"Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don't know. But I do know this: I'd be no good without them." - How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby
Like the protagonist of Nick Hornby's "How To Be Good," I've recently been faced with aggravation and conscience-poking qualms about how I'm spending my money. Not that there's much of it - despite having four (yes, count 'em, four) jobs right now, I seem to constantly be on the verge of having no money at all.
When I started the latest addition to my job harem, my first thought was that I'd finally have a chance at saving enough to head back for a 10-day stay in London this spring.
Stop laughing. I really was that na??ve.
Little did I realize how much stuff I'd been putting off buying. A few shirts, some actual, edible food, and a tank or two of gas later, all my first week's earnings had been spent - and before I was even due for my first check!
In my experience, budgeting money is closely related to trying to stick to a diet. You tell yourself quite finally how many calorie and fat grams you're allowed - per week, per day, per meal - and the first day or two goes fine ... then on the second or third day, you lose all will to keep up the charade of caring about whether you use no-fat vinaigrette or creamy, 18-grams-of-fat-per-serving ranch.
By the fourth day of each new budget, I wind up surrounded by CD cases, Payless-brand shoes, Target slacks, and new lipsticks that were "such a deal" when I saw them two-for-six-bucks on the shelf.
My checking account at the end of the first week of a new budget has a value inversely proportionate to my weight at the end of the first week of a new (and usually failed) diet. But I won't get into that, because a newspaper column isn't the venue I choose to give my readers nightmares.
One might ask what my budget usually includes, and how I overspend it. Well, food and gas are top on the list. But then there are clothes, makeup, travel ... The list gets longer the more you stare at it.
The problem isn't finding places to spend money. It's finding places where exchanging cash for services or goods doesn't make me feel like a bad person. I haven't gone the route of buying entirely organic food - yet - but I do try to avoid Kraft (owned by Phillip Morris, along with a slew of other "kid-friendly" brands) and Nestle. Unless I get a gift certificate, I don't shop at Best-Buy-owned Media Play, and as often as possible I buy books via used booksellers at Amazon.com as an endorsement of new-media ways of disbursing cultural works (although for one of my classes this year I've decided to buy the stuff by still-living authors new so they get the royalties). And although its sale of guns and ammo wasn't quite enough to keep me from shopping at Wal-Mart, the fact that there wasn't a salesperson in sight watching the things when my flatmate and I went to check out their Niagara Falls Boulevard store makes me wary of setting foot in there again.
The day after Thanksgiving is Annual Buy Nothing day. Well, I loused that up before 3 p.m. when, while working a daylong shift at the Picture People, I ate at McDonald's (are we beginning to see why my diets are just as doomed as my budgets?). One eensy day, and I couldn't even get through it without tossing five bucks down the drain for one of the biggest fast-food vendors in the world. I mean, these are the people who have a sign a hundred meters from an ancient temple, proclaiming "PARTHENON McDONALDS, 100M."
But what motivates my purchasing? I like to think I'm fairly responsible, or at least becoming more so; with my reading last year of Naiomi Klein's "No Logo," I began to develop a taste for conscientious consumerism. This is roughly equivalent to my decision to spend more money on healthier food, instead of buying $.99 Whoppers every afternoon just because they're cheap.
Yet another reason I'm incapable of saving money.
Well, if "The Ad and the Ego" - an hourlong piece we watched in my video analysis course Wednesday - is correct, then I, and all of you, have been brainwashed by the cumulative effects of seeing several thousand advertisements per day. So it's about as much my fault that I'm constantly broke as it is those unfortunate, obese souls whose bodies have been crammed full of fast food.
Yeah, right.
Unfortunately, I'm staring graduate school in the face this semester, and not one of the places I've applied has tuition costs of less than $10,000 per year. In fact, they're all a good bit more than that, once you add in the cost of living in New York, Los Angeles, or Edinburgh. So no matter whom I blame, the fact remains that I need to come up with enough money to buy a Ford Prius (one of those cool hybrid vehicles that gets about 50 miles to the gallon of gas, thereby saving money and lessening our dependence on Middle-Eastern oil ... don't get me started) by late August, so I can hand it over to whichever one of the three schools I applied to, and they can start "edjumicating" me in the ways of graduate knowledge. And stay on my parents' health care for another year or two.
So, if you'll excuse me, it's probably time for me to stop writing and go fish pennies out from under the sofa cushions.
