When my parents decided to have a family meeting in the formal living room, I knew something was happening. My mom nervously patted her Bermuda shorts and looked at my dad. “We’re cutting you off.” I didn’t get it. Cut me off? Of what? They were cutting me off their money supply; a supply I thought appeared naturally in my bank account, like moss on a rotting oak tree. They informed me that THEY had been supplying the copious amounts of money I siphoned every week, and now that I had graduated college, I was on my own financially. I was devastated. I came to the stark realization that at the age of 22, I don’t know how money works.
Lots of people use money, but how does it work? Where does it even come from? I used to think it only came from dead relatives, but no one has died in a while, and there’s still money. It doesn’t add up.
How do you get more of it? What if I need clothes and food to eat? What if I am efiling for the first time? According to Facebook, a lot of girls I went to high school with are getting married, and my single Aunt Rhonda just bought a boathouse in Boca Raton. Which costs more money? And why?
While I’m not a money scientist, I do know one way to make some. I know how to use an ATM – I’m not an idiot. But like, what really goes on in there? I can’t help but imagine the currency gnomes that harvest the money plant and dry it until it becomes a usable dollar. I mean that’s probably not what happens in there, but is it?
I’ve never been the type person who needs to know how things work (how does my iPhone make text? Guttenberg?), but money is serious. Knowing how money works makes people powerful and beautiful, and I’d like to find out in hopes it will make my parents and America proud.
But seriously, how funny would it be if you could just print money? Someone should make an app for that. Or does one already exist? LMK.
