Van Masters

What is the message from this Salon article about a grad student living in a van?

-Stunts pay, if not in cash long-term, in publicity short-term?

-People who claim, "Living in a van was my grand social experiment" should consider a reduction in adjectives? (Other people can call your choice to live in a van "grand." You, the van-dweller, do not have this privilege.)

-People who are "worried" that Facebook groups will form on the topic of their "grand social experiment" could try to sound a tiny bit more sincere?

-Men who pose shirtless online and offer up statements like "I had a penchant for rugged living" must appeal to someone, or else they would not do this?

-College graduates whose parents offer to pay their rent and who nevertheless go for something like living in a van are living in a van because they can leave said van at any time without getting a new job?

-Don't go to a humanities grad program that doesn't at least pay your tuition?

Cans, deposited

I forgot to mention, my roommate and I finally accumulated three bags of cans and went down to the bottle deposit place to get our due. Unlike in New York, apparently, regular stores don't accept deposit cans, so you have to go to some dank, smelly warehouse in east Cambridge to claim your reward. And, as I predicted, this warehouse was full of homeless people plying their trade. Also, you have to sort and arrange your own cans. After all that, we got fully $3.20 for our efforts. This is barely enough to buy a latte.

I concluded from this adventure that in order to get the most out of this deposit law, one really needs to have either 10 beer parties a month or 10 soda-guzzling children. But I still intend to go back in June and get another $3 worth of thrift.

If you can afford X, you can afford X+Y

A popular argument in favor of the much-debated cosmetic surgery tax is that if you can afford to spend a ridiculous amount on personal upkeep, surely you can afford to spend a bit more for something worthwhile - in this case, health care for others. While the proposal itself does not bother me, the suggestion that if you can pay Amount A, you can also manage Amount A+B, does.

Leave aside for a moment the specific issue of cosmetic surgery. The question here is whether one's intent to pay Amount A should be taken to mean that one could just as well pay A+B, as though B does not change the price and thus the affordability of Unnecessary Item X. My argument is thus not that purchases should never be taxed, but that we should not pretend that taxes have no impact on the affordability of said purchases, even if such purchases could be classified as rich-people-nonsense. If part of the hope with this tax is to discourage consumption of something foolish, fair enough - I'll leave opposition to the more libertarian among us. But it seems the thinking is more, these spoiled, vain fools have money to spare.

Why does any of this matter for those of us not looking for nips and tucks? Because the principle of assuming X's affordability implies X+Y's affordability extends to realms that have nothing to do with taxes, Botox, or spreading the wealth to the less fortunate. Example: at every food store where a per-pound item is selected for you, you have to ask for less than you want to get the amount you're effectively asking for. But if you forget to do this, receive significantly more than you'd asked for, and complain, you will learn that this is just the amount the item comes in, or that it's tough to cut some item (fish, meat, cheese, etc.) to a particular weight (which is plausible in some situations, but does not excuse, say, extra olives, walnuts, etc., and is in any case often used as an excuse to oversell items well beyond the range of error). The store's message: 'If you can afford not to eat only prepackaged foods, you can afford an extra third of a pound of whatever it is you're having.' Only someone cheap would argue over a sliver, or order a quarter of a pound in the first place.

Leaving aside the question of whether cheapness should be penalized (and why wouldn't those on the selling end frown on frugality?), the implication here is that all consumers of X spend a set percentage of their wealth on X, and thus that only those with a particular economic status buy X in the first place. Which, whether X is a nose job or arugula, is false. Different people budget differently. Two people can be said to have a spare $400 to spend on nonsense, but one person's 'spare' $400 might come from his spare $4 million, while another's might be the result of months' worth of lentils in lentil sauce.

So, readers whose knowledge of economics extends beyond what's taught junior year of high school, does any of this make sense?

Shopping repression

When I lived in DC and had a real life, I shopped at least once a month. It was easy--I had lunch breaks, and DC had convenient retail. My shopping was not extravagant, in part because I had a lot of time to waste waiting for things I liked to go on sale. Now that has changed. Everything in Cambridge is inconvenient except the Gap, and I make no moneyz, so I rarely shop.

This is apparently only a good cheapness strategy until Black Friday. That's when free shipping starts. Also, free returns. And then, you know, what do you have to lose...?

The answer, as you might expect, is your money. I bought lots of barely justifiable stuff on Black Friday (it was cheaper then!), which arrived, turned out not to look that great, and had to be returned to the store (no free returns on this). It was almost like I had repented of this terrible sin. But, unfortunately, returns require a trip to the mall, where other stores also live, and the sinning began anew. It's just that it's been so long since I had been in an H&M... And then these pants were on sale in exactly my size for only $20...Besides, what if I don't get to shop again for another three months? It's all totally justifiable, bank account, I swear!

Anyway, the moral of this story is that the binge and purge method does not work in any realm of life. Indulge your shopping desires regularly in moderation.

Cheapism

FLG sent me this link a while back for a kind of CNET for not-just-electronics that suggests the cheaper version of stuff you want, but also warns against products whose cheapness is not worth it (a temptation to which I am regularly subject). The site is still a work in progress, but could be good for christmas shopping cheapsters.

Lessons in home decor

I'm sure I wasn't alone in identifying with this Greenwich Village couple's attempts to redecorate "On the Cheap," spending a mere $5,000 and using a decorator. Ah, to be young and carefree!

Or, as an alternative, you can go with a couch former roommates found on the street, and for flair, instead of throw pillows, use signs.

Such as:


Jo, who knows me well, got me this "No Peddlers" sign at a hardware store in Downtown Brooklyn. I'd been sort of obsessed with this sign for months, given that a) I'm descended, I believe, from the very peddlers this sign was probably designed to keep out when it first entered this hardware store in 1920 or whenever, and b) it's just such an anachronistic word and problem. No Smoking, Post No Bills, No Solicitation, No Spitting... but peddlers?

Below is a surprisingly inoffensive image of "The Old Jew" from Curmer's 1840s illustrated encyclopedia of French "types" that I believe captures something of my own Ashkenazi heritage. (via Gallica.bnf).



The best home decor includes 19th century as well as more modern touches:


Keeping with the Semitic theme, this sign, made from piece of paper that welcomed us to a Tel Aviv hotel bathroom, offers a positive message if I ever saw one.

Slow Fashion

Why is it that even when they have a point, the various slow-things-down movements - Slow Food, slow art-appreciation, anything else asking us to unplug and return to a simpler time, a slower time - are so very irritating? Is it because we're all in a race of one kind or another, and those telling us to slow down are doing so so that they can get ahead? Is it because pro-slow can mean anti-cosmopolitan which can mean xenophobic?

Or maybe it's because well-meaning attempts to get us to stop being such wasteful Westerners sometimes manifest themselves as pseudo-environmentalist, pseudo-pro-labor arguments for choosing Chanel over H&M, from someone clearly more concerned with helping people not wear what everyone else does to the ball than with landfills. (Via.) The blogger situates himself in a branch of frugality that eschews the obviously correct answer - buy cheap stuff and not much of it - in favor of the more fun-sounding 'buy expensive stuff but not much of it', praise the gods of Quality and I Will Wear This For Years, and feel both smug and thrifty.

Anyway, agreed that the less we spend on clothes, the more disposable we consider them. But! For whom, outside the fashion-and-socialite industry, are 'cheap' clothes that disposable? (And is donation of still-intact used clothes no longer socially acceptable?) For whom, outside these rare exceptions, does the fact that a skirt costs $40 mean huzzah, time to buy a new one every week? No doubt, if I owned a $4,000 dress, I'd take ridiculously good care of it, and could perhaps mimic Golden Age sartorial behavior, wearing just one set of clothes per season, thus saving The Workers and The Environment. But I'm rather fond of my $30 corduroys from Uniqlo, my $17 dress from H&M; for me - and I'm not claiming poverty here - these were monetarily-significant purchases. Designer clothes would mean inability to pay rent; the clothes I own and wear are not "fast fashion", purchased and tossed without a second's thought, but just... clothes. My 'cheap' clothes must be awfully well-made, because they have a tendency to last for years.

"Are you being served?"

Saturday night, I was good and ready for dinner beyond what-to-put-on-pasta. Jo and I ended up with lamb chops from the new food-movement-friendly butcher shop in Chelsea Market. Humane treatment (or as humane as killing an animal for deliciousness can ever be) plus a frou-frou cut meant over $20 for barely enough meat for two. Which is to say, it will be a while till we do that again, but it was plenty delicious,* it was still less for two, even given additional ingredients, than an equivalent meal would be for one at just about any restaurant. I know this because I never dare order such a dish at a restaurant, certainly not along with a glass of wine and a cheese-involving salad, because this whole meal would cost... I don't even want to think about it. And the quality of each ingredient was, hands-down, far superior to anything a restaurant even remotely in my price range might provide. Restaurants promising menus rooted in market produce tend to go beyond even a grad-student splurge. Whereas occasional fancy-ingredient home-cooked meals are very much doable.

So far, all I've given an account of is the obvious: it's cheaper to cook than to eat out. Yet restaurants exist, presumably for reasons beyond some people's need to throw money away. Granted, certain contexts call for a non-home environment - a second date, a business lunch, any meal consumed by someone who lives with many kitchen-hogging roommates. And depending what you're used to cooking, some cuisines will remain permanently beyond your repertoire, either for lack of knowledge regarding 'secret ingredients' or for lack of a necessary skill or cooking tool. (If I had a pizza stone, a tandoori oven, the ability to roll sushi and have it come out looking like sushi...). But restaurants typically offer versions of what we could all easily make at home ("arugula, pear, and Gorgonzola salad, $9'), and what those of us with dishwashers can easily enough clean up from.

To enjoy dining out, you need to consider it a plus, rather than a drawback, that food is prepared by someone other than yourself, and that a perfect stranger, rather than you or your dining companion, fetches each dish for you from the kitchen. Despite the hundreds of comments here and here from waitstaff along the lines of 'we're not your servants', dining out is, even for the respectful, non-obnoxious customer, about being served. Otherwise, why would restaurants even offer basic salads, ice cream bowls, and other items simple to prepare for yourself? A diner should, of course, treat staff with respect and follow the local tipping standards. But a customer who followed this advice and spent each meal out feeling grateful not to be too poor to dine out somewhere fancy, and thinking how tough - no, almost tragic - it must be to be a waiter (i.e. reacting to restaurants as Larry David does to chauffeured cars in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), could not possibly enjoy the meal. While my past experience in food service (limited) and other fetching-stuff-type work (more extensive), along with my current salary, prevent me from feeling the requisite rich-yuppie guilt on the rare occasions I find myself in a restaurant, I still, for whatever reason, find someone making me food I could easily make myself, and someone else handing me that food, more of a negative experience, all things equal, than a positive one,** and certainly not worth spending too much of my earnings on. I like the variety restaurants permit, and the possibility of inspiration for home-cooked meals to come, but do not think that if I earned more, I'd be spending much more at all on restaurant dining.

So, fellow cheapskates, is eating out worth the price?

*I have also discovered that everything, absolutely everything, or at the very least, fish and meat, tastes better after first being marinated in a mix of rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Jo just made a sarcastic remark about me putting this next on pasta, but I think he might be onto something...

**This could, again, have something to do with the fact that when I say "restaurants," I mean real restaurants, which I have been to, but am also on some level picturing the sort of places I go to more often, where grad students might go to splurge - this means places where the one waitress speaks ill of each set of customers as they leave, to the one person making the food, in the main dining area, because the food-prep and dining areas combined are four square feet, or a certain spot in Chinatown where a paper napkin I'd blown my nose in and was about to take to a trashcan outside was quickly snatched by a waitress who proceeded to use said napkin to 'clean' the table for the next customers. Who knows.

Cans: not so great, actually

Now that I own a lifetime supply of canned tomatoes,* Mark Bittman informs us that can use means IMMINENT DEATH due to toxins in the material that lines cans, or, if not quite that, that "for the moment, it appears we’re looking at boxed tomatoes." We might be looking at boxed tomatoes, but I am most definitely looking at cans. Many, many, many cans. Cans purchased because they were on sale, on sale, perhaps, because other Whole Foods shoppers got the memo before I did.

Meanwhile, Jo and I thought the sale was due to a revelation that the Italian-seeming cans are actually a domestic product. While local is in, canned tomatoes fall into this category of foodstuffs still deemed inferior if not from the assumed location. San Marzano tomatoes are not, in fact, San Marzano tomatoes. Thank you, Red Hook Fairway:



Cheapness note: those same cans are going for 30 cents less at Whole Foods than the Fairway sale price, suggesting the predictable difference in concern about toxins of shoppers at the two stores.

*An artistic rendering of my apartment:



And for fun, a sign on a men's shoe store in my neighborhood:

Halloween costumes cost money... UPDATED

...but they don't have to cost much! After much soul-searching, I've decided to go as a can of San Marzano tomatoes. These have been on sale for forever now at Whole Foods such that we now have a lifetime supply, so in terms of costume-making materials, their easily-removable labels came to mind. Three of them are to be a belt around a silver dress, worn over silver leggings - together these will form 'the can'. Red keds and red nails will, if I'm feeling energetic, complete the look.

Photos forthcoming, assuming this does not look too ridiculous.

UPDATE



Photo credit: the party hostess, via Facebook