I've been fiscally prudent. When I got a job and finally stopped living right on the edge, I upped my standard of living hardly at all and now save fully half my gross yearly pay.
I fund my retirement account to the legal limit, and siphon half my remaining take-home immediately to savings so I can't touch it.
I never carry a credit-card balance. I pay my bills on time. I don't buy things I can't afford.
In consequence, I live in a way that most middle-class Americans wouldn't recognize. No car, no house, no shopping trips to malls and shiny bags of stuff. No clubbing, no sex-in-the-city-identifiable locations.
I didn't buy a house because I couldn't afford one. And I never would have agreed, had anyone asked, to provide home loans to people less qualified than myself.
So why have my retirement accounts and savings in mutual funds lost more than ten percent of their value? Why will they lose another 3% today? Why has my nest egg, possibly down-payment for a home, cracked? Why will I pay higher interest rates and possibly be turned down if I do apply for a mortgage?
In short, why am I paying for other people's greed?
I know *why* in the sense that I listen to Marketplace and read curbed and urbandigs and the Times. But, really, why?
Why must I read and listen to financial pundits scold that *we* live beyond out means, that *we* bought houses we couldn't afford, that *we* fail to save and fund our retirements, that *we* carry thousands in debt?
You know what this reminds me of?
In school, I was a conscientious, quiet, well-behaved, attentive student. And yet if the teacher lost control of the class, if people were loud or disruptive, time and again the whole class would be punished. How often did I have to take a "time out" with my head on my desk or listen to an angry adult's lecture or shouting?
How I burned with resentment! I became a very angry well-behaved little girl. I had seditious thoughts. I lost respect for the system.
Children can't opt out of school. And apparently adults can't opt out of the social order. Oh, I know some who have. How smug they are when talking to us suckers who played by the rules. "Toldja." posted at
6:23 AM[edit]
May 22, 2008
generation gap
I don't understand this sort of writing. I don't understand her sort of blogging. I actually don't understand gawker posts or comment threads.
It all seems like some sort of alternate-universe New York, populated by people who are recreating television show characters and locations, but all sort of like a hologram projected on top of an actual, other New York, the one I've lived in for 20 years. But what if I'm wrong and that's the real New York?
It's very confusing.
later....
I just lost my moorings for a bit there. What this is is Elizabeth Wurtzel redux. Same hype, same outcry, same cultural relevance, same time-capsule-esque relationship to zeitgeist. posted at
2:46 PM[edit]
April 22, 2008
Earth Day 2008
As a child, I imagined myself incorporeal, a changeling. I weighed very little and ate very little and endowed all objects under my protection with souls. Guided by my mega-Virgo propensity for compulsive cataloguing and my family's secular humanist social conscience, I soon discovered the meaning of life -- not simply to tread lightly upon the earth, but to atone for the waste, excesses, and damage wrought by the entire human race.
I often lay in bed, imagining the huge pile of refuse -- much larger than my actual body -- I had created just by living. I imagined the skin cells and the snot and the vomit and the paper plates and the candy wrappers. I imagined pulling this pile of evergrowing crap after me like a sled dog until I expired from exhaustion.
In my twenties, I tried to tell my then-therapist of the clamour of things -- the broken things and the mending, the unloved things and the lost things, the unsorted things and the things I could not bear to throw out. She was all for talking about deeper issues, but soon an army of clutter consultants and responsible living enthusiasts and feng shui practitioners were to create an entire industry from what I came to see not as personal pathology, but as the pervasive malady of late-stage capitalism.
A friend told me, as we watched a stunning lunar eclipse from my rooftop, that even the most remote, deepest, pristine nether realms of the ocean were now covered with plastic bits and soda cans. I read in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon that the entire forest adjacent to Mexico City had been suffocated into deadwood by blowing plastic bags. I despaired.
When my closest college girlfriend invited me to her domestic partnership ceremony, my first response, before congratulations, was to ask whether I might bring my collection of hundreds of unused plastic takeout utensils across the country for use at her reception.
I was hyper-vigilant when shopping, anticipating the very moment when I might interrupt the checker's autopilot with a clear, "No bag, please." I devised rules for living that were only revealed as somewhat strange when I had visitors -- no buying of plastic wrap or napkins or Kleenex; these all could be scavenged from overpackaging; reuse of all bags and containers and Styrofoam peanuts; dilution of all detergents and cleansers so they lasted years and years and years.
My income was half as much as New Yorkers continually reassured one another was the bare subsistence level. My apartment was tinier still. I'd always shopped at thrift stores and delayed any sort of gratification involving consumption. My weekly routine involved bringing piles of things to thrift stores, haunting the library sale alcove, memorizing the rotating specials at my local grocery. Daily I sorted through email from Freecycle and socially responsible living newsletters and admonitions from Flylady.net that turning my home into a personal landfill did not save the earth.
As a cater waiter, I would carry huge sacks of one-time-use champagne flutes home with me in a cab to recycle them in my home bin. Appalled by the casual waste I saw my temporary office job, I made a crusade of using one paper coffee cup until it fell apart; of never, ever leaving any trash in my office can; of carrying around a single plastic plate in protest of the hundreds discarded every day in the lunchroom.
But, increasingly, I felt impotent. How could I cancel out the five cups my officemate discarded every day? Although I rooted through our trash after he left for the day, picking out recyclables; although I would sooner use a paper towel from the floor of the bathroom than pull out a new one, I was not even making the tiniest dent in the tide of refuse. Even my own sled of sinful discard was heavier.
I know people who are more rigorous still. A friend married a man who lives entirely on scavenge, from food to furniture. A certain sort of dumpster diving activates my gag reflex, but I’ve certainly fallen from my preteen Café Society aspirations. Just last week I rescued a perfectly good pillowcase, still in the package, from my building’s garbage cans, in full view of my lurking landlord.
Increasingly, my clothes come from piles left by the curb on moving day each month, rather than from thrift stores. Sometimes I feel a ping, a slight burst of shame, especially on weekend nights in my neighborhood, as I root through piles of trash adjacent to the expensively dressed crowd milling in front of Le Table.
The payoff? A muted orange rag, upon inspection, was yards and yards of untouched organza, bundled inside a black trash bag, just perfect for covering my new-from-the-street loveseat.
I take a perverse pride in all this, a pride not at all to do with masochism or unworthiness or of rags-to-riches rescue fantasies. I imagine that it’s similar to the pride emanating from those rarified souls of the breathatarian lifestyle who have transcended food, and subsist on air alone.
Somehow, imperceptibly, I crossed from responsible and proactive to obsessive-compulsive and strange. There was that moment, on my hands and knees in the tub, scrubbing another woman's menstrual blood out of a pair of otherwise pristine panties I’d discovered among a bundle I rescued from a ripped-open garbage bag amid the slush on the corner of Bleecker and Bowery; there was that moment where I looked down and thought, as if my hands were not my own: how has it come to this?
And yet. It's the least I could do. posted at
12:19 PM[edit]
September 05, 2006
Quote of the Day
Who says there's no great writing on television?
Last night I heard the very best, most favoritist line *ever.*
Was in the opening seconds of the show, so you can experience it for yourself all this week, click on "Vanished"(Episode 3) at http://www.fox.com/streaming/index.htm
Line is (but it really is so much more enjoyable as delivered)
setup: "The cooler was off for 10 hours." not missing a beat: "Exactly enough time to reduce Amanda MacNeal to a putrefied mass."
Exactly enough time to reduce Amanda MacNeal to a putrefied mass
(I had to turn off the television immediately because it could only go downhill from there)
Also good, random lyric from guy named Xzibit. Not sure if he's big, on his way up or down or what, but
"I got a sixth sense that you ain't worth six cents." worked for me.
Literarature? I'm over that. posted at
5:23 PM[edit]
