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.

Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

It’s fucking hot in here.

It’s been over ninety degrees every day for almost a week, and so humid that my books are expanding on the shelves and sticking to the one I painted…. six months ago. I even turned the air conditioning on. Jersey’s not even supposed to get rain for another week, and only scattered thunderstorms at that. :(

So I’m gonna beat the heat by introducing two new bloggers a day to my little corner of the ‘osphere, sitting in the AC in between trips to the school gym’s pool. And homework, because I’m cool enough to take summer classes. Read about my premature master’s degree conquests here…

And a big hi and hello to Amy, a writer with pet rats (clone! clone!) and Awalkabout, a menagerie of topics with a vaguely Australian feel – or maybe that’s just because Outback Steakhouse calls their soup du jour by the same name.

Publications vs. Comcast Triple Play

In my household we regrettably pay a ridiculous amount of buxx for television, one because it’s Comcast and two because we pay for premium channels. Rather, the boy pays for it. After Comcast screwed up on our very first bill I swore never to give them a penny of my own money, despite the fact that I’d probably go a little crazy without Internet access. And I think the phone service is totally unnecessary because we have cell phones. The bill is not itemized, so let’s say $30 for the phone and $30 for the Internet (both of which have cheaper alternatives, but le sigh, the boy locked us in for two years) and the remaining $70 for the TV.

$70×12 is $840. How many newspaper and magazine subscriptions could I pay for with that much?

The Wishlist

The New York Times Weekender – $234
Newsweek – $20
Publishers Weekly – $279
Writer’s Digest – $14.95
Rolling Stone – $14.95
Army Times – $54
The New Republic – $59.97
Bead & Button – $25
Vogue – $7.20
Consumer Reports – $15.95
Entertainment Weekly – $19.97
Beadwork – $24.95
The Writer – $19.96
McSweeney’s – $55
Discover – $18.90

The grand total is $843.84. Wow. If only I could cancel my cable.

A Role Model, Finally

Up until a few days ago, almost all of my female role models have been fictional. But how can the superhuman skillz of Alice from Resident Evil, or the self-deprecating inner monologue of Clarice Starling, really apply to a productive nonfiction female life?

Enter Ms. Valerie Plame Wilson.

I had the grand privilege of meeting this brilliant woman at the College Media Advisors conference at the Marriott Marquis in New York City this past Saturday. The center of the CIA fiasco a la Scooter Libby, which should have felled a certain Karl Rove, Plame put into no uncertain terms the unspeakable corruption of the Bush administration and how decades of the same you-scratch-my-back crowd has greatly hindered the intelligence community and therefore the security of the United States of America.

You know, nothing big or anything.

You could tell two things from her 40-minute lecture: a) that she was speaking more or less directly from the book she was hocking for $28 at the same time, and b) that she knows a fuckton more than she was letting on. She must seriously have an IQ of 200 or something. My friend asked her about the threat that Iran poses, and she did all but laugh. And then added, “A dirty bomb is far easier, cheaper, and likely.” Then we shook her hand and went on our merry way.

The conference as a whole was fairly informative, however, some uberegotistical toady from broadcast media gave the closing address two days later, and I wanted to vomit all over his tasseled loafers. The tripe he spewed about media being a product (call me an optimist, but I’m in favor of it being a public service) was canceled out, fortunately, by the wit and wisdom of Adam Goldstein of the Student Press Law Center, in his evaluations of the state of student media today. But that’s another story.

Dead Man Walking

New Jersey abolished the death penalty. I applaud my state’s thriftiness. Now, Corzine is the “dead man walking” because of political activists in favor of the death penalty.

A few years ago I wrote a rather lengthy paper about the death penalty and how it’s not cost-effective. A few semesters later I used it in a writing exercise called “Playing in Traffic,” the object of which is to take a previous piece of writing and turn it inside-out, taking the form and content and blowing it all to hell and in the process, creating something totally different. I took my strongly anti-death penalty paper and turned it into a newsletter for an organization called Hangin’ Justice, which sought to bring back the death penalty. In honor of New Jersey’s first step at penny-pinching (whether or not that was actually the reason for the abolition), please read my work.

Acquisitions

I fell in love all over again with Rowan’s library last week, despite the shortage of Hunter S. Thompson. But I did find a stunning array of H.L. Mencken, surprising, really – and old volumes too; stuff from the thirties. I kept wandering through the literature part of the fourth floor, which houses the second half of the library’s Library of Congress-organized collection, and saw plenty of familiar names. Hemingway. Nabokov. Orwell and Tolkien are in there somewhere too. I picked up a volume by Katherine Anne Porter (the name sounded familiar; she’s the author of the short story “Noon Wine,” one of the stories listed as choices to critique in my Evaluating Writing class last year. I chose instead “The Death of Ivan Ilych”). One of the sections in Porter’s book was akin to “notes on writing” and a quick glance looked interesting, however, another attempt to read it at home yielded only annoyance. Really literatury stuff gets under my skin. It reminds me of the beginning of William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well where he’s comparing his bare-bones writing self to a beaming beginner who “Looooooooves symbols!” The really successful, really literatury writers sure aren’t beginners but I just don’t care enough to think too much about the deeper meanings of literatury stories and how they reflect some terrible thing about life. Lots of times (going back to literature class in high school) we come up with some bullshit that the writer could never have intended. Did Shakespeare ever say, Okay, Jane Smiley, here’s King Lear. Invent some crap and translate it into A Thousand Acres. Nope!

Bored

I’m jealous of people who have things to do. I much prefer having way too much to do than very little, which makes me climb the walls. Coming back from military police school halfway through the college fall semester is really throwing me off my game. Get a job, they tell me. Okay, and do what starting in January when I have nineteen credits, a paid staff position on the newspaper, another staff position at the magazine, National Guard drill, and the toughest year (MSIII) of ROTC?

My plate may be full (when it fills, that is), but I eat with both hands!