Pennywise and Pound foolish

 I may have used the title before, but I find the phrase "pennywise and pound foolish" to articulately describe myself: I'll resist the urge and starve myself for hours to avoid spending $3.00 for a bottle of water and $7.00 for an overpriced sandwich, but then I'll calmly plop down $76.00/ month (that's like $1000/ year) for a Hulu subscription for the sole purpose of watching Jeopardy. I'll refuse to take the $2.00 bus back home and rather wait for the free city circulator bus that comes 10 minutes later, meanwhile in those 10 minutes during that time I'll neglect my stocks and miss out on opportunities to make a lot more money of passive income, or pass up the opportunity to work an extra day for hundreds of dollars in compensation. If you look up pennywise (not the clown) and pound foolish, there'd be a picture of me doing those things for sure. 

I realized I didn't talk much about stocks in 2023, or if I did it was MUCH MUCH less than 2022. The difference? 2022 was a down year most of the year (bear market), 2023 was a straight line back up, like a V-shaped recovery from the depths of the pandemic up to the euphoric days of late -2021 (halcyon days where everyone in the market looked like a genius) to the painful tech busts of 2022, to the January of 2024 we just went through where everything suprisingly stayed up and kept going up despite the consensus view of having a pullback. When everything's going smoothly and there's no stress, the paradox is I don't even enjoy it- I just take it for granted and let it happen, only to pine for these days again when the market does poorly and wondering why I didn't sell earlier. So it goes. Bill Maher is a genius about psychology of money: the people who have money don't worry about money at all (it's like hunger- people who are full don't worry about food at all), where people who don't have money (or feel it slipping away when the stock market's down) care all the time about money. Which is probably why we all silently detest money- we only think about it when there's a lack of it or need for more, like a water faucet that studdenly stopped pumping out water. (Btw, I read today that we're supposed to flush our water heater every year or so? And there's something called "hard water" that makes the calcium deposits worse and makes flushing even more necessary? First I 've hard of it). 

Is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri too long and wordy of a title for a good movie? - NO, say Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson- a bit of a weird and rough movie, but reminded me of the Wire- truly flawed characters. We can't just have blissfully angelic heros in life like Spiderman or the Barbie movie, we gotta have characters with human flaws so we can relate to them, and also not quietly detest them for being too perfect.