Guess which well-known person wrote the following poem:

Glass Box
You know, it’s the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you’re using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can’t find it.
It’s—

And it’s all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

The Answer May Surprise You

About two months ago I started reading Get Rich Slowly. A month ago based on something I must have read there, or through there, I put a small notebook in my back pocket to find out just where all my money was going. I mean, I knew, or at least had a pretty good idea about, the the big expenses: rent, utilities, student loans, etc. But what about that sub I had for lunch at work from the deli downstairs? What about playing pool with Chris every Tuesday night? What about the $15 here for a cd or $9 there for a book? Surely that must add up…

It does. Some of it more than you might think.

For the last month I have been recording in that notebook the cost and purpose of every cash transaction that leaves my pocket. This afternoon I labeled and sorted all of those entries. I also went back through my last month’s bank account and credit card statements and labeled and sorted the last month’s transactions.

I grouped all of my expenses into 5 categories: Primary Expenses (rent, utilities, student loans), Food (groceries and dine/take out), Transportation (public transportation and car costs), Entertainent (media, going out, etc), and Misc (everything else) with subcategories under those. For one-time transactions, I grouped and counted them as they appeared in last month’s expense report. For less regular monthly expenses, like groceries, car repairs and parking tickets, I averaged the last 6 months’ expenses. I religiously pay for these expenses using plastic (and, like a good boy, almost as religiously pay them off completely every month if that plastic happens to be credit), but Bank of America’s online transaction history only goes back 6 months, and I didn’t feel like going through my pile of old, unopened paper statements. For large regularly recurring monthly expenses like utilities and loan payments, I averaged the complete history of monthly costs made since moving into this apartment for each, using the utlity companies’ websites online payment and statement history.

My spending breaks down like this:

• 36% rent and utlities
• 10% student loans
• 19% food
  • 41% grocery
  • 30% eating breakfast and lunch during the week
  • 29% eating out/take out/delivery weekday dinners and weekends
• 13% transportation
  • 15% MBTA
  • 85% Car (insurance, repairs, gas, parking tickets)
• 14% entertainment
  • 39% media; books, cds, dvds
  • 61% experience; concerts, games of pool, netflix, air america podcasts
• 8% miscellaneous
  • 70% Credit card interest and late payments.
  • 30% Other misc expenses.

My actual entertainment spending may be higher than it is here. These expenses should probably be amortized over the year, but I frequently pay for these things (concert tickets especially) in cash, so I don’t have a years worth of payments quite as handy as I do for groceries and car repairs. Also, the amount of money I spend going out may shift somewhat dramatically month-to-month and season-to-season depending on when bands tour and other factors. This is a subject for further inquiry.

Despite this potential innaccuracy, there are some observations and lessoned learned to be culled from all this:

1. I’m spending more monthly than I did last year, but I’m living more cheaply. Based on an estimate of monthly spending using last year’s income and savings at the end of the year, I spend about $150-$200 more per month, which is slightly less than the increase in the amount I’m paying for car insurance and rent since last year.
2. Being lazy about cooking dinner isn’t costing me as much as I thought it was, though it hasn’t really decreased the cost of groceries, somehow.
3. I should bring my lunch to work far more often than I do (but I knew this already).
4. Having a car is expensive, and getting enough parking tickets that their cost actually figures into your monthly budget doesn’t help. It might be time to play the cost/benefit game with Zip Car.
5. Paying off the credit card is good. Paying it on time is better. (I paid twice as much in late fees over the past year as I did in interest). Though neither cost broke the bank, it could have bought a handful more CDs instead of nothing.
6. In the grand scheme of things, paying for the wash/dry/fold instead of spending time at the laundromat is a good choice for me. With free time valued at 150% of work time it comes out about even to not have to sit at the laundromat or fold clothes.

Walking home from work today, a van that I had just stepped out in front of made what looked like an unplanned turn onto Royal St behind me and began rolling slowly alongside me as I was walking. I figured I was about to get an earful for being a bad pedestrian, so I ignored the man waving out his window. He persisted.

The man, possibly a contractor of some sort, red-faced, dirty hair and clothes, beat up van, was now hanging almost completely out the window while trying to keep his van in my peripheral vision. I took out my earphones, looked at him, raising my eyebrows slightly to indicate that I was prepared to listen, and continued walking:

… and he drove off.

God Bless Me? Sure. Why Not?

God Bless Me.

I got tired of looking at me as a zombie. So I made a new style which is somewhat brighter. If you liked me as a zombie, you can use the style switcher (provided by Jonathan Foucher ) to the right to set your preference. It uses cookies, so enable them and you’ll see the zombie style every time you come back, if you don’t touch it you’ll always see the most recent style. Any new styles I create in the future will also be delivered this way, though I make no promises about how old styles will behave with any new things I add to the page.

If you do decide to stick with me as a zombie, I changed the way the background image is broken up (which was idiotic and the cause of any weird rendering issues you saw when scrolling), so you should see improvements there.

This new style as well as the changes I made to the zombie style may look like complete crap in IE. In particular, in the zombie style, IE is now no longer getting a separate stylesheet which serves a non-transparent background png, so the background will probably be a completely mismatched white instead of the close-enough gray you’re used to seeing.
(You should be using FireFox anyway)

Real content soon-ish. Promise.

Now that I’ve completed my transition from Windows XP to Ubuntu as my day-to-day operating system (maybe I’ll write something about that for the three of you who care), I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some of the photos that have been languising on my drive as well as a recent batch from this weekend’s adventure in Providence with Pavlik and Arika.

Here’s a teaser:

Waffle Party

Joanne’s secret waffle recipe and tireless commitment to the utopian dream of waffles for dinner finally answers the age-old question “What could be better than waffles?”. The answer is: waffles for dinner with all your friends.

This weekend

Going to providence for a ska show? Why not make a weekend out of it? A night of dancing at Club Hell, a morning/early-afternoon at Horseneck Beach, an early dinner and late afternoon wandering around Providence, an evening with Streetlight Manifesto (ex Catch-22) and Reel Big Fish, and a night at WaterFire , makes for one very good weekend.