For those interested, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before because I’m found of the fact, no one has beaten me at Monopoly. I’m very good with money when I have structure and Boardwalk only costs $400. ($400?! Honestly? I covet pants that cost more. The good people at Parker Brothers recently revamped Monopoly to take inflation into account, because really, I can’t have been the only devotee that noticed $400 is laughably low for something like Boardwalk.) But if the game involved credit cards? Lattes? Bills? Yeah that game would suck.
I totally suck at budgeting.
Guilt-inducing example: (or, rather, it should be a guilt inducing example)
Yeah! Paycheck! I need… this much for rent. So the rest… hee hee hee… is all mine to completely blow off as joyfully as a nudist shedding clothing. Shoes. Oh my God, shoes.
In fact, I’ll be completely honest with you (a bad habit that I’ll have to check sooner or later): the shoes are the shoes that you see before you if you scroll down a bit.
Somehow I managed to forget which portion of my check was the rent money and which was the burn money, because the figures somehow switched themselves by the time I left the boutique. But I mean… look at them! I couldn’t leave them!*
Luckily, my landlord thought I looked like Audrey Hepburn and let payments slide for a bit before I finally bit the bullet and bought a plane ticket home. That’s right. My butt is in Nevada right now. My next year of college? Yeah, that’s going to have to wait. My dough got so thin that if I used it for pizza, it would have come out of the oven like a giant water cracker. Bad news.
I had several options, all of which I tried out to some extent:
1. Get another job. On top of the three I already had. I actually didn’t make much more money because this routine required an expensive daily dosage of caffeine.
2. Get a cheaper room. As it turn out, my room was about as cheap as they come in Manhattan, and anything cheaper were in neighborhoods that required one to keep pepper spray, a Taser and a corkscrew on their keychain at all times.
3. Stop buying shoes. In my defense, those shoes were really my only splurge for the entire summer. God dammit, I worked in Greenwich Village and SoHo. Think Cookie Monster in a Chips Ahoy factory. I rest my case.
4. A sugardaddy. Now, several of my girlfriends managed to find older, socially inept bankers who gladly paid their rent, tuition and god knows what else in exchange for their exclusivity. (A word to the wiser sugardaddy, should you exist: If a woman is dating you for your money, she hasn’t found love and is still looking for it and is never, truly yours. Think about it.) Granted, this went against everything I believed in, and egotistical, dominant Wall Streeters are men who (for the most part) I have come to detest if only because they are so fucking annoying to have dinner with… like I care about your close friendship with the restaurant’s owner. Jesus Christ, go eat with him. Anyway, I nixed the idea after a brief flirtation when I realized that, despite my flippant attitude about morals and such, my sell-out point didn’t exist. The fellow could have offered me the entire United Kingdom, his Swiss Bank account and tickets to Opus and he would still be annoying and I still wouldn’t love him and hate my life.
A wise person once told me this:
Say you’re driving to town “Euphoria” and you know that it takes about thirty minutes. You come to a fork in the road with no signage to indicate Euphoria’s direction, so you take a right. (Or left, it doesn’t matter.) After traveling that road for more than thirty minutes, Euphoria still isn’t in sight. Should you keep going? No! You back up and take the right road (or left road).
Which brings me to my final option. Go back to start. Collect $200 dollars. Get back in the game. Am I coming back to New York? You can bet on it. With a degree and a salary. I won’t reveal the name of the college here, but I’ve been offered a hefty scholarship in a fairly prestigious Western Institution. I will say that it’s close enough to San Fransisco to buy some more shoes to make up for my alienation from dear SoHo.
In other news, I had a peanut butter sandwich the other day and started to gag. It turns out that I’ve developed an allergic reaction to peanut butter. You know, I would be.
Also, I arrived home in time to celebrate my birthday with Anthony and Co., though they did eat all of the Chinese take-out by the time I pulled up. Since then, I’ve been trying to feel comfortable here. I don’t really feel at home, but it’s certainly pleasant to see honest-to-goodness constellations again and swim in water that hasn’t been bleached. If anything, my time here is a much-needed break. And chances are that my heels won’t wear out as quickly.
*For extra credit, leave the name of the shoe’s designer in the comments. Hint: Name sounds like: “Moo Moo.”
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