reading: Blood Memory, by Greg Iles.
Finished recently: Dancing in the Dark, by Mary Jane Clark. Pretty good book, but I think the ending was a wee bit predictable – at least, I figured it out beforehand, and I don’t generally do that very often, so probably to your more discerning reader it was even more obvious. I enjoyed it, though – Mary Jane Clark books read very, very fast.
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Yesterday, in and amongst a bunch of errand-running, I got a chance to sit down and watch a little TV. I was in the mood to watch TV since it was pouring outside and a kind of cool, so it was perfect weather to sit on the couch under the lap quilt and a cat or two and clear off the DVR some.
I watched what ended up being a very interesting episode of Oprah (lately, I delete more episodes of Oprah than I watch, because it seems like Dr. Robin Smith is on there ALL the freakin’ time. Now, I LIKE Dr. Robin Smith, but she does go on and on sometimes, so even though I like her – I do! – I find myself saying “Okay, Dr. Robin Smith, we get the idea, she’s trying to fill her hole ( ::juvenile snicker:: ) with food or THINGS or men or whatever, can we MOVE ON?”) entitled Class in America. And the more I watched people talk about how they look at someone and decide, due to their bad teeth or cheap clothing or weight that they’re “lower class”, the more interested I got.
Because anyone who looked at Fred and I out in public would never in ten million years guess that we have the yearly income that we have. We drive inexpensive cars, we wear fairly inexpensive clothes, I don’t carry a Louis Vuitton bag or wear expensive jewelry (or ANY jewelry, for that matter), and he doesn’t wear Armani suits. The only thing that might give away our income is the frequency with which we update our electronics (more frequent than the average person, I’d guess) and the house we live in – and we actually live in a house that we had no problem at all getting a mortgage on, because we would have been approved for a house almost twice the price of this one. And next year we’ll be selling this house and hopefully buying an even less expensive one, because we’d rather have a smaller house that we own after 10 years than a big, expensive house we have to pay on for 30 years. We have pretty inexpensive hobbies – books and movies, and the kayaks we bought are a one-time purchase – and we put away a lot of money every month toward retirement and our future.
And I love the fact that if someone looked at me while I was wandering through the mall or whatever, they’d have no idea that I’m married to a man who brings in the amount of money he brings in, that they might look at me and disregard me as being “lower class”, because I think that gives me an advantage. Because I don’t need Betty Sue in the mall to be impressed by me, and thus I don’t need to dress like I want to impress (and not having a life where I NEED to impress strangers is a blessing, as far as I’m concerned, as is having a personality that is uninterested in whether strangers are impressed by me and my stuff) and not having to live up to expectations from other people is freeing. If you gave me $10,000 right now and told me to spend it however I wanted, I’d probably buy a new laptop (much smaller than the one we have), clear off my Amazon wish list, and then I’d have one hell of a time trying to figure out what else to buy – well, except I’d probably be all “More cats!” and Fred would have to threaten to divorce me.
The older I get, the more importance I – we both – place on being able to take care of ourselves when we’re old and decrepit. Would I like to have one of those really cool phones you can send and receive email on, or one of those iPods with a video screen so I could watch TV shows and videos? Well, of COURSE I would, because they’re badass and cool – but I don’t need them, because I’m hardly ever that far from home.
(If anyone would like to offer me a job wherein you pay me a lot of money and I do a lot of traveling, necessitating the purchase of said cool stuff, just say the word. I have no skillz, but I’m a quick learner!)
The kicker about this whole thing is that I fully realize that the only reason I’m in a comfortable financial situation at this point is because I happened to fall in love with a man who is brilliant and extremely good at what he does, and what he does is very specialized and there are people out there who realize how good he is at what he does and are willing to pay him well for it. It’s just circumstance that I’m in this position, and I realize how lucky I am (though Oprah says there’s no such thing as “luck”, it’s just… something meeting opportunity? What the hell does she say? I don’t remember!) and you’d better believe I feel plenty guilty from time to time at the fact that I stumbled into a comfortable life.
I don’t guess I really know what my point is, here. Maybe that next time you look at someone and disregard them as being in a lower class than you are, the truth might amaze you.
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And speaking of money and all that, we finally decided it was time to take all the change from our big-ass 5-gallon water bottle (remember, the one we’ve been tossing our change into for the past 6 years or so?), turn it in, and send it off to our account at
Emigrant Direct, so that instead of just sitting there in the water bottle until it’s time to go on our 10th anniversary trip, the change could be earning some interest.
I know and you know that you want to know how much that change ended up being. Ready for this? $1600. Worth of change. That Fred had to cart into the credit union and put in the change machine. And which is now earning interest along with the money we send away every payday to the same account, so that in two years when we’re ready for the honeymoon we never had, we are going to be ALL SET.
The only thing we need to do now is decide where exactly the hell we want to go. We were going to go to the Bahamas, because Fred wanted to stay at the Atlantis, but then he looked at room prices and found that they are incredibly expensive. So we talked about San Juan, and we talked about Hawaii (the only down side being the plane ride) and we talked about the Grand Caymans, and we talked about the Virgin Islands (very expensive, apparently), and we talked about taking a 7-day cruise that would hit the Virgin Islands, among other places, but I don’t know yet exactly what we’re going to do. I guess we don’t have to decide just yet, since we have another couple of years.
Beach vacation, pretty (warm) water, and if there are mountains for Fred to climb, so much the better – where should we go? I know you have suggestions, leave ’em in the comments!
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This is your brain on drugs.
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Previously
2005: Spot let out a sad, drawn-out demon-from-hell sound.
2004: Meme-licious.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: I live to please you, my beloved readers.]]>