Tuesday, September 26, 2006

How Transactions Change Owner's Equity...

Gah! I am going to get this stuff!!!

See, last year I was mainly doing typing, math, 10-key, and Excel. Now my teacher says that I'm ready to learn actual accounting principles. And the book is like, oh my goodness...

It takes me a while to crunch the ideas into my brain. Like yesterday, I was having a huge brainfart trying to grasp the concept of the basic accounting equation: assets = liabilities + owner's equity. So I had to wait til after class to go through the book by myself and I finally got it: that just means you're going to minus the liabilities from the assets to get the owner's equity! (You remember basic math, don't you, Hermgirl? Anybody want me to do their taxes?)

The thing is, when you take a bunch of numbers, lay them end to end, stack them on top of each other and lay them out on a grid, like you do in accounting, it kinda scares the shit out of me. For a person like me that is a more creative, artistic, language based type, to assimilate things that are more concrete and number based, is really hard.

Which begs the question: if it's so hard, why do it? One answer to that is that I have always felt that a lot of the things in life that are worth anything will often require a lot of effort. Nothing worth anything comes easy.

Another answer is what this will get me if I am able to do it successfully: a good paying job. I have to keep explaining this one to my family when they question why I struggle through with this stuff (they are all a lot older than me and are products of a time when the economy was such that good paying jobs were much easier to get.)

My family (especially my dad) gets all uncomfortable when they see me muddling through these kind of things. And my dad has a hard time understanding things like, "No, I can't come in the front room and watch the PBS musical show with you, or go to Orchard Supply Hardware with you to look at the new table you're getting, because I have homework, a lot of it."

Having said all that, it's all worth it.

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