thoughts

(I’ve been toying with this post for a long time – at least four years – and it never felt completed before now. More synapses freed for other thinking!)

Below is my list of my top ten priorities for if I ever win a million or more dollars. This is the stuff I would hope to do within the first year of winning. Clearly, some of them would be executed differently depending on just how much the amount was, and if I could receive it as a lump sum or annuity.

1. Hire a personal financial adviser. There’s no use to winning a big sum of money if you can’t manage it well. This comes with the caveat that I would likely first talk to the lottery commission, past lottery winners, and any random rich people I can locate to create general recommendations about what to do to manage my winnings.

2. Pay off the remainder of my student loans (If it was a lot of money I’d probably also help some of my close friends get out from under their burdens.)

3. Pay off a significant chunk of our mortgage, not necessarily because it is the soundest investment, but to free up income for other priorities. Also, make some sundry home repairs, like our chimney – which I will never otherwise pay to fix. (If it was beaucoup bucks, I would buy or build a bigger house with a pool and design a detached recording studio. We’d probably keep our current house, for sentimental reasons, but also to use as a visiting bands hotel or something.)

4. Secure or invest enough money to retire comfortably at 50. With the immediate financial drains out of the way, I’d want to firm up my future. All the frivolous living post-lottery could be a lot of fun, but eventually I am going to get older, and I’d rather work a little harder now than have to relearn how to work after spending all of my easily-earned winnings.

5. Evaluate lots of band stuff. Hire a booking agent. Upgrade/repair everyone’s instruments to their personal ideals. Likely record studio EPs or full-lengths as a solo act, with both Arcati Crisis and Filmstar, as well as with my new super-secret project. (If it was mega money, I would consider if I could salary enough of my various band members at a high enough pay to make it worthwhile for us to go on occasional (or: frequent) tours.)

6. Hire a personal trainer, voice instructor, nutritionist/chef, web designer, and maid service (all things I am terrible at doing on my own). Possibly also a French instructor, see below.

7. Get one or more graduate degrees, or go back for my undergrad in music.

8. Look into some form of timeshare in Paris. (Living there full time would interrupt a lot of other bits of life, but I’d certainly love to have a way to stay there more frequently)

9. Establish scholarship funds at Masterman and Drexel, potentially for single-parent children. (If I still had piles of money to spare at this point I would probably do something really huge for Masterman, like add floors to the building or something.)

Do you notice what that list doesn’t say? Go on crazy vacations. Quit my job or alter my career. Change my entire life. Why? Because when it comes to the basics, I’m already living as if I won the lottery, and you should, too. Clearly I might wind up in a touring band or going back to school for communications, but neither of those things are so different than what I do every day right now.

Or, at least, that’s what I say now. E proclaims it to be very boring, but these are the sorts of things I dream of doing! Who knows what would happen if I actually won.

I know all too well the February Funk I typically descend into each year.

You might not know it too well, because it involves me becoming a total shut-in for the entire month, totally cutting off all ties with the outside world – including blog ties. It is a special, wintry listlessness that let’s no ambition escape its grasp. The only thing that will sate it is missed rehearsals and hours of playing video games. It may cause me to  wear sweat pants for non-sweaty activities. It’s altogether terrifying.

This year I skipped it entirely.

Unlike an extra layer of blankets, you cannot kick of your accumulated fat when it gets too warm at night.

I’m still not sure how I accomplished that. Maybe it was the weather? Philly never endured any bitter cold this February and we skipped our seemingly-annual snowpocalypse. On the whole it was uncannily springlike. I wonder if hibernating animals were all terribly disoriented by it. Like, were all the bears all rolling around in their sleep, thinking, “I am too damned hot in all these layers of fat”?

Who knows?

Whatever the reason, the only funk to be found this February was from the awesome music I’ve been playing.

Okay, that’s a lie. I’ve never played a lick of funk music in my life, unless you count screaming James Brown back and forth with Gina between songs at rehearsal. GET ON THE GOOD FOOT.

The real way I stayed happy and healthy for the month was by vastly, vastly overcommitting – but, in a way that didn’t put the whole burden on my shoulders. That path leads to Funk. We doubled Arcati Crisis rehearsals. I began editing my book in earnest for Writer’s Club. I started a sort of tentative search committee around forming a new cover band, which I haven’t even talked about yet, along with other insane undiscussed developments – joining the board of a local org, editing a new blog, mixing two EPs for bands I love, planning to play and iPod DJ a wedding – the list goes on.

One thing all the activity has in common? No isolation. Even book editing has the end result of being in a room with other people, talking.

It worked! I made it through February alive and decidely unfunky. Suddenly, it is March and I’m free, free from the stultifying confines of the dastardly February Funk!

And I am booked every day and night for the next four weeks. Some days I don’t have enough time allotted for dinner or the possibility of needing to use the bathroom.

Hey, if that’s what it takes to skip February Funk, count me in. I’ll take March Mayhem, as long as it doesn’t lead to April Admittance-to-Hospital-due-to-Exhaustion.

I had a plan of high efficiency for this past weekend. Novel-editing. Blog-writing. Track-mixing. Song-arranging.

Note a common theme: all my object-verbing centered around computing power, which made it the most awesome possible time for my laptop to have a complete meltdown.

So, of course, it had one. Followed soon thereafter by a complete productivity meltdown as I desperately shopped for a new laptop.

This image is a dramatization of the actual events of this past weekend.

Why do these things have to be so hard? My specifications, they are specific: Less than 13″ wide, less than 4lbs. More than a 2.3 GHz dual core. 8GB or more max RAM that’s user-installable. Not completely bloated with helpful programs I will never use. DVD-drive not required, but accepted. HD ideally replaceable with a solid-state version in a few months as prices come down. Under $1k. Bonus points for fun colors. Points lost for systemic issues pointed out by over a dozen one-star reviews on Amazon.

Okay, it’s not the simplest list of demands, but they’re a list! A very defined list. So why, why, WHY, was it an impossibility to find the laptop that fit? Shouldn’t there be entire websites – nay, entire cottage industries dedicated to solving this particular, very specific need of mine?

Well, there are. Sortof. There are cottage “laptop-to-spec” websites, but we’re talking >$2k for a custom-built laptop. They are for serious gamers and, like, Angelina Jolie in Hackers. CNET reviews every possible laptop, but the reviews are either immediately outdated or the laptop they endorse is nowhere to be found for sale.

(HP offers a pretty sweet set of customized builds on their website but, well – they’re HP. I’ve had several long-living PCs from HP, but there is no denying they are the king of bloat.)

The worst part? It’s not as though my laptop emergency came as a surprise, but even with a few weeks of prep time I was still paralyzed by dozens of shitty choices.

My battered blue netbook is now in year-three of its lifespan, and it has been through the wringer with me. I have worked with it in the crook of my arm on elevators and highways and in subway cars and rainstorms. Last year the original charger died, and it took three tries to find one that would work. A chunk of the faux-metal trim fell off, leaving a gaping hole in the front corner. Then my arrow keys stopping clacking, and removing them from the keyboard to try to solve the problem proved disastrous. The screen flickers dangerously any time my body accumulates the slightest bit of static charge. Sometimes it simply shuts off.

Still, it runs, it browses the internet, it edits my novel. What more did I need, really?

On Saturday, even more keys began to give up the ghost. The left-hand shift began randomly firing, creating CrAZEd SCreEds out of my every email. Then it died entirely (which was preferable), with the Backspace key seemingly next to follow. And, boy, let me tell you, if you are going to have one randomly-firing key, Backspace could be the worst possible option.

The result was about 36 hours of close to zero productivity as I cried about not being able to edit my novel and poked at seemingly every laptop spec on the entire internet. Should I cave and get a Mac Air like E, even though I find it unwieldy? Should I cave and get another super-cheap netbook for $300, even if it has the same exact specs as my three-year old version? Should I cave and build a custom HP that would take three weeks to arrive and at least another week to declutter?

As you read this post I am in possession of a brand new Toshiba Protégé R835-P94. CNET reviewed the series well and it fit all my requirements, though I had to hunt down the actual spec sheet to prove it. I’m not endorsing it yet (kinda huge and plasticy), but if you are also looking for a powerful portable, I’d suggest you throw it into the mix.

Hours spent actively shopping? At least 24. Actual credible options that fit my specs? Just this one (plus a similar HP, which I eschewed).