Big Ups for Small Living

So the Dow is below 7000 for the first time since 1987. It's raining buckets in SC right now and I wore hi-top chucks instead of my big scary steel-toe Docs. Rush Limbaugh is still alive. I'm out of coffee in my thermos.

BUT! That's okay. B got a pile of fun magazines from her homie S when she went up to San Francisco to hang out yesterday. Among them is this funny sort of hipster-living one for semi-broke kids in their 20s who still aspire to live with style. It was heartening to look through it last night while watching Cat Cora get her ass kicked again on Iron Chef.* One of the side effects of consumer culture inundation is that awful feeling that you're somehow an asshole for not being able to live in a spacious loft with bamboo flooring, and/or to eat out two or three times a week rather than cooking at home every night. Antidotes to that feeling in the form of counter-examples are all too rare, and it was nice to see an actual commercial magazine whose raison d'etre is to provide clever tips on living well while being mostly broke.

Right now, as the HMS Neoliberal Capitalism goes down with all hands, I'm reminded of the thing B and I don't have: debt. I'd like to think that my lifestyle is in its own way a tiny counter-example unto itself, one populated with tasty brie pizzas from scratch, bottles of entirely decent 3.50 wine, and riding the bus with headphones on.**

I will concede, however, that I'd be lost without the internet. But hey, that applies to rich people, too.

* It's pretty sad, you guys. Cat Cora was recruited to be the first female Iron Chef, but she always loses.
** Riding the bus in SC is usually pretty painless. It can actually be kind of fun, as long as you've got a sweet guitar solo going on the iPod.