HALF A MILLIONAIRE

Summer has arrived, and everyone wants to take a vacation. I would like to share with you a conversation that I had with a friend at work.

My friend: Are you planning to take your family anywhere this summer?

Me: No. We are going to enjoy our summer right here at home. We have a two-year-old, so we don’t want to travel.

My friend: Common, man! Why are you so cheap? You make all this money. You have to spend it to have a good time with your family.

Me: I know what you mean. But, seriously, it is not about money.

My friend: Liar! Life is always about money. You have been working 60 hours plus a week for what? It is all about money, man.

Me: I am not saying that money is unimportant. We just don’t feel like going on a vacation at this time because we are having a great time at home.

My friend: What do you do at home? I don’t care what you do at home. It is not the same as going on a vacation. You don’t have to worry about life. You enjoy your time. You just relax, man.

Me: We go to the mall. Our daughter loves the merry-go-around carousel. I ride with her. We eat junk foods and just hang out. At home, we play in our backyard, looking at bugs and ants. She likes to draw pictures with her chalk. We just do the simple things that everyone does. It’s fun.

My friend: Common! You can do those things everyday. You need to show them a different world.

Me: You have been the one who asks all the questions. Now, it is my turn. When you are on vacation, you are happy for that one week, right? I am at home and happy. So, is there a difference between your happiness and mine? When your vacation is over, what are you going to do? Mine is never over because everyday is already a vacation for me. Why do I need to go on a vacation when I am already on a vacation?

My friend: You are weird! You make all that money for what? You will die, eventually. Why don’t you use it to buy your family some good time?

Me: I am glad that you have brought up the concept of death. Let me expand it a little more: When you are on your vacation, happy and all. But, technically, you are still dying. I am at home and, like you, I am dying because as every second passes by, you and I, both, get closer to death. So, taking a vacation or staying at home is irrelevant, right? As long as, we all “live” (or “die”) a happy life.

My friend: I don’t get it, man. You have weird ways of looking at things. I think you are just cheap.

Me: Let’s stop here. Again, it is not about money.

I did not want to continue our conversation because I felt that he had the intention to humiliate or anger me. We are still talking to each other because I was never mad at him for calling me, “cheap”. I call myself, “cheap”. And, I am proud of it. Sometimes, my wife calls me, “cheap”. But, my wife has started to understand my “weird” thinking. She knows that I am not cheap because if it is the right thing, I do not hesitate to spend. She calls me “cheap” because she just wants to tease me.

I just wanted to illustrate one point: In life, I do what I want. I refuse to follow the norm. I define happiness on my own terms. I did ask my wife if she would like to take our daughter away for a few days, and her answer was “no” because, like me, she thought that we have had a lot of fun at home. Why seek happiness in a distant place when it can be found at home?

In college, I had three roommates. We shared a studio-loft apartment. We put two standard bunk beds in the upstair loft, and we used the downstair studio for studying. They often went home during weekends because their parents lived in nearby cities. Sometimes, they teased me by demanding that I should pay higher rent because I used the unit more than they did. One weekend, I had the flu. I was very tired, so I immediately went to bed after having taken some Theraflu. I woke up on Saturday and felt better symptomatically, but I knew that I was still sick. Without an appetite, I stumbled to the kitchen and filled up my stomach with a bowl of instant noodles and went back to bed. I woke up and fell back to sleep several times without eating anything because I was too weak to get out of bed. When I saw sunlight again, I knew that it was Sunday. I allowed my lifeless body to slide off the top bed and onto the floor. I began to crawl down the stairs. As I was lying on the floor of the studio, the front door opened. Vince, one of my roommates, came back to campus early because he wanted to catch up with his reading assignments. I told him that I was hungry and asked him to make a glass of milk for me by mixing condensed milk with boiled water. He did. A couple of weeks later, I recovered fully. And, a decade later, I am still talking about my friend.

The foundation of our society is individualism. Each of us has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. We have the freedom to express our own individuality. We have conservatives and liberals. We have the rich and the poor. I will never trade our system for anything because it is an accurate representation of life. Only through struggles and competition we can grow and improve. Personally, I believe that the purpose of my life is to fight and thrive because I do not want to waste the chance that America has given me. In other words, I do not want to lose. And, unfortunately, in this fight, there is no tie. Some complain that the system is unfair. Some gripe about being born at the bottom of chain. And, perhaps, there is some truth in these cries. However, life is more interesting when we accept its challenges. We shall not rely on the government to solve our problems for us because it cannot even take care of itself.

As of July 4th, 2009, our national debt is approximately $11.4 trillions (U.S. National Debt Clock). Many financial experts argue that it is not a big problem because we are still capable of paying the annual interest of about $450 billions. We scold our uninformed Americans for taking out interest-only mortgages, but we have been allowing the Federal government to do it for more than two centuries. Personally, I don’t think the politicians know how to solve the problem because it has ballooned so quickly. And, none of “the patriots” is willing to take a political risk. Tomorrow, President Obama will whisper sweet birthday-wishing words into our Mother’s ears. He will retell us the stories about how our great founding fathers defeated a powerful king 233 years ago and how we freed slaves. And, we will applaud with our wrists and ankles shackled by debts.

Tomorrow, I will celebrate the 4th of July with my family because to me it symbolizes freedom. I am free to express my individuality. I am free to take care of myself first. However, besides freedom, individualism requires compassion to flourish. I do not want to credit our founding fathers for having created one of the most compassionate country in the world, but it seems that they did everything right. They did not ask us to be compassionate. They only gave us freedom, and, somehow, when we all strive to search for our own “individuals”, and when we truly understand the meaning of individualism, we automatically become a compassionate people. Perhaps, during the fight to become who we are, we discover the tasteful fruit of compassion. Personally, I think that individualism has pushed me to become more compassionate. For example, I want to help others understand the meaning of individualism, too. It is not selfishness. It is self-improvement. When one is independent, one feels empowered. And, when one is powerful, one will offer others “a glass of hot milk”.