Last Friday someone deposited three hundred grand cash at the low counter where I was observing. (In banks, high counter means the tellers, where people usually transact money while low counter means the customer service section, where people open accounts, have checks made and process foreign exchange. However, when there's a lot of people queued in the high counter, the low counter can serve as tellers too.)

Now three hundred thousand pesos sounds like a lot of money when you hear it (actually, three hundred thousand pesos IS a lot of money, I could buy a decent early 2000's Honda Civic or pay for the rest of my sister's college tuition fee with that). But I learned that in reality it's just three bundles of one thousand bills that you can hold even in just one hand. That moment three hundred thousand seemed so trivial. In fact the rest of the day I just played with the money, practicing how to count bills the way tellers do (fast and with that distinct swish-swish sound ^_^). It was as if they were just cards that I shuffled and reshuffled when I wanted to.

And so I realized that for all the fuss about money and never having enough of it, it's really just pieces of colored paper. Maybe I need to re-evaluate my priorities after all.