Balance

This Monday was the last day of my undergraduate degree.  You know how I celebrated ending years of formal education?  I picked up a hammer and helped out a behind schedule contractor friend.

There is something profoundly refreshing in doing something different.  More-so, it is important for me to remain in touch with both parts of my being.

A strange theme that often consumes the LCL (Low Cash Lifestyle) is a duality of lifestyles.  People rocking the LCL, at least those who are in the LCL by default, generally fall into three categories: students or scholars, laborers in the trades or food service, or those disengaged individuals trying to get back into one of those two categories.

The issue at hand with this duality of lifestyles, is that living one tends to exclude you from the other.  And there is something poisonous to the soul in being only a laborer or only a scholar.  We have all seen it before...  A visit to a lower-middle class gas station will give you a steady flow of laborers of all types: framers, drywallers, painters, line cooks, and fry cooks, all down on their luck.  Terrible examples of scholars gone wrong abound: anyone who has had to deal with an American English teacher can attest to that.

The real secret here, for me, is to not get stuck in one of these ruts.  Its not hard; I just remind myself of both sides of this coin.  I might install a piano hinge on a built-in storage bench after reading about proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (if you want some butt hurt, try a physical chemistry text).  It fulfills my puritan work ethic along with my need to try to understand the universe.

But that's my bag.