TBL has been looking for a good analogy for the season to date, and today she found one. (No points for guessing why this particular analogy came to her...)
Watching the Twins so far has been like leaving the office for the lunch hour on a nice sunny day and taking a long, invigorating walk through a picturesque area, in shoes that haven't properly broken in yet.
The comments are open. Post your analogy!
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Even most of TBL's closest friends did not know this until now: aside from all the story writing and blogging, TBL also keeps a journal. A traditional, handwritten journal. A diary, if you will. And while most of the contents are extremely private, TBL would like to share with all of you a few recent entries.
Do pardon the diarists' shorthand--they were not originally written for public consumption, and TBL does not bother with trivialities like grammar and prepositions when writing solely for herself. Proper names of people and companies have been redacted because they are nobody else's business.
25.Nov.07
First entry in weeks. Will shortly lose lack-of-time excuse as have been laid off. Do not expect to work between Wednesday (first day unemployed) and new year.
Announcement of layoff (19.Oct) followed by three weeks solid depression. Cleanliness of apartment has yet to completely recover. Will shortly have time to rectify that, as well.
Looking for new job downtown. Being there would go long way toward making up for recent events.
Hope to finish revisions of Catch Me in December, since will have all that time. Ask A____ for advice how to find right agent?
Severance package quite good. Jobless December not worrisome. Trying to view time off to write as gift. When else might have chance at whole month off? But still hoping to win Hot Lotto.
Have been reading up on Buddhism. Idea of "right thought" and seeing things as they really are very appealing. Also concept of mindfulness, opposite societal worship of multitasking. Meditation very difficult, though--brain not wired for stillness.
Knitting lots lately. Also reading and watching movies. Distractions sans interactions.
26.Nov.07
Tomorrow last day at job. Have résumé in for 3 positions--1 @ K____, 2 @ C____. REALLY want job at C____. Excellent benefits, everyone who works there seems to love the place.
Not sure how to make it through tomorrow with dignity intact. Have been known to cry at commercials.
J____ coming to pick me up, bless her--will not have to face teary bus ride clutching box of lost-job detritus. Have better friends than deserve.
One foot in front of other. No day lasts forever. Got through divorce, will get through this.
27.Nov.07
Last day @ G____. Plan to hand off key card and bolt before could cry foiled by sudden appearance of half of team. Somehow managed to joke around with them several minutes before making exit. Cried in car. Professional dignity intact, passenger seat slightly damp.
Spent evening watching DVDs with J____ & printing out résumé for job fair tomorrow. Résumé paper should go out, find job for me, given exorbitant cost.
28.Nov.07
Am now officially unemployed. Yet, still got up before crack of dawn, because job fair* at 8:30. Insult, meet injury.
Got all tarted up in best professional-style outfit, went to ass-end of Bloomington to beg for employment. ("Tarted up" prob. not best phrase; actually looked like Republican convention delegate. Very disturbing.)
Turns out, rumor that are more jobs like mine than people like me in need of jobs is true. IT recruiter from S____ tried to get me to give him all my résumés so I could not hand out elsewhere. IT recruiter from P____ wanted to know if could interview this week. Both companies, unfortunately, in locations that suck, also known as outer ring suburbs. IT recruiter from T____ downtown asked ton of questions, scribbled notes all over résumé and mentioned specific job trying to fill. HR types with W____ and U____ downtown made interested noises but unsure what openings were in IT. Left résumé, will be forwarded to IT types.
Really want to work downtown. If find job there, will be magically transformed into super-cool single girl about town. (Realistically, will prob. continue as awkward, knitting spinster with cats, but firmly believe that rich fantasy life is good thing, esp. in troubled times.)
Cat suddenly behaving very strangely, perhaps in odd feline attempt to cheer up the biped.
Is working.
* Not sure why called "job fair". "Fair" implies bright lights, food on stick, atmosphere of gaiety, possibly beer. Job fair had none of above. Also, facial muscles sore from excess of fake smiling. Should be "job gauntlet" or perhaps "employment roulette".
This morning, I was half a block from my bus stop when the bus went whizzing merrily through the intersection.
I was not late. It was early.
With a few choice words on the probable ancestry of bus drivers who can't stick to the schedule, I struck out for the nearest coffeeshop to wait out the half hour until the next bus came along. On the way I passed beneath the overhanging branches a tree festooned with leaves faded to a glorious shade of chartreuse. The sidewalk beneath was carpeted in those leaves, rustling as I walked over them.
A breeze kicked up just then and knocked a bushel of them free from the branches. I stopped and stood there laughing like a crazy person while the leaves whirled around me. I wasn't slumped in a bus seat on my way to my rapidly-disappearing job. I wasn't trying to coax resume-worthy phrases out of my sleepy brain or calculating for the hundredth time just how long my severance package could be expected to support me.
No, I was standing on the sidewalk on a quiet street being pelted by windblown leaves on a crisp autumn morning when all the colors of the world were just beginning to turn winter-bright. Half an hour that normally belongs to my obligations suddenly belonged to me, the unexpected gift of an early bus.
The breeze died and the leaves settled around my feet and I continued on to the coffeeshop. When I asked for a jacket for my cup the guy behind the counter and I spent a minute laughing over all the funny things he'd had customers call those little rings of cardboard. My favorite was "mittens".
Then I sat and drank my coffee and read my book and watched the dry red and brown maple leaves skitter across the road outside. When the next bus came, I got on it and I went to work, where most of the cubicles are empty now and everything I do comes with a countdown clock attached.
But when I close my eyes, I can see brilliant green leaves swirling in the wind.
Mere days after wishing for, in essence, a coffeehouse with beer, TBL unwittingly wandered into just such a place!
Common Roots Cafe, on the northwest corner of 26th & Lyndale, has soups, salads, sandwiches, bagels, pastries, other breakfasty things, coffee drinks and...beer and wine! Oh, but it gets better, dear readers.
They use local ingredients, compost their food waste (there's a special bin for customers to tip their own uneaten portions into), and serve Peace Coffee, which is a line of fair trade organic coffees from a company based right here in Minneapolis. The tap beers were all local brews when I was there--two from the new Surly Brewery in Brooklyn Center, an organic ale from Flat Earth in St. Paul, and do-gooder beer Finnegan's from St. Paul mega-brewer Summit. All the wines listed on their online menu are regional and/or fair trade. The lighting is good and the furnishings simple. Alas, no couches. And last but not least, the menu is vegetarian-friendly.
Helpful reader Douglas suggests, in the comments to the original post, Arcadia Cafe on Franklin and Nicollet as another place where one can get a drink or two without having to navigate the bar scene. TBL has not been there yet.
We have the flu. I don't know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death Flu". You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that said "ELECTROCUTION". Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth, because (a) your teeth hurt, and (b) you lack the strength. Midway through the brushing process, you'd have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom floor, which is how the police would find you.It's going around. That first early-October bout of flu, which hits before the shot can take hold, if not before the shot has even been administered. And this year, it's a bad one. TBL knows. TBL has got it. TBL would very much like to curl up and die, but having taken Tuesday off work to nip this thing in the bud (and that worked ever so well...) she must stagger onward until the weekend.
You know the kind of flu I'm talking about.
-- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide"
The fridge here at Casa Liberales normally contains a small supply of beer, usually an ale of some description. Bell's Oberon and Finnegan's Irish Amber are the current favorites. But you know, sometimes a girl just wants a nice stout. Or perhaps a porter. A lambic, even, on very rare occasions. Rather than laying in a whole six-pack, parts of which might still be cluttering up the beer drawer (What, it's supposed to be for produce? Who knew?) six months later, I usually just stroll on down to the local bar.
Let me tell you, going to a bar alone is strange. Especially on a Friday or Saturday when it's really crowded. I know people do it, but what I don't get is how they can just sit there at the bar without anything to do.
It's likely a side effect of growing up an only child in a house full of books smack in the middle of 50-odd partially tamed acres ideal for playing knights-and-dragons or wizards-and-invading-hordes in, but I require constant intellectual stimulation. I am more than capable of providing said stimulation for myself, but I can't just sit somewhere. I have to be reading or writing or watching (good) TV. Or engaged in conversation, of course.
Then again, I'm not one of these hail-fellow-well-met sorts who can wander into the local watering hole and befriend half the bar in a quarter of an hour or less. Actually, with the exception of those very rare people with whom I feel instantly comfortable, I can barely string together a coherent sentence when talking to strangers. And "people watching" in a bar is only interesting for the first five minutes.
So when I go to the bar on my own, I take a book. Boy, do I get some funny looks. Especially on the weekends. Also, reading by the light of that dinky little candle on the table? Not easy. Once, someone actually stopped by my table and asked, "Why don't you go to a coffeeshop and read?"
I said, "I didn't want coffee. I wanted a beer." And I went back to reading.
But you know, if someone opened a bar with a coffeehouse feel (lights up, free wi-fi, pastries available, etc.) I would LOVE that. The quiet and sense of space and maybe a few puffy couches, now with beer!
I would miss out on the drunken proclamations of the trendy young things at the next table, but you can't have it all.
SWIPE!
(hack, cough, sputter)
Gads, the blog was dusty! Pardonez-TBL for one moment, she missed a spot...there. Much better.
Well. Here we are again. TBL confesses to neglecting the blog partly because the Twins continue their pursuit of blah-ness. (Although, the series in Baltimore? Delightful!) But the largest share of the blame, TBL is afraid, must be laid square at the doorstep of fellow blogger Crazy Aunt Purl.
CAP is a funny, funny lady, and TBL reads her often because when one is of an age that no longer begins with "2" and suddenly finds oneself divorced and living on one's own with several cats and a yarn stash that has grown large enough to devour the neighbor children, it is lovely to know (or at least read) someone in much the same situation who can make it all seem hysterically funny.
And CAP, in the course of being very funny about things like the relative coolness factor of thirty-something spinsters with cats who knit a lot (you called?), got me addicted to a TV show on BBC America called 'How Clean Is Your House?'. Basically, these two women travel Britain going to houses that are so messy they're a health hazard, cleaning them up, showing the residents all the bugs, vermin and dangerous microorganisms they've been living with, and sharing handy chemical-free cleaning tips. Then they come back a few weeks later to see if the residents are keeping the place clean or sliding back into old habits.
Since CAP's post about the show was so amusing, TBL set the DVR for an episode. And made the mistake of watching it during dinner. Then TBL jumped up and cleaned her kitchen counters.
Long story short, BBCA airs two hours of 'How Clean is Your House?' every weekday. TBL gets home from work, makes some dinner, watches two hours of Kim and Aggie setting their "filthy beggars" to rights, and then sets to on the much more manageable problems here at Casa Liberales. And while TBL will never be as, er...exacting as Kim and Aggie, in the last two weeks she has dusted every surface in her home, scrubbed every inch of her kitchen and bathroom surfaces and floors, cleaned out and scrubbed the fridge, vacuumed twice-weekly, polished her silver, organized her closets and cupboards and even shoehorned her yarn stash into a manageable space. Furthermore, she has created a cleaning schedule and posted it on her fridge where it confronts her every day when she makes dinner. TBL has become tidy, dear readers.
That thumping sound you just heard was Fourth Pew, Center fainting from the shock.
Did you know that housework burns about 200 calories an hour? TBL's favorite jeans are looking scandalously good on her these days, if she does say so herself. All that TV-watching and frenzied cleaning, however, have not left much time for the blogging. And that is why Crazy Aunt Purl is to blame.
There has, however, been gobs of time to knit! (Well, what do you do while you're watching television? Never tell TBL you just sit there.) In what may prove to be the greatest barrier yet to managing the yarn stash, one of the knitters at TBL's Thursday evening stitch-n-bitch, as opposed to the Sunday morning stitch-n-bitch, has taught TBL the secret to acquiring incredibly cheap yarn. Those of you on a yarn diet should skip the next few paragraphs.
Go to a thrift store (and there are plenty around the Twin Cities). Yard sales can also be good. Browse the sweaters: start at large and work your way down the sizes--bigger sweater = more yarn! Also, for some reason, TBL has noticed that sweaters in very large sizes are more likely to be hideously designed but made out of lovely yarn. Check the seams--do not buy serged seams. Pick the sweater apart at home. Unraveling is the best part! Loop the yarn (which now looks like ramen noodles) into loose skeins. Wash gently to take the kinks out and dispel that lovely thrift-store aroma. Dry. Wind into skeins. Add to stash.
TBL loves this because not only is it so very in keeping with her environmenty and recycley tendencies (aka "hippieness"), but it's cheap yarn. Gobs and gobs of yarn for pennies a gram! You begin, dear readers, to see why stash size is a matter of concern.
TBL has acquired five sweaters ranging from $3.99 to $9.99. She has unraveled three so far. One, a lovely worsted weight coral and red twist in a silk/nylon/wool blend, yielded over 800 yards. A worsted self-striping jewel toned wool/mohair blend yielded about 1000 yards. An acrylic in shades of green gave 850 yards. (Many yarn snobs will not bother to recycle acrylic yarn. However, TBL is ever so slightly allergic to wool, in much the same way as she is ever so slightly fond of baseball. She finds cashmere scratchy.)
For yardage, measure out ten yards and weigh on a kitchen scale. Weigh total recycled yarn. Calculate approximate yardage thus: (sample weight in grams/10) * total weight in grams.
The silk/nylon/wool blend is being worked up into a clapotis stole. The acrylic is earmarked for a scarf. The self-striping wool/mohair will probably be a shawl someday, likely for Shiela's Shawls. The sweaters waiting to be unraveled are a variegated DK wool in crayon colors which will probably end up as a pile of hats and mittens for all the nephews and the niece, circa 2009, and a men's XXXL in sock-weight maroon tweed cotton.
One day soon--pictures!
Back on the baseball front, however, things are not so tidy and TBL is not having so much fun. There has been a great deal of talk about whether the Twins can retain the services of Johan Santana, and judging by what Santana himself has had to say lately, it does not seem promising.
Allow TBL to refresh your memory:
"I'm not surprised," Santana was quoted when asked about the lack of another trade. "That's exactly how they are. That's why we've never going to go beyond where we've gone."
And the ace said that it might jeopardize his future with the franchise.
"You always talk about future, future, future," Santana told the paper. "But if you only worry about the future, then I guess a lot of us won't be a part of it."
"Why waste time when you're talking about something that's always going to be like that? It's never going to be beyond this point. It doesn't make any sense for me to be here, you know?"
Santana wouldn't elaborate on his comments Wednesday, saying that he had said all he wanted to say a day earlier. But the two-time Cy Young Award winner did confirm that his statements were indeed how he felt.
"I was just being honest," Santana said.
This team can build for the future all it wants, but without Santana things don't look so good. Yes, there's Francisco Liriano, but he just had Tommy John surgery. It's going to be a couple of years before we have a good idea of what his future holds.
Obviously, one can't go back in time and make a big trade to boost the club and keep Santana happy. But there's an offseason coming up--how about getting something done at the winter meetings, TR? Show us, and Johan, that the organization is committed to building for the immedate rather than the distant future.What can one say about the Twins lately? They're not good enough to inspire, nor bad enough to be comedic. They're just rather...blah. Which may be a good word for the season as a whole, really.
As TBL can take only so much blah without going stark raving mad, she's found other things to occupy her attention lately. (She is still as passionately devoted to the Twins as ever, but sometimes one just needs a wee break, especially in the midst of the blahs.)
Well. It appears TBL was overly optimistic last week in declaring that the insane busy-ness was nearing an end. It has merely changed flavor.
Some of you are already aware that TBL has been known to write things that do not get posted to this blog, and also that she hopes to someday reclaim her soul from her corporate masters and write for a living. So when the Muse says, "Yoo hoo! Over here!", TBL drops everything that does not help her pay rent. Yes, dear readers, even the baseball. ("Inattentive" would be a kind description of her game-watching habits of late.)
Regular blogging will resume when it resumes. One presumes it won't be too terribly long, for the Muse, she is fickle and drives TBL bonkers.
If you are interested, the project of the moment is a short story tentatively titled "Pelean's Jewel", and it is going just swimmingly. It is about an old dragon, a young queen, a knight, a kitchen-boy, and a lost jewel.
TBL has no explanation for this, except that she was bored and both the cat and the knitting were close to hand.
Caption, anyone?
Sometimes living alone sucks.
I've been on my own for six months now, and 99% of the time I love it. My space, my rules, my style, my stuff, my way. No roommates, no family, no compromises. I've got a meatless kitchen and a toilet seat that's always left down. I've got four closets all to myself. (No, I have not filled one with yarn. Yet.) I know where everything is, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.
When I don't feel sociable (which is often) I can shut the door and throw the bolt and ahh...blessed solitude. If I'm writing, no one wanders in and accidentally blows my concentration all to hell. No one tries to talk to me during CSI, or dares to suggest that holding knitting projects is not the ultimate function of the coffee table.
However, there are times when I want to be around other people, to talk and laugh and interact, yet everyone I know is busy (I don't know very many people, actually) and there's nowhere to go but home. So I go home and shut the door and try to talk to the cat, but it's just not the same.
The cat, frankly, doesn't give a shit if you had a bad day and were hoping for an evening out with your friends to make up for it. Nor does the cat care in the least when you've got a raging case of writer's block, and furthermore the cat is utterly useless if you want to bounce plot ideas off of someone.
The cat also can't give you a hug when you need one, or smack you upside the head and tell you you're being a dumbass when that's what you need. The cat does not point out ever-so-delicately that the outfit in which you're trying to leave the house makes your ass look like a dirigible ready for launch, nor does the cat remind you that you're out of toilet paper, veggie burgers, and whiskey. (You know, the essentials.) The cat loves getting backrubs, but has yet to reciprocate.
Humans are hardwired to be social creatures. Even raging introverts like me have to get out there now and again. And when we're thwarted in that design, the primal brain becomes convinced we have been abandoned by the tribe and will promptly die. No amount of logic and reason will convince the primal brain otherwise, because it is not so smart. It is the primal brain which leads us to feel like crap when we find ourselves watching the Cubs game on television a few minutes before midnight on a Friday when we'd hoped to be down the pub with a pint and some old friends, even though these things happen and there's really no reason to get at all despondent about it.
Don't get me wrong. I love my new life. I adore my on-my-own-ness. I relish my privacy and my utter command of one tiny, overpriced, cat-fur-covered piece of the universe.
But once in a while...
...every so often...
...just occasionally...
...one percent of the time...
...it sucks.
Rangers 1, Twins 7
Time for TBL to catch up on her correspondence.
Today in "Poorly-Edited Sports Headlines":
(It's even funnier because it's the Yankees...)
Ah, spring, when a young(ish) Twins fan's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of finding some capri pants and maybe a top to go with her so-cute new sandals.
You know what? They don't make clothes for actual women anymore. TBL is not sure they ever did.
TBL recalls being fourteen and approximately as wide as your pinkie finger and having no problems at all finding clothes that fit just wonderfully. But TBL kept on getting older until one day she woke up and had hips and a butt and other things that grown women have in real life. And suddenly, the shopping? Not so easy.
Here's the thing: the average American woman is 5'4" and wears a size 14. TBL is 5'3" and does not wear a size 14, but neither does she wear a size 2. And yet, all the pants which fit the curvy bits have great swathes of extra fabric flapping about the legs and/or pooling about the ankles. And all the tops which fit the curvy bits either drape tentlike over the rest of the torso or look as though they were applied with a vacuum-sealing device of some sort.
As a bit of an aside, while TBL is pleased to see the sport clothing manufacturers producing more gear for the female baseball fan, far too much of it is pink. Those of you who know TBL in real life, take a minute to picture her in pink. Try not to laugh so hard you injure yourself, please. This blog does not carry liability insurance.
But back to the fashion industry--TBL has female friends in every size you can imagine, and we all find that the task of acquiring clothes that fit nicely and are appropriate to both our personalities and our ages falls somewhere between "Herculean" and "Sisyphean".
So tell us, why are 95% of the clothes in the stores made for only two kinds of women--the pencil-thin, hipless, buttless, boobless wonder, or your color-blind Auntie Edna who thinks muumuus are appropriate to every occasion?
Most women fall somewhere between the two. And what we want is not so terribly complicated. We want clothes that fit. Comfortably. Over real bodies. We want to be able to look professional without looking frumpy. We want to be casual but still have waists that are easily identifiable. We want to look (and feel) sexy, not trashy.
We want to walk into stores and try things on without having our self-esteem bludgeoned to bits. It's okay--it's normal--for a woman have a convex belly and dimples on her thighs. Why should she hide under floral-print tents just because she doesn't spend three hours a day at the gym or--goddess forbid--she had a baby and her body changed? Why are we made to feel ashamed of having a woman's body, not a boy's? Perhaps more to the point, why do we allow ourselves to be shamed?
But no matter how good (or otherwise) we feel about our bodies, hardly anyone is making decent clothes for them. We do the best we can, we hunt through store after store, picking up this here and that there and too often settling for something vaguely adequate because it's the best we can find. We learn to alter our own clothing (get a serger, ladies, you'll love it) and keep an eye out for our best girlfriends' sizes while we're in the stores, because they do the same for us and we can all use every bit of help we can get.
We buy stuff that isn't comfortable because it looks okay, and stuff that looks like hell because it's comfortable. We come home with things that neither look nor feel good, because we think they might be great when they soften up in the wash, or after we drop that five pounds we've been meaning to deal with. We end up with closets bursting and drawers overflowing and nothing to wear.
Guys? You wonder why she has so many clothes? This is why.
It's stupid. Piles and mountains and racks of clothes in store after store all over the world, and no one who isn't a size 4 and under can find a thing that they really like. Who designs this crap?
Who decided that TBL is too short for her own hips, and that if she doesn't want to wear a sack over her chest, she must be determined to skirt the very edges of the public decency laws? Who decided that the most gorgeous, sexy women TBL has ever met should disappear under yards of shapeless fabric just because they had children? Who decided that you only deserve nice clothes if you're 5'8" and measure 34-22-34?
And, ladies, we can't hang this one on the guys. TBL is certain that there are, in fact, men out there who honestly prefer the stick-figure vision of femininity, but she has yet to become acquainted with any of them. The (straight) guys, they do like the curvy bits.
You know what the really "in" thing is this summer? The empire waist. That's where the top or dress is cinched (usually with a band of some sort) directly under the breasts and flows loosely from there. This style looks delicate and lovely on any woman who has an A cup and no hips. On the rest of us--which is most of us--it looks like maternity wear.
And to judge from what is available in the stores, they all expect TBL to voluntarily buy this stuff and spend the summer looking pregnant. Aside from the fact that FPC would fall catatonic at the mere thought of becoming a grandmother, TBL does not wish to spend her summer explaining that no, she does not want or need a used stroller for cheap.
You will not find any answers here. TBL is just venting, and putting some questions out there. And maybe hoping that if enough of us think about this, and get annoyed about this, and find a way to stop buying crap that's barely serviceable and mostly undesirable, someone in the fashion industry will wake up and say, "Excuse me, but why don't we try something completely off the wall here, and whip up some clothes that make people look and feel good? I've got a hunch they might sell."
And if, in the course of your daily life, you should stumble across some capris which would actually be capri-length and not wader-length on a woman of normal height, and which do not in any way resemble a hot air balloon or, alternatively, body paint, do drop TBL a line. She's still looking...
Today, TBL has (under the nom de plume "infield") gotten rather silly over on BatGirl.
Post reproduced below, for archiving purposes:
Thou still undent'd length of maple wood,
Thou foster-child of Sucking and slow Curves,
Pine-tar'd historian, who canst thus express
A hitless tale more surely than our rhyme:
What soul-sucking legend haunts about thy shape
Of left-handers or righties, or of both,
In KC or the paths of Jacobs Field?
What men or gods are these? What bunters loth?
What mad putouts? What struggle to reach base?
What fouls and ground-outs? What wild swinging strikes?
All baseball games are sweet, but those we win
Are sweeter; therefore, ye young Twins, play on;
Not with the assbattery, but, more endear'd,
Swing at the pitch that falls within the zone:
Fair youth, beneath the lights, thou canst not leave
Home plate, unless thou can those fastballs smack;
Bold batter, never, never canst thou hit,
Swinging now this assbat--yet, do not grieve;
But proclaim, fie!, upon that curs'd wood,
After this wilt thou swing, and it fall fair!
No, my name isn't Jonah. Why do you ask?
Whoa, man, that was some heavy catnip...
My mom raised me to not spend money I don't have. Sensible, no? And that sensible philosophy saw me through my twenties with only a student loan on my back. Growing up (and I include my twenties in that!) living the pay-as-you-go maxim imbued me with a deep distrust, even fear, of credit cards.
We all know someone who thought "hey, free money!" when that first credit offer arrived days after their first job started, and later learned how NOT free that money is. They're sneaky, those cards. Blow a thousand bucks in one place, and pay only $25 a month thereafter! How nifty! How keen! Pay that twenty five bucks a month until it stacks up to thrice the purchase price. How evil.
But I want to buy a house someday, and I want that someday to be while I'm still young enough to really enjoy the damn thing. A student loan isn't (alas) enough of a credit history to get a mortgage, and being responsible enough not to get into debt in the first place (double-alas) counts for precisely nothing in today's America.
So. I got a credit card.
And for the last year that credit card has been sitting in my wallet like a ticking time bomb, pulled out gingerly at great intervals and only after the most solemn forethought, only to be paid off with an alacrity most people reserve for pulling their firstborn out of traffic.
But the siren's song of credit finally got me.
My first mistake was browing Amazon.com while, ah, less than flush in the pocket. My second mistake was taking a "quick peek" onto my Wishlist, "just to remind myself" of what I wanted.
(You see where this is going, don't you?)
Lo, upon what did my longing glance alight but a book and a kitchen implement (a bake-your-own taco shells rack), both of which I have been sighing over these many weeks. My thought process at that point went something like this:
If I get the free super-saver shipping, it'd be okay...
But no, I really shouldn't be spending on non-necessities right now. I can wait until I get paid again.
But I REALLY want to read that book. And I loves me some tacos.
It can wait.
I could read the book while eating tacos.
That sounds fabulous. But I'm kind of broke.
I'm only kind of broke because I paid ten times the minimum payment on my Visa last week.
Which means...
Yes?
Which means, I have a shitload of room on my Visa now.
Baseball player.
Jogger.
