I just discovered a blog on personal finance called Moneyning. It has awesome articles on personal finance basics. The first article that caught my eye was about the two things that mattered in accumulating wealth.
Wealth = income – spending
It’s ridiculously simple, but I’ve never seen it so simply put.
I spent last Sunday at a coworker’s place, where we made brownies and played Super Mario Brothers. A non-conventional celebration, to be sure, but those of us who were there had a great time. We made the brownies together, which turned into a disaster. We each made a valiant attempt to choke down our individual portions. The rest was destined to become part of the compost.
I haven’t played Super Mario Brothers in eons. To be honest, it felt like we were skipping school to eat brownies and play video games. The four of us, ranging in age from 24 to 30-something, were jumping up and down and shouting at the TV and each other. It was great fun.
In a nutshell, it seems like the Lunar New Year is about building and rebuilding the relationships that matter to individuals. It’s a time for family and friends to reconnect with each other. New acquaintances visit and new friends are made. Traditions about how to bring in a prosperous new year abound, but the core point appears to be family-oriented.
In North America, and possibly around the world, the Lunar New Year is considered loud, red, gold, distinctly Chinese (which it isn’t, necessarily…) and focused on prosperity. While most of these aspects can be observed, the true focus is on family.
As I was mulling over whether the celebration of the Lunar New Year in Taiwan was akin to the celebration of Christmas in Vancouver, I realized that it was.
Brief and overly-simplified overview…
Christmas:
Colors – red and green
Food – specially prepared festive food: fruit cake, gingerbread men, eggnog, turkey, stuffing…
Gifts – presents
Religion – roots in Christianity and the Roman Winter Solstice
Main point – family, love, thankfulness
Lunar New Year:
Colors – red and gold
Food – specially prepared festive food: new year’s cake, assorted snacks, chicken, tangerines, expensive dishes eaten rarely, sausages…
Gifts – money in red pockets to children and students
Religion – roots in Chinese folk religions and Buddhism
Main point – family, love, filial piety, thanks for the end of an old year and a look ahead for the new year
There are many differences, naturally, but they do appear to be somewhat related. Regardless of the superficial differences amongst cultures, I believe that people are not that different from one another.
Happy New Year!
My school gave all of the students, teachers and admin staff 7 days off for the Lunar New Year, aka Chinese New Year. According to Wikipedia, “Chinese” New Year is also celebrated by “Koreans, Tibetans, Bhutanese, Mongolians and Vietnamese“. The first time I realized that was when a Vietnamese friend got annoyed (and rightly so) with me for “owning” a celebration that was hers too.
The streets have been really quiet in Taoyuan. The majority of the shops on my street are closed and the few that are open are making money hand over fist. Most people have left Taoyuan for their hometowns scattered across Taiwan. As a result, my normally noisy apartment building is almost deathly quiet. Good thing I have my little guys to keep me company.
That last line sounded like a good exit line…but wait, there is more. While my little guys are very cool, they can’t talk. Luckily for me, a few friends are staying in Taoyuan/Taipei and they have invited me over to witness celebrations in keeping with Taiwanese/Han Chinese tradition.
Two days ago, I went to my coworker A’s house to have dinner with her family and several other lucky foreign teachers. We had seafood hot pot, cake, wine and great conversations.
Today, I went to a friend’s house to meet his grandchildren and say hello to his 92 year old mother. That’s right, there were 4 generations under the same roof, all there to celebrate family, food and to bring in the new year.
Tomorrow, I will be heading into Taipei to have lunch with a friend of my mother’s. I expect that her children and grandchildren will also be there and we’ll all have a blast.
So much for posting something new each and every week. I guess that’s why gyms make so much money on memberships in January.
It’s been an interesting week. Earlier this evening, I was at the company annual dinner. In North America, an annual dinner would likely occur just before Christmas. In Taiwan, at least at my school, it occurs just before Chinese New Year. As expected, there were speeches, food and a raffle.
What was sort of unexpected was the fact that I won the 2010 Outstanding Performance Award.
The award went to 16 Taiwanese teachers and 8 foreign teachers, from a pool of about 250 Taiwanese teachers and 100 foreign teachers. (I fall in the “foreign teachers” category.) The award was for writing creative lesson plans, developing strong student-teacher rapport, good communication, attendance and student retention. The head office announced a list of qualified teachers last week and school directors, along with senior teachers could nominate individuals for the award.
I’m proud of my work and I think I do a good job, but I’ve only been here for just over a year. I wasn’t expecting to get the award. As a result, I’m feeling ridiculously pleased right now and wanted to share the good news.
A few weeks ago, I came across a series of podcasts done by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne of Manager Tools LLC. This series is so incredible, even the best adjectives would be insufficient. It’s completely blown my mind.
They talk about careers and the various things that go with it, such as resumes, interviews, professionalism, etc. Their tips make sense and while I haven’t yet given their tips a test run on any potential employers (or my current one), I can see how their advice would work.
As a result of listening to their casts, I’ve fixed my resume, updated my LinkedIn profile, created a Career Management Document (which is essentially a really long resume) and bought a bunch of career/business books. These were all things that I thought I’d do when I needed a job.
In hindsight, that thought process was flawed. If I’m unemployed and struggling with my sudden cut in cash flow, the last thing I would need is more stress. Trying to remember what one did 3 jobs ago is difficult.
J.F. Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Though I’m not sure anyone can describe 2010/2011 as sunny, I think it’s time to give your roof a close inspection.
It’s stupid, really, but this past week, I realized that time hasn’t stood still.
Shocker, I know.
It started when my partner told me that his sister just got engaged. She’s a wonderful person and I’m really happy for her, but I was thinking…wait, why are people getting married? Didn’t we leave school not too long ago? She’s also two years younger than me, so if she’s old enough to get married, does that make me really old?
I put that thought out of my head and went on with things, as usual. Then I found an old friend via Facebook….who is now engaged to her partner. “That’s cool,” I thought. But wait…we met our respective partners at around the same time. Wait….how long has it been? Oh my. A little over 5.5 years. Okay… I chalked it up to the fact that she was a year or two older.
Then temptation hit.
I clicked on the “People you may know” option. I found some old friends from high school so I went on an adding binge. I also Facebook-creeped some of my former classmates. It’s not quite the thing, I know, but I couldn’t help it. I needed to know, like a drug user needs his/her fix, if it was just these two couples I knew or if this whole marriage thing was a trend.
There were a surprising number of former classmates who used pictures from their wedding as their profile pictures. Then I started seeing kids. Babies and toddlers. Naively, I thought, “That’s sweet, s/he’s posing with her/his nephew/niece.” This lasted until I kept seeing the same kid, along with family pictures.
At this point, I’m having a heart attack and then I realized that this year, I’ll be turning 25. That’s a quarter of a century.
Obviously, I’m not as old as the oldest person on this planet nor am I as young as the youngest person. I’m also not generally hung up on age. What I found the most shocking was that I hadn’t paid much attention to the passing of time. I value time and make “to do” lists every day (I’m just that cool), but I hadn’t really thought about how days become weeks which then become months and years.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but when I did, I realized that I had:
a) finished university
b) found a job afterward…in a foreign country
c) signed a lease for my own apartment
d) bought my own source of transportation
e) bought some pets (which are not yet dead from neglect)
f) been in a stable relationship for a decent amount of time
g) a number of friends already married or getting married
h) a number of friends with kids
By most metrics, that makes me an adult. One doesn’t need all or any of those points to be an adult, but if one is keeping score, I’d probably fall into the “adult” category. (Which is something I still think is really strange.)
I know the grammarians among us are reeling as they get to this sentence, but I’m just so shocked, it’s all coming out, stream-of-consciousness-like. Maybe later, when I feel more normal, I’ll come back and edit. Or maybe I’ll just pretend this post has fallen into a deep dark hole.
Oh, and by the way, I’m going to take up the WordPress Blog a Week 2011 challenge. It’s cheaper than getting a therapist.
tick, tock...tick, tock...
I finally found a place I can call home for the next year or so. I moved in on January 1st and I’m not finished unpacking yet. The most important things were unpacked first: computer and food/kitchen stuff. I’ve been taking it easy over the rest of the stuff and putting a few things away at a time.
What I’ve discovered (especially when carting heavy boxes around) is that I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff. Most of this “stuff” consists of books. Although English books are harder to come by and fairly expensive (by Taiwanese standards), I love books. New books, used books…I love them all.
Since I’m about 45 minutes away from Taipei, I go to CAVES books, near the Yuanshan MRT station, for their lovely, but small selection and to Page One in Taipei 101 for their much more extensive selection. The KingStone bookstore near the Taoyuan Train Station occasionally has an interesting book, but their “Foreign Language” section generally consists of novels featuring sparkly vampires and boy wizards with lightning-shaped scars.
Come to think of it, my books were the third thing(s) I unpacked. Now I know my top 3 priorities.
Not sure how I got from moving to books, but I guess that’s what happens when I go too long without caffeine. Don’t worry, the Exciting Saga of Beatrice’s Moving-In Experience will continue in another post.
I’ve been looking for a place to live in Taiwan for the last 2 or 3 weeks. Some landlords/agents are really helpful and others are…not. I’ve seen about ten different places and will have to decide by the end of this week.
At one point, I saw a house on a local home renting/buying site and realized it had gone down in price three times. It was stunning and I couldn’t figure out why it was still on the market.
NOT haunted, by the way
The logical side of me said, “Maybe there’s a reason…such as the fact that there’s a recession going on.” The irrational side of me said, “Maybe it’s haunted!”
I thought that there was no way for me, as a foreigner, to find out whether a place was haunted. Given that my reading ability in Chinese is really low and the fact that I’m still new to the area, I figured that even if something had happened in a particular space, that information would be really difficult to uncover.
I was wrong.
I was talking with a Taiwanese coworker, and I joked that even if several murders happened in an apartment, I would have no way of finding out. She then told me very seriously that if the agent/landlord doesn’t tell me truthfully about any unfortunate events, my rental/purchase agreement would become nullified.
I went to take a look at a place (the apartment shown in the picture above) the next day and thought to test this out so I asked the agent if that apartment was haunted. The question sounded stupid to me, but to my surprise, he answered me very seriously and didn’t think my question was strange.
Later that day, I came across this article.
A man has been sentenced to prison for eight months for selling a house without telling the buyer that someone had committed suicide there….because he did not tell the buyer surnamed Chang (張) that it was a “violent house” — a term meaning that an unnatural death, murder or suicide had occurred at the house
Whoa.
I’m back.
It’s been more than a year and a half, and I’m finally back to this blog. Why am I back? It’s odd, but my fingers have been itching to type randomly for a little while now, and I thought I’d indulge them.
If you are reading this, and you followed my blog in May 2009, thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m sorry for not coming back earlier. If you are new, it’s possible that you found me by searching for “femininity” or “masculinity” or other similar terms. While I will still blog about issues affecting women, I’m going to change it up a bit. I’m basically planning to blog about random stuff that I think is interesting or important. On an off day, I’ll blog about the mundane.
I sincerely hope that if you are still reading this, you will not abandon Ms. Beaker (my superhero alter-ego) due to the changes I have planned.
 | mwhitney on Lunar New Year in Taiwan |
 | Ms. Beaker on Getting old |
| Ms. Beaker on Career Tools Podcasts |
 | Wendii on Career Tools Podcasts |
 | 2blu2btru on Getting old |
