Moneymoneymoneymohhhneyhhh…mohhhneyhhh

After Helga’s birthday dinner (our youngest turned 8 today), after oranges, ice cream (Nestle pops for us, brazo de mercedes for helgy and fro- they LOVED it. it’s super sweet but sans the chocolate toxic to doggies) and over tea, my family and I had a bit of an A-ha moment. Granted, it was only A-ha to us. To the rest of the world it is a known fact. We were daydreaming- out loud and at night- about all the places we haven’t yet seen but would love to see. We have Europe pretty much covered. North America, too- although by that we just mean the US, but no one seemed to express a desire to visit Canada. I have some parts of Asia and Australia down, too. As our passports will attest, we are not exactly travel-deprived, but all the same, there is still the rest of the world. Central and South America. An entire African continent. Talk inevitable leads to HOW and HOW predictably leads to money. So our A-ha moment was this: Money does make the world go round. What had been obvious to everyone else seems to have eluded us all these years. Yes, we’d always had a taste for the fine things in life and while we knew that the fine things are not without cost, acquiring wealth was never considered a priority. We were never raised to aspire to make money. When my brother and I were in school, there was never any pressure to major in something that would secure us a well-paying job. Study what you love. We were always of the follow-your-dreams variety. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course, but a slight emphasis on money-making couldn’t have hurt either. In college, while I was enrolling in classes like Taking Shakespeare’s Word for It and The Politics of War Crime Tribunals, I was not above scoffing at the Bulgarian Economics majors, voluntarily submitting themselves to semester upon semester of monotony and misery. I would smugly tell myself, I’m making the most out of a liberal arts education; I study whatever I’m passionate about, who can be passionate about numbers and graphs? I wonder who’s smug now. My editorial job won’t buy me a cruise any time soon. Earning 70 grand a year as a Wall Street financial analyst, one of my Bulgarian friends probably could.

I have friends all over the world. I mean that in the literal sense. A whole bunch of them are backpacking across the continent of their choice. Their facebook albums remind me that, at 24 , now is when I should be doing the same. Money makes the world go round. It also makes going round the world possible.- perhaps even the purchase of a designer bag or two along the way.