poverty: a retrospective

i don't care how idealistic you might be: money is good.

mb and i spent the weekend back in madison visiting college friends, and over drinks were reminiscing about the things we did to get through several years spent living on skimpy financial aid checks. turns out i made it relatively unscathed - i didn't call it "poverty;" i called it "vegetarian." others didn't fare so well; mb's friend chad tells a funny story about months gone by without heat one winter because he had just bought an engagement ring and his roommate decided that a bmw xz-something was really worth $80,000. mb himself lists an impressive array of luxurious make-ends-meet jobs including chicken farmer, can factory worker, box factory worker (to this day he claims to be able to distinguish single from double-corrugated eyes closed), and opener of little milk cartons as elementary school assistant janitor (for children who, although young, clearly and demeaningly understood the class structure separating the milk drinkers from milk openers).

so now we find ourselves in our first jobs that make more money than our previous positions as supper club waitress and mattress maker. granted, it's not much by city standards, what with the beautiful people who wear nike cashmere tracksuits to take out the trash. but we're thrilled with the ability to go out for dinner besides to subway. so i found it odd when, in an attempt to be healthier during a busy work week, i made a pot of lentils and couscous for us to use for lunches, and mb returned two days later telling me his coworkers were all making fun of him for his depression-era meals. turns out they've noticed we eat like this a lot, and are concerned that mb must need a raise because we can't feed ourselves better than canned beans.

now, in my defense, clearly they haven't tried my lentils. i'm a pretty decent cook, and anything flavored with wine, bacon and tony chachere's cajun seasoning is a good thing. but where i sputteringly protest, "but this isn't poor-people food! come on, i can finally afford the couscous and bacon!", mb has decided to revel in his newfound pauper role. he requests more trappings of poverty so he can keep up his new work image.

is there such thing as "nouveau-poor"?
and can i help him pull this off without resorting to spam?

the lost art of b.s.

i live in ongoing awe of some of my more senior colleagues. these are people who can, in any situation, retain and recall all of the salient details and also command a sophisticated and insightful understanding of the big picture.

i will never be one of those people.

on some level my expectation must have been that without any particular effort i could passively become smart and good at stuff. having realized that such a transformation would actually take a tremendous amount of motivation and effort, and that - let's face it- i probably wouldn't succeed anyway, i've started looking for loopholes.

basically what i've found is that there's no upper limit to how much one can bluff. it all started with a couple a stalling devices that i picked up from some friends at work- things you can say when you're up against a wall that either so vague or so universally true that they're almost never the wrong answer. while i want to say that over the last few weeks my blogmate and i have been involved in a collaborative effort to expand the list to cover one's behind in a variety of situations, the truth is probably that while i've been busy confabulating bullshit answers, my blogmate has actuallly been getting smarter and more sophisticated in her understanding of things.

whether or not i'm acting alone, i'm escalating my ploys to make it look like i know what's going on. i've come up with two basic approaches:

#1) embellishment- if you have a reasonably good idea of what the key issues are, but have been unwilling or unable to back yourself up with hard data you can usually get around ever providing it. the truth is that most people don't want to listen to you drone on about the details anyway- all you really have to do is use big words to get across that you understand the concept and make it seem like you're doing people a favor by leaving out the minutiae.

#1a) dumbing it down- the opposite tactic, only for the most skilled participants, is to use inappropriately small, childish words to describe highly complex or worrisome phenomena- it makes it sound like you've arrived on a higher plane of understanding.

#2) plausibility- if you actually have no idea what's going on but you have enough free time to harvest some (but not necessarily all) of the details, you can usually arrange them to come out of your mouth in such a way that they make sense to everyone else. take it step higher by either drawing a conclusion that sounds pretty reasonable (and vague), or by finding a way to make your data back up a known reality.

every day i get one step closer to greatness.

whore #3 and the french fries that weren't

this low expectations thing is working out great!

after a grueling work week i finally started decompressing on saturday night, first over ass-kicking margaritas at caesars (one margarita, actually), then at the movies, after which i wondered if a small role in major motion picture would be worth running in the credits as "whore #3."

then came brunch with twinset on sunday morning followed by mid-day bourbon on the rocks with ck and my blogmate. we were all a little rough around the edges that day (even before we hit the bottle), such that our romp around lakeview consisted of a brief blitz through the gap and tj maxx- that is, of course, after ck gave me a good schooling on where one's tea kettle should live. "you put it AWAY?!?!" my blogmate proceeded to taunt me with the empty promise of french fries, leaving me alone on the couch to round off the night with pizza and buffy the vampire slayer.

all and all i was quite pleased with how the weekend went, and returned to work feeling vaguely refreshed. i also came away with the sense that when it comes to j-date i have a stay of execution. i just don't see how i can squeeze in 3 to 5 dates a week when i have so much drinking to do.

nowhere to go but down

every year i generate a long list of new year's resolutions. most of them are pretty mundane, and as most of them appear on the list year after year, i've realized that regular gym attendance, daily flossing, and abstinence from chocolate covered raisin binges just aren't attainable goals.

as such, i've decided to go minimalist, whittling the list down the list to one, simple concept: low standards.

while my blogmate was, for the most part, supportive of this strategy, she did give me her trademark meaningful eyebrow raise which i correctly took to mean: "i hope you'll make an exception for men, where higher standards might be a better approach."

in truth, i think i've been doing this low standards thing for a while, but it all gelled as my blogmate and i planned our new year's eve festivities.

a few weeks ago, we heard that our boss of all bosses was having a party at his fabulous frank lloyd wright mansion in hyde park. it seemed perfect- high quality food and booze, walking distance from my blogmate's house, absolutely no social pressure. no need to go shopping for sparkly new year's attire (that invariably squeezes in all the wrong places)- no one to impress at this party, no pretense of coolness. and, of course, we'd get to to see the house.

it seems we were the only people with this point of view, and due to a dismal rsvp rate, the party was cancelled. had we rsvp'd on time, someone might have bothered to tell us... but of course nobody told us, and even though the house seemed bizarrely quiet, we rang the doorbell and had our coats off and hung up in the closet before the very important man that we barely know asked us, "did you think there was a party tonight?" did i mention that his fly was open? in spite of our obviously interrupting christmas present-opening with his family and friends, said important guy broke out a very nice bottle of wine and he and his thankfully granola wife proceeded to give us a private, thorough, tour of their fantastic, and thankfully interesting house. i think i made it a little easier by knowing a little moore about frank lloyd wright than the average person, and by opening with the bit about another one of our colleagues (who'd had the sense to stay home) asking about the andrew lloyd weber house.

one traumatic hour later we were back out on the streets of hyde park, desperately searching for someplace to ring in the new year, which turned out to be my blogmate's living room, since the only bar in the neighborhood was closed. it wasn't bad really- my blogmate mixed us captain morgan and diet cherry cokes (more rum than coke, i think, but it was hard to tell), we wolfed down the yummy brownies that mb had made, and watched the univision equivalent of dick clark's new year's rockin' eve- feliz 2006 live from acapulco. these women take boob job to a whole new level.

too stupid to quit while i was ahead, i convinced ck (who originally wasn't going to go out at all) to keep the party going and actually talked mr. andrew lloyd weber off his couch, out the door, onto the el, and into a bar. so then there was alot of drinking and a subsequent lot of headache.

one could argue that spending new year's this way- barging in on my boss' intimate family gathering, getting drunk at a bar with people who didn't want to go out in the first place- is downright pathetic. but in low standards land it was fantastic.