By Evan Rosen
"Being humbled can sometimes be the most humbling experience a person can have. It can happen at any time without any warning and make you feel stupid or even embarrassed. But maybe that’s ok. Maybe it’s good?"- Evan Rosen
I had a call this morning with a financial advisor and was informed that I need to start paying off my credit card balance, completely. I thought that if I was paying the statements at the end of each month that I would be fine. But it turns out that I’m being charged 15% on my remaining balance each month, and have already racked up over $200 in fees for this year. I don’t know if that was stupid of me to not know. I felt stupid. I had been racking up many fees for many months before that. And I can’t really afford to be racking it up like that.
Money makes me stressed out. That’s part of the reason why I quit the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and became a film major. The other reason being mostly that I had no interest in working in business, but had a lot of interest working in Film. On the first day of my accounting class in Ross, my teacher came up to me and said “Are you Evan Rosen?” It was a good guess because everyone had name tags in front of them and that’s what mine said on it. I thought maybe she had heard good things about me from business school orientation. There had been a big competition to see who could come up with the best T-Shirt design to advertise the business school. I had come up with one where the front of the T shirt said “Blau Blau Blau Blau Blau” all over the place and then the back of the shirt would say “That’s the sound of my business blowin’ up.” A lot of people liked it, but it came in 2nd in the voting. I think it should have won (Blau was the name of the big auditorium in the business school). Anyway, Ms. Accounting Professor didn’t hear about any of that. She said something weirder: “Baloney*, swordfish, Rick Carlisle?” in a very condescending tone, and looking at me with impressed consternation.
It was at that moment that I remembered answering the accounting class survey that had been sent out to all the students over the summer. It was very long and pointless, in my humbled opinion, and at the very end included an answer that asked me, “what are the first three words that come into your head when you think of the word, ‘Accounting.’ Well, I decided to really let my mind have a go at it, and free-associate, as minds often love to do. “Those were the three words that came into my mind,” I replied to her, smiling. She said, “Yeah. Why don’t we start off on a fresh foot,” and I said “Yes, ma’am,” not really seeing how that was possible. I think part of me knew in that very moment that the business school and I were not going to work out. It also kind of felt weird to say “Ma’am,” which I don’t say a lot. How did that come out?
I don’t think I’m really built to handle money, or, business, or contracts, or figures, or even charts, for some reason. I guess I’m just built different. They say everyone has their strengths and their weaknesses and I guess, as anecdotally evidenced previously, those things would fall into my weakness category. I’m okay with that. I don’t really find it interesting anyway. And I’m humbled by those who excel at using Excel.
I think it’s good to be humbled sometimes. I think that I was probably in the wrong place, and a man of my character and composition may not belong in a suit, or even behind a desk. Maybe I’m more monkey than man.
Business school humbled me. And also made me believe in myself in other ways, with the support of friends and family. I believe in myself now. To do great, other things. I do want a 401k eventually. I want to be able to handle my money wisely and take care of myself, and not rack up fees unknowingly. But it was a great learning experience for me. I was very scared to leave the business school. I remember meeting with a professor who I looked up to a lot at the time. He told me, “If you leave business school and become a film major, you have to kill it. You have to absolutely kill it.” I’m not sure why he thought that exactly, I wasn’t “killing” it in Ross (even though my 20% exam scores in accounting were being curved up to a B- grade (you can’t get lower than a B- in Ross)). But I like to think that I did kill it in film school, after making a film called “Rumplestiltskin: Code Black”** and winning a student award for “Best Ham-Acting in a Musical Comedy,” which was made up by the professor who awarded it and which I later realized was kind of an insult cause Ham-Acting isn’t a compliment.
I guess I was also humbled as a film major. I guess sometimes you get embarrassed in life, and it doesn’t matter if you’re doing the thing you suck at or the thing you think you’re supposed to do with your life and be great at. You have to roll with the punches. That’s something that I’m working on right now — not beating myself up about hidden fees and surprise embarrassments. Because they happen and I think they’ll always happen and honestly they should, because sometimes I need to be humbled. We all use credit cards, and they all have balances on them. We have to figure out how to pay it off. Because when you spend money, it needs to come from somewhere, and you have to spend money or else you’ll never get anything you want and so we buy and we buy and we buy and capitalism sucks the life-force out of our bodies and rots our soul. That’s right. It’s time for the fucking revolution and I’m willing to literally die for my ideals - mostly the ones regarding Rumplestilstkin as a secret agent and T-shirt designs that get me fired up. Because one great t-shirt design can change the world. I know that in my heart to be true. And I know that in my truth is my heart. Beautiful. Red. Beating, beating, beating. And absolutely hemorrhaging cash.
*Bologna in this article has been spelled with the more informal “Baloney,” because why the fuck is it spelled like that in the first place. Even if it comes from a different language, it should’ve been changed by now for my poor dumb monkey brain to understand.
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