🌿 Taurus New Moon Alert! 🌿
On April 27th, plant seeds of abundance with the year's most grounding lunation. Discover what it means for YOUR sign + how to work with its sensual, stubborn magic. ✨
🔗 Read about it here!
#TaurusNewMoon #Astrology #Manifestation
How much would you pay to go to the moon?
In my current financial state, I would not pay any money to go to the moon because I know such an adventure would cost way more than I could get my hands on without doing things against the law and against my morals.
I have, however always had a dream of being part of some science study that would give me superpowers, so if the chance arose at this…
Season 3, Episode 7: “I’m Finished With the Basic Shit. What Are the Advanced Financial Steps That Only Rich People Know?”
Season 3, Episode 7: “I’m Finished With the Basic Shit. What Are the Advanced Financial Steps That Only Rich People Know?”
When people ask us about the target demographic of Bitches Get Riches, we tell them “It’s for the children.” You can tell because of the G-rated content!
True, our readers-slash-listeners trend young and untested in the ways of the financial world. We wouldn’t have it any other way, of course, which is why so much of what we write concerns the problems of early-career personal finance.
But what…
I’ve mentioned having “scales” here to make plans, things like 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, 10 months, 10 years – whatever works for you.
Right now, I am currently on a scale of about 8 months, because in March I finalized plans to go to Disneyworld.
8 months may not seem like a long-term goal, and I admit, I do have other long-term investments and plans in the works (retirement funds, house projects, things like that), but this sort of long-short goal I think is important to have so I want to talk about it.
I am going to call it a Long-Short goal, because one: Medium-Term goal seems awkward, and I think Long-Short gets the “feel” of it better: it is a short-term thing, that actively consumes a lengthy period of time.
How is it consuming?
I am actively saving more funds for the trip.
I am actively focused on short-term appearance goals (aka weight loss), at times to my detriment as I’ve learned, and had to adjust, reminding myself that 8 months is ABSOLUTELY enough time to slowly lose 20lbs in.
I am actively gathering items for “Disney Bounding” aka dress-up.
I am actively reading up on information for the trip.
I am actively re-immersing myself in Disney films and culture.
I am actively talking about it with my mother, who is going on the trip.
I have been proactive in getting the time from work off.
I am actively working with a Disney travel agent.
I am actively watching for flight tickets, as well as looking at Disneybands.
I am monitoring the COVID situation, and working on getting fully vaccinated.
As things get closer, I will actively be getting information on what souvenirs my friends may want.
I will begin to get reservations for restaurants and events (Like building a droid). My park reservations are already made and locked in.
Why do I outline this here? None of you care about my trip to Disney.
It’s to show you this kind of goal, for one. I think it’s important to have long-short goals, because they are usually very engaging, and they get you to really be excited for a moment. The feelings of bliss, excitement, anxiety, worry, fear, happiness, ecstasy, all come together in a way that planning for retirement, doesn’t quite make possible.
It’s not a passive goal, like waiting for a game release. While yes, that is engaging and fun in its own way, it involves two steps – buying the game, and playing the game. The build up to it may be there, but I don’t feel it involves the same amount of preparation, nor the same amount of engagement even when you have the game.
This is no diss on games. I am going to absolutely lose it when Elden Ring is finally released, mark my words, but there’s nothing to be done before then, and while the enjoyment of the game may last months of play time, I know it won’t stick with me the same way that this will.
I know because I’ve done something like this for the Star Wars Celebration in 2019. That was my first real experience of doing something like this – planning a trip further from home, for a particular event, and being engaged in a new environment.
Having a taste of that, I’ve come to realize a certain love of “long-short” goals, so I am already planning after Disney, to take a trip to Boston with my father, because he’s always wanted to see more of the Eastern USA, since he never got to when he was younger – he was mostly on the Western side of things.
I’ve already found an awesome hotel built in an old prison. Now it’s just determining a good time, gathering the funds, and making the plans – but that’s after Disney, and I’ll likely have a year cooldown.
These plans are useful though. They help you imagine a future, and not only that, it’s a future that truly feels like it can happen because you see progress towards it. You see payments. You see dates. You are engaged with other people going on the trip – or if it’s just yourself, you are engaged in looking at places to visit, things to taste, events to check out. You see other people being engaged or preparing for these events, too.
It feels real.
It makes the future real.
Sometimes, that can be hard to feel with death anxiety. Experiencing the excitement and seeing something coming together over a long period of time – being active in it for a long period of time – does help to make it feel real in a way that knowing I’m going to play video games next weekend, doesn’t.
So, if you’re able, try to make “long-short” plans, with yourself, or with those around you. It doesn’t need to be travel oriented, it could even just be an event in your town, or perhaps a project (sewing, art project, writing project, etc.), that engages you over time, requires investment of at least time, and that you can stay engaged with.
For me, I find this most accessible in travel plans.
For you, it may be an art project that depicts a series of events, feelings, or something.
It may be a long novel, where you work on it chapter by chapter, outlining it, and engaging it, bit by bit, and then editing it once it’s all done. Fanfiction counts in this, too!
Whatever it is, I hope you can find a good “long-short” project!
I would like to come out of my side of the internet just to say, y’know, a while back I mentioned casually if ya’ll were super opposed to a trump presidency, stay home. Boycott buying goods, strike your work, stop the country, slow it down. Show the politicians, who it is that makes the numbers, who the people are, electing their drunk asses for their offices.
Now we have a literal virus that says, “ya’ll better stay home or I’ll make you stay home with the fun roulette ‘cold, allergies, super-pneumonia, or dying’?”
And people all over the country are going “omg, bills need be paid? no work? unemployment? what do!?!?!?!? eviction?!!?!?!?”
People are so programmed to being divided, fighting each other for career-positions, products, toilet paper, surviving, capitalistic mindsets - it’s kind of everything that made the virus so potent in the first place.
The things set into place to make the numbers, and the people, are the ones who spread it. The covid-19 was not as potent, until you inject it into that government system. The economy and its properties gave covid-19 its foundation, its foothold. We spread it. We’re in this together, but people still insist on being divided. We still have disruptions discouraging people from VOTING.
ya nasties.
trump was like easy mode for corona virus. You take someone who ignores science, medicine, economics, doctors, common-sense, and there’s no contest. Anybody else in office, it would’ve been no contest. The Electoral College betrayed the people, and chose an unstable, narcissistic, sociopath - void of education and foresight. A bankrupt asshole.
And Im not immune to this either, but my approach has been different. I have specialized skillsets, training, education - a depth of ‘hypothetical’ takeaways, due to the environment Im in. I STUDY RISK AND CONTINGENCY SCENARIOS.
Im an essential employee. And I am afraid of the corona virus. The one difference between myself and other people - other workers - is that I am trained to sanitize and combat viral infections, I am educated to protect myself before going into a situation. Im very aggressive and super-effective in my field of work, and I pride myself for that.
Rather watch the news outlets religiously, Im watching health and medical videos, sanitation-sterilization, reading up on the different viruses and their behaviors. You know, there are viral infections resistant to Bleach products? Ive mentioned this before years ago, but I am afraid of viral pathogens resistant to bleach. So my go to sanitation solution is always something guaranteed to kill EVERYTHING. Especially BBPs.
So people are afraid, uncertain, and that’s fair. That’s good. Be afraid. But read. Learn. Observe. Educate yourself. BE CRITICAL. To survive this financially, that is possible, but it becomes difficult under a trump controlled situation. We first need to survive. A year, A month, Two months, we can take as long as we need to recover from financial crumble, but first, we must survive.
You’re either going to be a statistic of the dead lost to corona virus, and a “very good number” as trump would say. OR! You will be a number in the profits for the DOW. That’s all that matters to the politicians.
One of the things that surprised and puzzled me for a long time about the way the Saitama and Garou fight had ended was why Saitama had branded Garou's goals as half-assed and accused the latter of taking 'the easy way out.' Most trenchantly, he said 'after all, all you had to do was defeat heroes.'
Looking at how tough it was for Garou to push himself, breaking past limit after limit, until he was hideously strong, I could see how he was misguided. But taking the easy way out? What gave?
It finally all came to me in a rush. And comes down to the goal that Garou had.
A: Just a little further...
Before I go into this, I'm going to ask you to forget anything and everything you may know about 'Boku no Hero Academia.' It's a fine series, but it's its own story with different premises, principles, characters and development. A lot of needless confusion arises when people misunderstand just how superficial the similarities are. Let's go on.
Fundamentally, Garou wanted to stand for the oppressed and downtrodden, which is a pretty heroic goal. However, he wanted to do it by scaring people straight. His goal was to become The Symbol of Fear. This is important to keep in mind. The manga has done a very nice little expansion of what he means by it. Even drunkards are to be scared straight by the reign of terror he would like to unleash on the world.
His approach to becoming the Symbol of Fear was to attack heroes. It was straightforward enough. All he had to do was beat the twenty or so strongest heroes in the world to declare himself the Symbol of Fear. Why heroes?
1. IT IS NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE STRONG. Sorry for the emphasis, but it’s important. One thing we've learned in OPM, particularly in the manga, is that there is no shortage of strong people. In the webcomic we've had to wait until chapter 106, well after the Hero Hunter arc to be introduced to the idea of there being a pool of really strong people, but the manga brings this up with the Super Fight arc and then builds on it further [link]. As Genos muses, there are many people as strong, if not stronger than heroes who don't use that power in a heroic way.
And Garou knows where to find them. After leaving Bang's dojo, he went to the previous Super Fight and won the tournament handily. He went and busted many dojos in the six months before he formally declared war on the Hero Association. But fighting strong people in and of itself is utterly meaningless to his goal. Strong people like fighting each other for whatever reason, money, pride, testosterone. Whatever. Being the strongest man fighting regular men means nothing to the general populace. Garou had to attack heroes specifically.
2. HEROES ARE LEGITIMATELY GOOD IN OPM. Garou is the opposite of Stain. Get any and all bullshit about heroes in OPM being hypocritical and somehow deserving of being punished out of your head. Leave it in BNHA. The heroes Garou beats up have individually and collectively saved hundreds of thousands of people. We've seen it with our own eyes, heroes throw themselves at monsters to save people, even if the situation isn't going to go for the hero. Not just Mumen Rider, but far, far more than that. The Tank Toppers people love to hate on? The experiences of the patients in the large hospital monsters invaded was that these guys forced themselves out of their hospital beds to protect them.
In fact, let's put some numbers on this. A large hospital has upwards of 500 beds, with three times as many people present as outpatients, staff, and visitors. Many bedridden patients cannot be moved. We learn that 5,000 people were in the shelter the Deep Sea King attacked. A stadium, such as the one Amai Mask sang at, 25 - 30,000 people. City Z and its environs will have upwards of a million people. For all these people, their personal experience is that but for the heroes present at the time, most of them would be dead. And it's not just about big numbers. The manga has further been able to show us that heroes, almost to a man (Metal Knight is the exception), value every life. They will save anyone.
Even the 'lesser' heroes, the ones who can't fight monsters, we've seen for ourselves that they've gone in to bring people out of situations too dangerous for the rescue services to operate in. Far too many people have been directly saved by heroes, or have had a friend, family or acquaintance saved by a hero, or know of someone who has for any idea of heroes not being worthy to stick.
The trust that heroes have built up over the years isn't due to the Hero Association. It isn’t due to marketing. Not due to press coverage. None of that matters. It's due to hundreds and thousands of lives saved by hundreds of painstaking, unflagging efforts, often in the teeth of great suffering. Heroes may be human and flawed, but they are legitimately symbols of hope in OPM. And thus it is that attacking and crushing them kills that hope and spreads fear. Let me put it another way: if heroes were not legitimately good in OPM, then Garou would have no reason to attack them. Garou is not policing heroes, looking for the worthy or unworthy. Indeed, the better the hero, the more valuable a target they are for him.
Putting it together, this is why Saitama castigates Garou so roundly. Garou wants peace. He wants global recognition and the impact to create this peace. Which are good things. However, instead of building it by painstakingly working on creating it by good work, he looked to capitalise on the hard work heroes had done and create fear through notoriety. It's quick! It's easy, certainly a lot easier than doing hero work. It's effortful, but it's not hard. It's a very distinct, limited and specific goal. All he has to do is beat the twenty strongest heroes and then announce himself as the greatest monster whom all should fear.
That it wouldn't be an actually useful or helpful thing to do, isn't something Garou thought too much about. Thankfully, he couldn't beat one hero, the hero called Saitama, who has challenged him to get an actual worthwhile goal and do better next time, one that is helpful and authentic to what he truly wants to be. Which is actually to be a hero. We wait to see what Garou comes back with.
B: ...So far to go yet
Phew! That's quite long! And I'd have ended it here if it weren't for my good friend @the-nysh, who has listened patiently to too many of my half-formed rants and suggested that I look at Genos too.
So, look at the picture above. See over in the right corner? There's a guy who's slumped over like a broken puppet. If he seems to be listening intently to Saitama's lecture, that's because he is.
At this point, Genos had come to the realisation that he'd made a similar mistake to Garou, one that looks much harder to set right. A little earlier in the evening, he'd had an epiphany that getting rid of his human body and reaching for body modification as a quick and easy route to power was anything but. The despair on his face is one for the ages. What next, ah we'll have to see.
That said, one of the interesting things that is happening with the manga is that ONE isn't holding his characters artificially static to match their development in the webcomic. They've done more, so they've developed more. A fuller look at all the different characters who have progressed more in manga than webcomic has got to wait for another day. In the manga, Genos has gotten a higher goal than just find and kill the mad cyborg. Long term he's set his eyes on becoming the Symbol of Strength.
Hoo hoo, let's unpack that one! It's definitely not a nice, neat goal. There are three necessary parts to it.
First, you have to be able to beat everything and we do mean everything. Any monster, any person, any threat. Not a bunch of heroes. Anything. Everything. No mistakes, no excuses. If it threatens people, you have to be able to save them from it. The requirement to seek strength is if anything even more imperative than it has been to date.
The second part is that you can't declare yourself to be the Symbol of Strength. It's like calling yourself honest -- no one believes you, whereas if other people attest to your honesty, then you're considered it. Being seen as the symbol of strength is a reputation built up slowly, by being consistently there and making the difference when it matters, so that people know that they *can* run to you and feel safe behind you because their experience is that you will use your power to end their oppression. Protecting people is something that we do find out is truly important to Genos, at least as important as getting vengeance. While he castigates himself for falling short, the truth is, Genos hasn't been doing too badly that way in the manga. Between the Deep Sea King debacle and Elder Centipede, he’s actually protected people extremely well. [I apologise, anime-only viewers, JC Staff edited out crowds whenever they could, so you missed the fact that Genos successfully both protected people while killing monsters with the G-4 robot and in City C. You also missed that he's learned to resist being distracted by people, the mistake that had cost him so dearly with the Deep Sea King and with Mosquito Girl in Season 1.]
That said, going up against monsters for whom ‘cyborg’ is a synonym for ‘tinned human’ (only no one remembers to pack a tin opener) and dealing with a public whose gratitude lasts no longer than a mosquito’s life are nothing compared to the third hurdle. The third one is the doozy: you can't become the Symbol of Strength while being a less than. If Genos is serious, at some point he will need to come from under Saitama's shadow and shine with his own light that borrows nothing from Saitama's own. Not easy when he’s got an obsessive admiration for and is psychologically over-dependent on Saitama. He will also need to break out from the frame that Kuseno has cast him in. All while having the very real handicap of being a cyborg and thus having real physical and financial dependency on the old man at least. Attaining a healthy independence from both people is an absolute must.
This is going to be some long-ass drama. Not that I'm complaining -- as long as the story has things to say, it's not going to end too quickly. :D No decisive set-piece battle will attain this goal for him. It’s a long hard road to becoming the best person and hero you can be and we have no idea how far Genos will get, but it’s a most worthwhile journey. And if there’s any one thing we know about this guy, it’s that he’s damn serious about whatever he does.
C: Wrapping up
If I were going to wrap up what these long-term goals (aspirations?) look like, it’d be this: Authentic to what you really value. No shortcuts. Actually helps the world. Makes a better person of you.
Oh, and it’s not easy. You’ll need a lot of courage to see it through.
My 3-year habitversary was last week, and the biggest change it has brought to my life in the past year is creating a to-do list every day. I have a "Create daily to-do list" daily, and a daily that includes my to-do list in checkboxes that I change each day. This has helped me with many things, including getting chores done on time, homework assignments, and making progress on my long-term goals. I don't always get my list done (the daily is currently dark red-- whoops) but it has gotten me into the habit of thinking about what I want to accomplish each day and working toward it.In the past couple months I've gotten more involved in guilds and challenges, which I've found to be really fun and motivating. I've started to use the Pomodoro method (via the Extraboost guild challenges), and spent more time outside (via the "Venture Outside Your Lair" guild), and I've recently started running, which the "Runner's edge" guild has helped with.
This week, Master Ricardo has been speaking to the classes about Goal Setting. This theme included an at-home assignment for our students. There were three main points:
1. The first thing you have to realize is that all the work you’re doing today -- all the pushups, all the situps, all the sweating, all the kicks, all the punches -- is not for today. It’s not going to benefit you TODAY. It’s going to benefit Future You.
What is Future You? It’s you in a month, or you in a year, or in 10 years. For example, in a month, Future You is going to be stronger because of the pushups you did in class today. In a year from now, Future You is going to be much healthier, much stronger, much faster, and a much higher belt. But that’s because of all the work you are doing TODAY. What you do each day is for helping Future You.
2. Master Ricardo asked the students to go home after class, get a piece of paper, write down two goals: a long-term goal, and a short-term goal. A long-term goal is something that you want to achieve after several months or even several years. For example, if you ask all the kids in the class if they want to be black belts, everyone will raise their hand. Becoming a black belt takes around 4 years. So that’s a long-term goal. Future You in 4 years should be a black belt if you keep doing all this work now.
A short-term goal is something you want to achieve sooner. For example, if you’re a white belt, maybe you want to get all your stripes for your orange belt test. That’s an example of a short-term goal. Future You in a couple months should be testing for your orange belt if you work hard every day.
Master Ricardo’s long-term goal is to become a 9th Degree black belt. His short-term goal is to get to his 5th Degree.
These don’t have to be Taekwondo goals. They can be anything you want. You can have goals related to school, homework, grades, other activities, getting along with siblings, anything. What we want to start doing is getting into the habit of setting goals.
So write down the two goals on a sheet of paper. Younger students can get a parent’s help. Then bring them in to class so we can talk about them.
3. Follow-up, after students bring their goals sheets in to class:
Now we need to start planning for our goals.
Think about this… It would be really cool to be able to do 1000 pushups. But unfortunately most of us cannot do 1000 pushups right now, today. But that’s okay, we can make a plan. Today, we’ll do 10 pushups. And tomorrow, we’ll do 10 pushups. And every day, we’ll do those 10 pushups until they get really easy. Then we’ll do 20 pushups every day. When those get easy, we’ll do 30 pushups. That’s our plan. And before you know it, Future You will be able to do those 1000 pushups!
So, we’ve set our goals and made our goal sheets. Now we’re going to hang them someplace where we can see them every day to remind us. And we need to make a plan to achieve those goals.
The best way to do that is to break it down into small steps, bit by bit, just like we talked about with the pushups. We can do something every single day, and it may be just a small thing, but it gets us just a little closer to our goals. The important thing is to remember that the work you are doing today is helping Future You become whatever you want to be.
