377 days - Blog #22 where I put analysis, philosophical wondering and a bad day into a blender of words

I made a spreadsheet today.  For fun.  Well, more like a curiosity of patterns.  Patterns I knew would be easier to notice in Excel than a notebook of handwritten sheets.  

 Isn't it pretty?

I don’t know when I became a person fascinated by numbers.  Especially in this context.  Twelve or fourteen years ago I would have told you how art isn’t about money.  That the numbers shouldn’t matter in the end because art is better than that.

But art has a cost.  Several, in fact.  A lot have to do with numbers – in the obvious realm of money, but also time and the amount of materials/resources needed to complete a project.  There has to be an equation of some sort along the way to determine if the expense is worth the gain.  And, yes, we can measure that gain through that sense of creative accomplishment, pecuniary profit, and human connection through friendship or community or just understanding our existence a little bit more.

On a more personal level, I am aware of how artistic endeavors have the cost of subtracting my time and energy and enthusiasm from other artistic endeavors.  Almost always, my writing suffers from attention to theater.  And definitely, I forsake theater when I need to write.  There is a fixed amount of time, a specific supply of creative energy and thought that … when I try to share them, the end product becomes diluted.  Then again, as I’m starting to realize more, if I manage that time outside the organic attitude of creativity, they will inform the other.

But I don’t intend to linger here on the subject of creative process.  It is that subject of cost and the taxation of resources to the maximum yield of a result that seems to play in various forms throughout my life these days.

Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying I’m thinking about karma.  Or some law of physics relative to balance.  That for every gain, there is a loss somewhere else.  A positive from one perspective could be a negative from another.  That nothing in life comes free.

A couple weeks back one of my former English teachers posted an Internet meme asking to choose between the option of raising someone from the dead or a billion dollars.  My immediate impulse was no way.  No way to either.  Firstly, I’ve read Frankenstein.  And then… come on, that much money doesn’t come with any less strings attached.  Fast overwhelming wealth does not solve problems.  It just creates more of them.  That tale is older than the Bible.  

And maybe that’s why this ice bucket challenge keeps bothering me.  My first frustration was the tagging people and shaming them on Facebook thing.  But then people argued back to me that it can’t be bad because it’s raised SO MUCH MONEY.  Yeah.  Great.  And yet… that’s a lot of money for a cause that has never had profits so high.  It is going to be an accounting nightmare.  A security nightmare.  An accountability nightmare.  Is it going to do a lot of good?  Yeah.  But… there is also a price to pay.  

But I don’t want to get too much more into that on the internet.  That also brings the cost of trouble, so we’ll leave that there.

I will stay on the subject of money though.  Because these thoughts just brought me back around to how we expect more for less in our present day.  And while, no, it isn’t a billion dollars, there is an assumption that you get more money in your pocket by going to Walmart and protesting taxes.  But saving money at Walmart actually drives down the value of goods (both in what we pay and the quality as manufacturers have to underbid to get a contract) and the value of the employees (who live on food stamps).  We argue argue argue about paying taxes that will help fix our roads, but barely raise a whimper about the oil that goes into the vehicles we use on the roads.

Why don’t we want to pay what someone is worth or what something of quality is worth?  Do we really think by cheating those costs that we will get closer to a billion dollars?  It’s a weird little game of logic we play with ourselves, isn’t it?

But cost isn’t simply about money.  I found myself thinking of it in another way today when someone decided to start a conversation at level 11 instead of a conversational 2.  I have the intelligence to understand her negativity and accusatory manner had little to do with me and more to do with something of which I have little control, but that cost me the rest of my day because I just felt so drained from having that five minute… not a conversation.

But of course, it didn’t take me away from that really cool spreadsheet that helped me understand costs of a successful theater.  That actually put ideas into my head for how to give as much as take from a community that sits in the seats.  And while, certainly the 23 year old me would scoff at that approach, maybe I’ve started to understand how to use costs at an advantage.