I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Rubin’s “July” chapter, the money chapter.  The chapter contains more pages than the last five months of the year combined.  Or so it seems to me.  Just as I was beginning to find her redundant and lazy, she mentioned in the last two pages that her happiness project was, possibly, making her less happy.

I wonder if she’ll go any further on that!  The demands she’s making on herself to be a better person, she loosely concluded, were only making other people happier, not her.  Of course, part of that is that she’s someone who always goes for the grade or “gold stars,” as she refers to them.  Roughly put, if someone isn’t telling her all the time that she’s doing a fantastic job, she loses interest in the job.  Alleviating burdens from her kids, assisting friends, and letting her husband have some slack apparently weren’t winning her any awards with them.  At least in this gloomy moment she was having. 

Except that she lets her blog readers do a little too much writing in her book, I like Gretchen.  She’s pretty honest.  I find it annoying that she found it a regular challenge to stock up on toilet paper in NYC because, up here in the mountains, I only run out of toilet paper because there isn’t money for it or we’re trapped in because of bad roads.  Yet I also think it’s pretty great that she’s going to let me into her psyche about why she needs to train herself to stock toilet paper. 

We’re clearly on very different money plains, for now.  But I’ve avoided talking about her conclusions and mine.  Tomorrow, actually, I’d like to talk about this “chakra cleansing” as a demonstration of mine.  Til then…