People are complex, and we’re always changing. It’s hard to give the right advice knowing how radically people differ from each other but then also while considering where an individual is in their own personal development.
Advice that resonates with you now may not be relevant in five years; it may have been incomprehensible 10 years ago. Think about all the layers you’ve tried on and shed between 6thgrade and your 36thbirthday. Today, you’ll hear what you’re ready for.
When discerning the path to take in this moment, why not check in with your past selves to see the directions you definitely don’t want to go in? As long as you aren’t listening to these people, you’re making a good choice.
Q: After many years of working multiple jobs and cutting corners financially, I feel satisfied at work and am, at least, making all my bill payments on time. I keep nearly buying a big-name food processer that I am certain to use, but guilt makes me back out at the last minute. This has been happening for more than a year.
Should I just accept that I will never be comfortable splurging on high-end kitchen appliances, or bite the bullet (not the juicer I am agonizing over) already?
You As a 10th Grade Metalhead: Thrashing things up into tiny pieces is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But why do you need to do this to food? Just get in the pit and punch a stranger, then eat a plain burger with NO VEGETABLES ON IT OR NEAR IT, like every other day.
That Semester You Fell in With the Academic Marxists: You’re telling me you need to spend money just to be able to consume food, which you didn’t produce yourself? Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now? I have a stack of books Katya lent me that you need to read RIGHT NOW.
Why yes, I do defer to my friends a lot. I tap them in to most of my arguments in the classroom or the dorm. It’s just nice when these guys (and, uh, this is gender-neutral because some comrades are young women) bum me cigarettes I don’t know they shoplifted, but I strongly suspect they did.
If you got something new and shiny from a department store, you couldn’t let Tatiana see. I know that Tatiana isn’t her real name, it just says that as her Myspace display name, with the hammer and sickle as her profile picture. So, right, perhaps none of us is completely honest about our backgrounds or even what our legal names are.
My birth name is bourgeois. All given names are bourgeois. So are appliances.
Have Alexei or Vlad or whatever these hobos are really called shoplift you one maybe, to really stick it to capitalism. Just don’t tell Tatiana.
That Summer You Visited A Friend with a Sweet Tech Job: We have been doing this all wrong for TOO. LONG. There are so many possibilities, you just need to find the confidence to pitch this vision to an investor. Disrupt all your assumptions that hold you back.
I would definitely say R&D is the answer. Throw a lot of money at it, but someone else’s. Also: Legalize it!
Do you follow? I absolutely was not listening to your question but I will have my denizens troll or even dox you on Twitter if you disagree with my answer.
You at Your Desk While Attempting Your Novel: It’s a metaphor, clearly. All that baggage from the years you just couldn’t get enough food in you while working several jobs and paying those student loans, it hasn’t gotten any lighter. The weight—yes! Buy it, then weigh every piece of the damn blender, take those numbers and fold them into the narrative, somehow.
It would be so perfect in one of the (several) stream-of-consciousness chapters, or the middle part that is pure, unattributed dialogue. Just drop in the literal weight of this food processor as a subtle cue that only the most refined reader will get.
So meta! How could this be any shorter than 1,000 pages?
That Winter the Gym Became Your Life After THE Breakup: Invest in it, it’ll be worth it. Let it suck you in or whirr you around or cold press you or whatever it does. Make sure you dominate every conversation with protein smoothie recipes and don’t let any other topics come up.
It’s a healthy outlet, right? This food processor is my top priority now and if things hadn’t gone the way they did I wouldn’t be able to see that. So drop all that money and use it NINE TIMES PER DAY, never eat solid food again, change absolutely every habit so that really, when you look in from the outside, your life is so different it’s unrecognizable and basically brand-new.
Like the past never happened, and the troubles you faced could not and will not ever find you again. PUREE THAT KALE AND FORGET YOUR FEELINGS!
Little Old Lady Comedy 