feel great spending a lot of money on bike gear, such as the kit, the cleats, the pedals, but I've been on so many adventures thanks to biking, and am really glad I purchased it!
Around June of 2022 I took the leap to start doing tap classes. Initially I felt that a $20 a week class was a big investment. After all in a month that would be $80 almost a climbing gym membership. I really felt like I needed to practice and make the most of the dance classes. However, when I convinced my brother to try out tap somehow one class didn't feel like such a big investment and at one point we were taking 3 dance classes a week.
I do think there is value to practicing on your own, but that requires a lot of discipline, and I don't think it makes sense to punish yourself for not being able to find the time to practice. In other words, it's better for me to have 1 tap class instead of none, and I'll get better if I go to 3. One element that helped taking more classes feel more acceptable to me was that my brother was earning less than I was, paying more and rent and didn't seem stressed by his finances, so I was probably overreacting.
To put a number on it the gym membership plus dance classes were probably around $3,000 a year or so. I think the overall quality of life improvements of those hobbies are well worth the price I've paid. Even today when the climbing gym membership costs more and I don't attend as frequently as I would like to.
It's also helpful to compare what my life was like prior to these hobbies. When I first had graduated college my main focus was on getting a computer science degree and making a career change into the industry which involved finishing a Master's degree part time while I worked full time. This meant that most of my time was either working or studying so I wasn't thinking about hobbies at the time. By the time I graduated in Dec 2019 covid happened shortly thereafter and I would spend a lot of time just lying in my bed after work which was definitely depressing me.
Having all these different activities to do has been incredibly nourishing and worthwhile, and I am quite fortunate I was able to experience the benefits in no small part due to observing my brother and his more relaxed relationship with money. Being able to afford these hobbies is definitely a lot easier because I earn a good salary and am very grateful / thankful for that. I also am still quite interested in the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movements, and try to have judicious spending while trying to strike a good balance. Judging by the reactions to the release of the new OpenAI model O3 software engineers job are fading out, so we'll see what the future holds which is a wonky way to end an article, but I must let you know that my hold on "How To Tell A Story" became available so maybe this blog can benefit!