I’m Bad at Vacationing

I just spent the past several days alongside a lake in upstate New York. It was kind of cold and the ratio of spoiled-yappy-dog-to-human was an unfavorable 1:3. I prefer something closer to 0:1.

So, faced with the choice between embroilment in family drama over joint appliance purchasing and accompanying a sailboat captain with zero experience, I slunk over to the room used as a library. I had with me an enormous tattered copy of The Trust, a history/biography of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, the owners of the New York Times.

Whatever you think about that particular paper is largely irrelevant about this book. Its authors delve deeply into the business of news (see also “Backstory” by Ken Auletta) and the sociopolitical role of such a dynasty as the Sulzbergers’. The period of the book encompassing the 1950s-60s mirrors the social environment of my new favorite show, Mad Men (which started its second season last night – hooray for OnDemand).

The trade paperback edition is over 800 pages long, and I still have 100 some pages to go. But in reading it, I have a slightly more favorable outlook on the resilience of the newspaper industry, a better idea of the industry in general, a stronger dislike for high society, and another winner to add to one of my many nonfiction shelves.

And I’m bad at vacationing because the scenery in upstate New York is absolutely gorgeous, but my head was buried in this book most of the time.

Lifestyles of the Cheap and Frugal, Part 4

Technology.

There are about six computers in my household. The total value of these computers is probably about $3,000. Subtract my (gamer) brother’s computer from the population and the overall value decreases by about half. This is because the remaining computers that are not aging, slow-ass laptops are Frankensteins.

They were brought back from the dead, retrieved from roadside piles (more on such piles at a later date), everything-must-go yardsales (often for free), and yoinked from newly updated offices. From wiped hard drives, grimy CPU shells, orphan CD drives, and motherboards of questionable origin came the clunky but operable PCs of the house. And the internet on these computers is not bad at all, in terms of speed. And the speakers, also dug out of a pile, are pretty damn loud. Nice bass too, for what they are.

I don’t even have an mp3 player.

Monosyllables and cute

For the past few days and until Friday my job is to write a daily newsletter for a kids’ camp. Yes, there are people who actually do this stuff, and I am she. I’ve been writing things like how important it is to drink lots of water, and that drugs are bad. It’s a kind of law enforcement-geared camp because of where it’s located. Yeah, lots of cutesy crap.

FUCK. Shitfuck damn.

There, I said it.

Lifestyles of the Cheap and Frugal: Part 3

Books.

Finally, a good thing to say about being cheap: libraries. I grew up splitting my summers between the Jersey shore and the kids’ book club at the library. For my parents, it was a win-win deal: it got my brother to read books for free pizza at Pizza Hut, and, well, I just got free pizza at Pizza Hut. I must have blown through the Babysitters Club series and its spinoffs in three summers or less.

I occasionally troll Yahoo Answers primarily to yell at idiots, and a very common question in the Books and Authors section is WHAT WEBSITE WILL SEND ME FREE BOOKS or something to those ends. Hey, goofballs, the library is 100% free. Unless you keep their stuff for too long. Ride a bike over there or something, because only a criminally insane parent wouldn’t take their kid to a library.

Books are among the only things we splurge on. My county library holds a book sale each year and their profits set a new record each year. I’ve been to each and every one of these sales since I was eight years old and the sale itself consisted of a dozen boxes on the park benches outside the library building. Now, the sale lasts three days and fills both buildings of the local National Guard armory, and people have to be  bussed over from the library’s much larger parking lot. On the final, half-price day, hardcovers and trade paperbacks cost one dollar. I personally spent close to two hundred dollars this year, and many of the books were considerably cheaper mass market paperbacks. Do the math. I needed to build new shelving in my apartment to handle the newcomers.

At a store, cost will still be taken into account due to my incredible cheapness. Why spend $14 a pop on a load of Kurt Vonnegut novels when I can order them used for $7 apiece plus discounted shipping online? Bookstores are still great for impulse buys, like the very wonderful Jhumpa Lahiri collection Interpreter of Maladies, the stationery section, and the bargain section.

The other thing I like about books is that no technology is required of me to read one.

Nice, nice, very nice.

EEEEEEpa! EEEEEEEpa!

I watched the Simpsons movie last night.

Lifestyles of the Cheap and Frugal, Part 2

Replacement and/or mixing of foodstuffs.

In my household it is frowned upon when two mutually exclusive items, such as corn flakes and rice krispies, or orange juice and grape juice, or APPLESAUCE and CANNED PEACHES, are mixed together in the serving containers and put back into the general foodstuff population. It is considered rude and disgusting to the person who does not enjoy such a combination, but instead wanted to eat just one of the mixed ingredients.

This practice stills occurs occasionally, in the name of saving cabinet space. YUCK!

A less visible but more palatable food travesty is the ol’ switcheroo: when a small container of a brand-name product never seems to go empty – because it is constantly refilled from a bulk container of the generic brand. Now, don’t get me wrong - Marshmallow Mateys taste just like Lucky Charms. Really! And they’re pirate-themed! But when it comes to something like coffee or liquor, you get what you pay for. Really. A single shot of Grey Goose instantly weaned me off Smirnoff. Try it, unless you can’t afford to pay more than ten dollars for a half gallon of vodka. With the handle built into the bottle.

Monocle cat says pip pip

Lifestyles of the Cheap and Frugal, Part 1

Postage stamps.

We used to recycle them in my household. Years ago my father found a large pile of old stamps in his father’s stuff, half-charred from a house fire. Most of the stamps were recoverable, and put in a warm water bath to separate them. Once the stamps were soaked off, they were dried and reapplied to a new, out-going envelope with a glue stick. Since the stamps in question are decades old, he has to cover half the envelope with old, funny-looking stamps.

Packages go to the office to take advantage of the postage machine there, a practice referred to as a “perk” by other office slaves.

Every little bit helps…

So much for mixology

Do not mix an ounce and a half of cran-raspberry juice, half an ounce of Captain Morgan, and half an ounce of Myer’s dark rum with an ice cube and a teaspoon of honey. It’s kind of lame and too strong to be tasty.

Edit: Maybe I didn’t eat enough today, but the single ounce of liquor in this little drink is really fucking strong.

Thoughts on Frida Kahlo

As my clickthrough rate shows, a lot of people know I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in May. A large portion of the exhibit was of photographs that had never been displayed in public before. In half the photos of her, Kahlo has this certain look on her face. If she’s looking at Diego Rivera, it’s “I know what you did there,” to the artists’ infidelities with a lolcat reference. If she’s looking off at nothing in particular, or kind of tilting an eyebrow or the corner of her mouth at the camera, she seems to say that she’s discovered the meaning of life, but isn’t going to tell us anytime soon.

Frida Kahlo’s life was one of frequent, intense pain, both physical from injuries sustained in the trolley crash when she was nineteen, and emotional from the ups and downs of her relationship with Rivera and the distance in her family. Her paintings convey all this raw emotion, sometimes even the raw physical suffering symbolized by impulsive swipes of red paint on the frames of graphic and bloody works. Her forays into surrealism are brief enough to emphasize the transcendence of pain into her mental state, and the fact that she was almost entirely self-taught while recuperating from the bus accident provides a neat little footnote to her artistic biography: that Kahlo’s art is suffering, that her suffering became her art.