Thursday, December 2, 2010

I am a Money Sieve

I totally just lost twenty bucks at the laundry mat (laundromat? whatever). Easy come, easy go. Hopefully somebody feels super lucky and psyched right now!

But seriously I hemorrhage money. It just slips away. My relationship with money is highly conflicted of course. I want to hold on to it as much as I just want to set it on fire. I don't think I have too much of a spendthrift issue at all - I eat at home most of the time, there is no daily latte in my life, I don't have to satisfy any clothes coveting for the most part, since shopping for clothes is a dark journey into self-esteem-ville that I happily avoid. I like good cheese and farm raised pork chops and am willing to pay for Buddha and yoga classes etc, but I think I really live pretty modestly.

So this brings me to what it means to "afford" things. I sort of think that if you are willing to spend money on something only if you can "afford" it then you really shouldn't spend money on it at all. Everything else you find important you will find the money for. Like going out to dinner. Would you go out every night of the week if you could "afford" to? I don't think so. Gets boring. All that noise, too many choices to make. And on the other hand, how much are you willing to change your own behavior even when money is pretty tight? For example, there is no way I'm not going to buy good milk. And I will purchase a social beer for $4.50 plus tip and pay the door charge for a show even if I am pretty low on funds, because supporting local music and friends and business and community connectedness is a priority. (This is pretty leisurely of me to say since I have no children, I have a very nice husband, and I have a really supportive safety-network that makes fudging the numbers pretty easy.)

Money has this tricky social aspect to it, as well. Money and friends is pretty tough sometimes. Mixing our social forces with market forces is always tricky. My tendency is always to overpay or offer more money whenever a friend is involved, and I am pretty confident that with my friends, their tendency is to undercharge or vigorously wave me away when our social and market imperatives combine in one big awkward exchange. So overall it comes out pretty fair. Sometimes when nobody has any money it can get really emotional - "he's my friend, he should cut me a break!" and "she's my friend, she should offer me more!" Out of fear of this kind of bad juice in the air I view money as disposable and expendable and really unimportant to me when it comes to keeping everybody's feelings intact. I sort of assume that I am probably more capable of letting go of any cheap-bastard animosity toward anyone than they are toward me, so overcharge me, I won't care! Yeah, just like getting in the door at a friend's concert isn't really money I have to spend to hear music or keep my friends, it's just a little toll on good will that we need to accept as part of the mixed up tumbler of money and relationships.

So last night I got an upgrade for my cell phone. I went to a Radio Shack to try to get a charger for my really old phone, and basically my cute little old phone got laughed out of the shop. Turns out you can do phone upgrades at Radio Shack, what do you know. The clerk was super nice to me, and really knew the ins and outs of the whole thing, and showed me the free phone I could get with my plan, and endured a whole bunch of ridiculous service-associate-phone-calls due to the fact that I was unsure of what name my phone plan was under and what phone plan I had and wasn't really sure about much besides my phone number, and even that was tough since I don't really call myself ever. So at the end of this exchange, in which I had to say goodbye to my little pink phone in exchange for a fancy new touch-screen and type-pad purple phone, she offered me a little side sale for screen protectors for $7.99. I definitely don't give a crap about screen protectors or phone cozies or pad puffers or whatever. Phone = rings = plenty. But she sort of said "so since I tried to help you out here how about a $7.99 screen protector, usually they're $12.99." And I bought them. The impact of what I saw as her social gestures in this market context nudged me into buying something I didn't want. She did say "yes" in a woo-hoo kind of way when I sighed and said I'd get them, so I hope at least this helped her meet some kind of retail donkey quota for Radio [Butt]Crack and maybe she gets a prize. She was nice, I want her to have a prize. So what happened here was either the most despicable form of salesmanship ever - manipulation of a person through a sense of social obligation to gain market advantage - or kind of a no-big-deal favor from one human being to another that acknowledges both of our participation in the big crappy capitalist sh**storm of survival. Like I said, money is pretty disposable to me when feelings are involved (I don't get carried away though, and I sort of despise street canvassers, yuck, let me walk around in peace, I donate online), so it's whatever. And instead of spending $25 bucks on a charger for my old phone, I got a new phone with a charger included for $7.99 (plus a lame-o $18 thing that Sprint will charge me later so it's basically a wash, but still, new phone still weighs in favor of me making out better than I would have thanks to this chick's patience and salesmanship etc).

So am I sucker or a reasonable human being or both? Should I put up more money-holding armor? I still wish I hadn't dropped that twenty. Man that sucks. Right when I'm trying to reel it in. And I helped return a wallet to someone today in that very laundromat! But I also got a free hamburger from the shop across the street from me today. I guess it's all a wash in the end. Losing that twenty doesn't feel unfair, really. Also I have to say that waitressing helps with that easy-come-easy-go feeling. Twenty bucks is no big deal when night to night you make a range of 10 to 200 dollars. Whatever, that's life, it all evens out.

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