So one thing I have been doing since moving is trying to learn slowly and unwillingly some real financial management skills.

I figure what better time, then when I have no money, to learn how to pay off debt and save for the future. Although to be honest. The 'saving' part is going to be taking a backseat to the paying part for a little while I think.

One thing I have been doing is reading this book called "Smart Cookies" about a group of young women who started a 'money club' in order to learn some financial literacy.

The book itself is a bit of an 'lets appeal to the broadest audience possible by saying the obvious' but the idea is good one, and a lot of the websites they recommend are really useful. Useful in the way that I wonder how I managed to live my financial life up to this point depending on the Excel calculate function and some inspired "balance transfers".

Take for example Bank Rate's Minimum Payment Calculator The idea here is that you enter all your credit card info and then find out how long you will actually spend paying down the balance, if you only pay the minimum.

There is a second option beneath the minimum that lets you enter the amount you could pay above the minimum.

Since I am a bit broke a bit, I only entered 10 dollars above the minimum and that is how I made the pleasant discovery that paying a mere 10 bucks above the minimum halves the amount of interest you pay, and cuts down your payment time by more then half.

I know everyone probably knows this already but if you don't then huddle in. 'cause this shit is crazy!

For some reason this morning, I stumbled upon a series of posts in the Guardian blog called "How to Believe" and started reading. The series on the whole looks at philosophies of belief, et al, and the first two articles are about Heidegger (of course), who thanks to a couple of uni professors I have a very 'fleeting' familiarity with.

So far this resume of his 437 page master work is making for a pretty easy morning read. However as always, when someone is para-phrasing the old curmudgeon I feel like those professors who assigned 'The Question Concerning Technology' (yes I had to read it twice and it still wasn't enough), would say " well, maybe, but that's not quite it either." Anyways, here's a quote to start you off:

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls "phenomenology" – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

But we should note the difficult of the task that Heidegger has set himself. That which is closest and most obvious to us is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself in my average, indifferent everyday existence, but how to describe this? Heidegger was fond of quoting St Augustine's Confessions, when the latter writes, "Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Heidegger indeed means trouble and one often sweats through these pages. But the moments of revelation are breathtaking in their obviousness.

Micro-blogging et al, while interesting to me as a practice is less meaningful than the continued maintenance of this blog because I think the breathtaking obviousness of revelation is exactly what blogging was made for.

140 characters is not exploring it's just babbling.

Lola just came and put her head on my lap. She stinks. She needs a bath perhaps more then I do. And I also need a bath.

I am listening to French pop music.

Specifically these two songs that Steven put on a mix for me.

Berceuse

Comme Des Enfants